Mainly Opera and Ballet
Booing is par for the course at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and the Parsifal production opening the 2023 season well deserved it. Singers and orchestra were another matter however. Most people go to Bayreuth because they love Wagner’s music, superbly played by the excellent musicians, and under the baton of Pablo Heras-Casado this was …
To say that this new Ring at Bayreuth never quite settles down is to put things politely. The young director Valentin Schwarz has lots of ideas, but they never really gel. There is no coherent vision bringing them all together. To put it bluntly his efforts are a failure — see my review in The Article.
No gold. No Ring. This new production at Bayreuth has offended almost everyone, but contains interesting ideas while departing from Wagner’s story in many ways. For example it is not Hunding who kills Siegmund, but Wotan himself. Sieglinde is already pregnant when Siegmund encounters her. Oh, and Wotan and Alberich are twin brothers! My review …
The present extraordinary Bayreuth production by Stefan Herheim portrays Germany from before the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, with Parsifal representing the true spirit of the country, and Amfortas the one that lost itself in Nazi times. It all starts during the overture, with Parsifal’s mother Herzeleide close to death. Lying …
This intriguing production by Hans Neuenfels, now in its third year, concentrates on the people rather than the distant historical setting in which Wagner sets his opera. The stage action starts already during the overture with Lohengrin in an antiseptically white room trying to get out, which he eventually achieves by simply walking backwards through …
The 2012 Wagner festival at Bayreuth started in dramatic fashion when the singer in the title role for a new production of The Flying Dutchman suddenly pulled out. Evgeny Nikitin, covered in body-tattoos from his former career as a heavy-metal singer, found himself the focus of attention, and although claims of a swastika seem unfounded, his …
This year the Bayreuth Festival produced five different operas, opening with a new production of Tannhäuser, followed by four revivals: Meistersinger, Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Tristan, in that order. I went to the first four, which included Katarina Wagner’s grotesque Meistersinger for which spare tickets were selling at half price, and no wonder. With a weak …
Tickets for Bayreuth are hard to come by, so you know something’s wrong when people are disposing of Meistersinger at half price outside the theatre.
The imagery is enormous, but the production concept is simple. It’s the history of Germany from before the First World War until after the Second.
The video projections of rats fighting and metaphorically trying to take over the kingdom were clever, and I loved the opening of Act II with a dead horse and overturned carriage.
What fun this was at the end! The production team were booed to the rafters with not a handclap to be heard, and Venus was so roundly booed she didn’t return for her second curtain call.
“You stand waiting hours for a Valkyrie and then they all come at once”. So quips Stephen Fry in a studio at Bayreuth with four Valkyries in rehearsal. Bayreuth is the small town in Bavaria where Wagner built his own opera house, and in this delightful documentary we learn how he acquired the money for …
