Katharina Wagner’s new production of Lohengrin that premiered on March 17 in Barcelona upends the story of the swan knight in shining armor from distant land to rescue an innocent maiden Elsa, who has been accused of murdering her brother Gottfried. A few years ago, I had seen a production of Lohengrin in Salzburg and Vienna (a co-production) in which Elsa is the villain who kills her brother, witnessed by Ortrud.[...]
Lohengrin returned to the Met on February 26 for the first time since 2006 in a new production by François Girard. After Robert Wilson’s starkly abstract 1998 production, the Canadian […]
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, […]
It’s back! For the second time the Metropolitan Opera has revived Robert Lepage’s much loathed production of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, which is famously dominated by a vast mechanical contraption (“the […]
Great singing and convincing acting marked the revival of Keith Warner’s production of the Ring at the Royal Opera House in October. Warner’s conception was generally forceful and intelligent; the […]