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[...]
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, […]
A team of young creators headed by a director sporting a baseball cap; a black performer in drag; extensive use of video: the new production of Tannhäuser in Bayreuth this […]
Yuval Sharon, the first American to stage a new production at Bayreuth, has created a Lohengrin that is gorgeous and introspective yet very accessible, at least by Bayreuth standards. Focused […]