Wagner Notes

Lise Davidsen stands next to Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the podium and holds his hands

How Mahler would have loved the Met Orchestra! It played with such presence, such enormous expressivity, clarity and strength that all the extremes Mahler inserted into his hard-won Fifth Symphony came across brilliantly. Mahler, like Mozart, frequently wrote marches. But whereas Mozart’s were purely musical, as a means of generating material for musical development, Mahler’s marches might be said to express[...]

Andrew Rombakis
January 2024

San Francisco Opera recently presented six performances of Lohengrin (Oct. 15 – Nov. 1) that left an indelible mark on its audience. Eun Sun Kim, the company’s Music Director, ventured […]

Berthold Hoeckner
November 2023

On 12 November 1880, Cosima Wagner noted in her diaries what Richard had said about the Hermann Levi: “as a Jew—all he has to do is to learn how to […]

The Met’s last new staging before 2020’s pandemic shutdown–François Girard’s Der fliegende Holländer–disappointingly staged and cast and poorly conducted by Valery Gergiev–returned to port more enjoyably for four end-of-season shows. Girard […]

Susan Brodie
May 2023

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 […]