Whenever the Ring is staged in its entirety, it becomes a major international event—particularly at a world-renowned opera house such as the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. From September 27 to October 12, two complete Ring Cycles directed by Christian Thielemann were presented in revival, with few cast changes from 2022. The Staatsoper closed for renovations in 2010, and the reopening didn’t occur until[...]
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, […]