Gallons of ink have been spilled in praise of the ravishing instrument that soprano Lise Davidsen brought to the opera world when she burst on the scene in 2015. It was clear from the start that she was destined for the great Wagner roles when her voice was ready. She has been working her way gradually into the Wagner repertoire, having already sung Elisabeth and Sieglinde at Bayreuth. Strauss has become a calling[...]
Wagner Notes
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 […]
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, […]
In 1967, the French composer Pierre Boulez crowned his early career as a modernist provocateur by publishing an essay entitled “Blow up the Opera Houses.” Eleven years later, he conducted […]