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’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 […]
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, […]