The 2024 Bayreuth Festival season marked the third and penultimate year of Valentin Schwarz’s staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Like many current productions, Schwarz’s version opts for a contemporary setting, but it should not be considered a production which lacks mythology, as his concept draws deeply from a larger-than-life family drama. Here, Wotan is the patriarch of a wealthy family overseeing their[...]
Wagner would have the world believe that his particular art sprang solely from his own creative soul, but as usual he bent facts to fit his personal mythology. Like all […]
It is difficult to know how to take this book. The title suggests it will be about Wagner’s theatre and the author’s name instantly catches one’s attention, as 18 years […]
Parsifal: A Good Friday Play. To perform Parsifal on Easter has been and still is a tradition in many an opera house in Germany. Whereas the Bavarian State Opera in […]
How Mahler would have loved the Met Orchestra! It played with such presence, such enormous expressivity, clarity and strength that all the extremes Mahler inserted into his hard-won Fifth Symphony […]