Tristan und Isolde at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which premiered on November 1, 2025, is not entirely new since it is a coproduction with the Grand Théâtre of Geneva and was premiered there in September 2024. Reviews of that premiere were mixed, especially about the production. This reviewer holds that the Berlin production by director Michael Thalheimer is very finely crafted, with the help of an extraordinary[...]
Staging Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Germany, and especially at Bayreuth, has been a challenge since World War II ended. Its unbridled celebration of German art and culture has been […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]