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, eerie. Familiar shops and restaurants have gone out of business as a result of the cancellation of last year’s Festival, and the reduction of this year’s attendees by half meant an unsettling lack of queues. From the yellowing paper in the window of the[...]
Wagner Notes
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 […]
The announcement of a new production of the Ring cycle at Opéra National de Paris was greeted with much excitement in early 2019. Tickets went on sale shortly afterwards, and Wagnerians […]
This is a remarkable book. Alex Ross has written what is arguably the most wide-ranging, intellectually comprehensive, entertaining, and thoroughly useful volumes ever produced on Wagner. Let us dispense at […]
Despite the Covid-19 crisis, which caused the cancellation of the last two months of the Met’s 2019-2020 season, the company did manage to pull off three of eight scheduled performances […]