Italo Montemezzi’s La Nave, premiered in 1918 and not performed anywhere since 1938, concerns itself with nautical power, male and female archetypes, love and hate conjoined, sex and death, the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire — and the visionary future of Old Venice.
Since 2010 I’ve been reading nothing but horror being heaped upon the Met’s new Ring. It’s been like a cross between a cruise ship size buffet spread of internet snarking and a slasher film re-cast with music critics.
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
Apparently, we learn very little in life; the follies we pursue with haste in youth are answered by the follies we commit in age with great deliberation.
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Richard Wagner believed the key to any legend was contrasting the supernatural with human nature, and showing how the combination had no chance of enduring. In Lohengrin, the title’s character’s insistence on unconditional love and trust collide with the conditional expectations of the real world. The challenge is capturing the tale’s somber majesty without losing…
The story is enough of a cipher to make any regie-bent director salivate.
Can a day pass without the New York Times‘ 24/7 coverage of the Met’s Ring getting on yet another of La Cieca’s nerves?
In the liner notes to his new Wagner CD, Rene Pape opines that performing the master’s work isn’t terribly different than performing Mozart. Both composers require singers to sustain a melodic line, manipulate vowels at the right moments and deploy dynamic gradations for dramatic effect. Call it German bel canto or natural speech, just don’t…
Stefan Herheim’s production of Parsifal for Bayreuth is the regie Holy Grail—a production that completely fulfills the promise and purpose of Regietheater.
Robert Schumann said he devoted more love and energy to Manfred than any of his other compositions. It took him only about a month in 1848 to adapt a translation of Byron’s semi-autobiographical poem about a guilt-ridden noble into a program consisting of an overture and 15 pieces for chorus, orchestra and spoken voice. Schumann was…
Hans Neuenfels‘ new staging of Lohengrin for Bayreuth is the grimmest version of this work I’ve seen. Not that this opera is all bright lights and lollipops, but he gave us a particularly dark take on the work, motivated, in part, by Wagner’s writings at the time of the opera’s composition.
Classical music writer and opera critic Robert Levine has written a very pleasant new book, Weep, Shudder, Die, A Guide to Loving Opera, published by HarperCollins Books. Levine sets up the book’s premise early in his introduction: “Could singing… make one, as the composer Vincenzo Bellini said, ‘weep, shudder, die’ and at the same time…
I was on the bus to Nürnberg today on the way to do Wagner tourism and hear Herr Sacro Fuoco tomorrow, and on the way I translated the juicy bits of the full print edition Anna Netrebko article… I was going to post it as a comment but it turns out I thought a lot…
The world has come to an end and we are at the end of the world, the collapsed ruins of a bridge that can no longer be crossed. There is no greenery; the few trees that are left are dead and being chopped down for fuel. Shell-shocked survivors wander through this hellscape, fighting over the…
Although Walter Braunfels was among those German composers whose music was banned in their home country after 1933, and whose political rehabilitiation in 1945 was not accompanied by a commensurate revival of his music, his 1920 opera Die Vögel should need no special pleading on musical or dramatic grounds. Though Braunfels is traditionally described as…
In the summer of 2007, at the height of the heated speculation and public debates over who would succeed Wolfgang Wagner as the head of the Bayreuth Festival, his daughter, Katharina Wagner presented a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the festival, replacing the mind-numbingly boring one by her father (his third at…
“I must say choosing from among these finalists is almost impossible, as there are bits and pieces from each one I like and admire the thought process and the experience each one highlights for us. For me they are all intelligent and quite wonderful— skewed perhaps by their times and what is and is not…
First-time novelist Matthew Gallaway’s ardent love for Tristan and Isolde gushes through every page of The Metropolis Case. According to Gallaway, Tristan is the highest expression of human art, and the book functions effectively as the ultimate initiator in the cult of Wagner. The novel opens with a lengthy discussion of the opera in the…
Performance Lab 115‘s adaptation of the first two parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, simply titled The Ring Cycle: [Parts 1+2], is a clever, well thought-out, if not entirely successful attempt to mythologize Wagner’s epic within the framework of 1980’s professional wrestling.
Crossing the Plaza and seeing two thousand chairs gleaming in the gloaming with rain slick and thoughts of the evening that might have been for many. Past the ticket takers and the buzz of voices, the gawkers lined up on the stairs to see the celebs, I wend my way through and up and up.…
It may seem quixotic that La Cieca subscribes to Opera News, and the print version at that, but, after all, the dear people there were kind enough to interview Our Own JJ last summer on the subject of this very cum-blog, so, well, noblesse oblige and all that, you know. Since the mag is showing…
Some things, like hearing an evening of chamber music on a barge in the East River, sound better on paper than they actually are. And some things work exactly the opposite way: for example, the composer David del Tredici. Bargemusic presented soprano Courtenay Budd in a program of two song cycles from the 1990s by…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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