The Prussians are coming
Sometime in 1753, Frederick The Great of Prussia, following a tiff with his great friend Voltaire, began writing an opera libretto in French prose that was to elucidate his ideas about the role of an enlightened monarch.
Bayreuth Festival
Sunday in the park with Tannhäuser
Certain contemporary opera directors have taken to portraying Wagner protagonists as visual artists to better illuminate the characters’ moral and aesthetic struggles.
By Adriel
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I know why the caged rat sings
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.
Sacred and Propane
Fertilization; birth; growth; decay. Eating; digestion; defecation; fermentation; biogas recovery; food production. Wagner’s Tannhäuser is a meditation on the relentless, repetition of cycles that define our existence and man’s insistence on the possibility salvation despite all the biochemical evidence to the contrary.
Le déjeuner sans l’herb
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not […]
Maxed out
A documentary about the heldentenor Max Lorenz would seem to be an ideal prism through which to examine the moral ambiguities and trade-offs of artistic life in the Third Reich. The preeminent Siegfried, Tristan and Tannhauser of the Nazi era was considered so essential to the success of Bayreuth that Winifred Wagner told Hitler that […]
Katharina’s church
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 […]
“Der Irrtum Werktreue”
“Theater ohne Regie gibt es nicht – das ist ganz einfach dann lediglich Literatur.” So writes Jürgen Flimm in the Berliner Morgenpost: “Theater without direction does not exist; it is simply only literature.” UPDATE: Our Own Batty Masetto has provided a translation after the jump.
Kaufmann, Italian style
Our Own Ercole Farnese discovered and translated this interview in La Stampa with Jonas Kaufmann, in which the tenor discusses his “his idolatrous success with ladies and gay men, four fifths of the opera-goers.”
Capitol punishment
When Hans Von Bülow joked that Rienzi was Meyerbeer’s best opera, he was not very far off the mark. In fact, Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen, Wagner’s third opera, has all the traits of a typical “grand opéra”: it is divided in five acts, features a historical character or situation, makes large use of the […]
Christoph Schlingensief 1960-2010
The German filmmaker and theater and opera director died earlier today. Among his works was a controversial production of Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival beginning in 2004. [AP]
Side Partitur
Take a Wild Ride with a Valkyrie!! Yes, that’s what all the signs say around Old Baghdad-by-the-Bay…. So, fasten your seatbelts, y’all, it’s going to be a bumpy night! As it turned out, Die Walküre was an unexpectedly wonderful ride, marking the debut of someone who could be a very important new Brünnhilde, Nina Stemme. […]
Wolfgang Wagner 1919-2010
The grandson of Richard Wagner, chief of the Bayreuth Festival from 1951-2008 and director of a dozen productions, died Sunday. He was 90. [Monsters and Critics]
Entry of the God into Valhalla
A new CD set of Der Ring des Nibelungen, recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival in 2008, is slim on superstar casting, but basks in the reflected glory of conductor Christian Thielemann, a controversial artist with a passionate following. So how does the music measure up?
Master, singers
There are several reasons to purchase the new DVD of Die Meistersinger from Vienna (EuroArts EUA 2072488), but the main one is Christian Thielemann. This production will most likely come to be known as “Thielemann’s Meistersinger,” because his sense of the overall architecture of the work is, pardon the pun, masterful.
By JedSF
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IV on HD
Four of the cher public caught yesterday’s HD presentation of Tosca and have agreed to share their impressions with La Cieca and the rest: “The death of Puccini’s Tosca was much exaggerated, in fact it did not take place.” “After about 34 years of going to the opera, I don’t think I’ve ever left a […]
European males talk among themselves
La Cieca sat in on the “Cognitive Theater” discussion tonight at the New York Public Library, and the main impression she came away with is that Patrice Chéreau is a very quiet, soft-spoken man who happens to be a genius. (She was expecting something more fiery, but like many of the great divas, it seems […]
ring of truth
Wieland Wagner directs James King and Leonie Rysanek in the legendary 1965 production of Die Walküre at Bayreuth. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ILGJSK-i65I” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] Note at around 0:40 Wieland gets Rysanek set up for her explosive gesture at 1:20. The long, tense stillness suddenly broken by a quick, strong movement is a trademark of this […]
NYCO torpedoes staffers; “pretty girl” rescued
In what is becoming the New York City Opera’s only conduit of information to the public, a Friday afternoon news dump reveals that the company has laid off 11 members of its administrative staff. The layoffs are “because of financial pressures and a lack of work caused by the cancellation of most of its season.” […]
noch mehr tristan! noch mehr isolde!
La Cieca just can’t get enough of the old Love-Death. So this week’s edition of Unnatural Acts of Opera begins a classic performance of Wagner’s music drama from the 1976 Bayreuth Festival under the magical guidance of Carlos Kleiber. Tristan und Isolde (Act 1) UPDATE: Well, you can spank La Cieca’s butt and call her […]
Barenboim sings again!
Introducting a new guest critic, Giulia Grisi, who blogs regularly for “Il Corriere della Grisi.” La Scala’s 2007-8 opera season opened last night (December 7) with a new production of Tristan und Isolde. The Milanese theatre hadn’t presented Wagner’s masterpiece since 1978, when Carlos Kleiber‘s masterful interpretation became an instant classic, in spite of a […]
Estivation at high elevation
La Cieca’s Gal-pal del Golden West, Laura Hope Cruisey, sounds off on Santa Fe, 2007. Can we talk like this? Has Carl Rove turned off the reel-to-reel, before he turned out the lights? Well, since the New York Times seemingly did not cover the Santa Fe Opera Festival 2007, somebody’s got to say what happened […]
Judgment at Nuremberg
Well, this is what La Cieca gathers from Katharina Wagner‘s production of Die Meistersinger (without, of course, having had the benefit of actually seeing it!) KW’s basic idea is that Great-grandfather Richard presented an overly optimistic view of the dramatic action of the opera. Walther is taught by Hans Sachs to moderate his radical musical […]
Hoyoutubeho!
Scenes from the 1967 production of Die Walkuere from the Bayreuth Festival, stage direction by Wieland Wagner. Brunnhilde: Anja Silja; Siegmund: Jess Thomas; Sieglinde: Helga Dernesch; Wotan: Theo Adam. Thomas Schippers is the conductor.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).