The big cube
Ludwig van Beethoven’s “rescue opera” Fidelio was presented by San Francisco Opera as their first new production of the season last Thursday in reinterpreted fashion.
Greer Grimsley
14 pieces since 2010 — in 6 roles, at 4 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
14
pieces
6
roles
4
companies
17
years
Role Don Pizarro
Reunited
There is much to say about the similarities between the plot of Fidelio and the ancient myth of Orpheus.
Role Hans Sachs
Wahn for a day
Die Meistersinger is a bold stroke of programming, in a not particularly exciting way.
Role Kurwenal
Similes of a summer night
Blazing Jupiter, the Jovial Star, my personal magical azimuth, plus Perseid meteors wafting about, burning out as do our souls, as we arrived home from Seattle Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde.
Role Orestes
Twisted sisters
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
Role Telramund
Mystery date
The moral of Lohengrin is clearly set out: Don’t talk on your wedding night. Even more important, don’t sing. Happily, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Johan Botha in the title role and Amber Wagner as Elsa of Brabant ignored this advice.
Role Wotan
Something With a ‘Ring’ to It
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
Teenager in love
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was not so much brawny and terrestrial, but heady and mercurial
Oh my goddess!
Die Walküre crystallizes the cycle’s questions, ideas, and stakes.
Domino theory
The Metropolitan Opera delivers on the promise of Wagner’s Gesamtkunswerk in a revival of Robert Lepage’s Ring.
Human, all too human
Siegfried is, in a sense, The Ring’s odd one out.
The hipster demigoddess
If Das Rheingold is an opera about infinitude, the illusory idea that the world is large enough to satisfy all of our desires, passions, and lusts, Die Walküre is an opera about scarcity.
Walvater knows best
There is a mighty appetite among both old Wagnerians and new ones to see a Ring that follows—if not too slavishly—the scenic requests of the libretto.
Bark, not Bayreuth
Is Der Ring des Nibelungen responsible for the transformation of Seattle from a gray, damp, low-rise Boeing company town where half the jokes had punchlines in Norwegian (and were about lutefisk in any case) into today's booming cultural metropolis? I like to think so.