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)

Vienna’s New Parsifal

Classic dramatic structure requires that a play feature a climax—a single moment in the action, necessary to the narrative, when the protagonist achieves self-awareness, accepts fate, and performs the action that the plot requires.  In Hamlet, it is the moment that prompts his declaration “The point envenomed too?  Then, venom, do thy work,” and fatally […]

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April 17, 2017 – 11:42 am | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Lohengrin as Nudnik

The production of Lohengrin at the Opéra National de Paris, which I saw in early February, prompts inquiry into the creative process by which theatre artists choose interpretation of classic texts. Many years ago I was involved in a production of e.e. cummings’ obscure play him, where the director extracted from the text a running […]

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March 2, 2017 – 10:40 am | By peterp | Posted in The Wagner Blog | Tagged , | Comments (1)