Chicago’s Ring Cycle Keeps Building

The second installment of the new Lyric Opera Ring was, if anything, even more gratifying than the excellent Rheingold that I attended a year before.  Sir Andrew Davis, celebrating his 30th season at Chicago, led a charged, nuanced and richly romantic reading of the score, and the instrumentalists of the orchestra responded with impeccable musicianship.  […]

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December 18, 2017 – 10:27 am | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Splendid Book on the New Wahnfried

While in Bayreuth this past August I paid my first visit in five years to Wahnfried, and was delighted to find that it had not been eviscerated, which the construction site a few years ago seemed to presage.  I miss the chairs, the piped-music and the tranquility of the great room that I first entered […]

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November 24, 2017 – 10:25 pm | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Preparing the 1983 Hall/Solti Ring at Bayreuth

Last month, browsing the book stalls located outside the BFI under the Waterloo Bridge on London’s South Bank, I found a volume I had never seen before – The Ring: Anatomy of an Opera, by Stephen Fay and Roger Wood. Fay chronicles the preparation of the 1983 Bayreuth Ring production, directed by Peter Hall, conducted […]

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November 2, 2017 – 11:21 am | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Bayreuth Meistersinger 2017

Barry Kosky’s new production of Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth is a polemic, suggesting that, in creating the role of Sixtus Beckmesser, Wagner intended to warn his audiences to reject the harmful influence of Jews on the integrity of German art.  Kosky asks further whether, in feeding this pernicious strain of German anti-Semitism, Wagner, along with […]

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September 13, 2017 – 2:00 pm | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)