Wagner’s only mature comic opera returned to the Met this season, in a six-performance revival of the Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen gorgeous storybook production, which premiered here in 1993. Pre-pandemic rumors held that it was due for replacement by a more abstract European production favored by management. But with much of the rest of the company’s Wagner repertoire now dubiously entrusted to François Girard,[...]
A gloomy town center surrounded by orderly but claustrophobic buildings. Violence seething under the surface of respectability. A boy whose mother committed suicide after being abused by a town’s businessman […]
Forty years after reporting on my first visit to Bayreuth (see Wagner Notes Vol. IV No. 5, November 1981), this city in the time of Covid is, in many respects, […]
In 1967, the French composer Pierre Boulez crowned his early career as a modernist provocateur by publishing an essay entitled “Blow up the Opera Houses.” Eleven years later, he conducted […]
The announcement of a new production of the Ring cycle at Opéra National de Paris was greeted with much excitement in early 2019. Tickets went on sale shortly afterwards, and Wagnerians […]