Category Archive: Opera
Pierre Boulez
(26/3/1925 – 5/1/2016) I hold a box set of records of a Bayreuther Festspiele production of Die Walküre conducted by Pierre Boulez, who died on Tuesday last. Other conductors work hard to give audiences what they want to hear: the famous baton-less Pierre worked the crowd towards liking what he wanted: atonal purity and the trampling of populism. As Michael Tanner, in his Wagner, recounts, the Boulez/Chéreau production of The Ring in Bayreuth “moved from provoking physical violence in 1976 to unqualified triumph in 1981” (at page 57).He recognised the need to dare and to irritate – that failures paved…
Continue Reading →Tannhäuser
The naughty knight with Venus (Otto Knille, 1873)
(Richard Wagner) (1845) (Met, December 2015) An old-fashioned, rollicking and surprise-free production, beautifully sung and shockingly acted (Johan Botha can’t even manage to convincingly strum the symbolic lyre) with James Levine leading the orchestra (James Jorden in The Observer rudely suggesting that he “flapped his baton like a wounded bird”). Terrific early Wagner, with a stark and invariably crass look at a medieval gallant’s perennial struggle twixt sacred and profane love – the orgasmic overture leading on to the writhing, wriggling Venusberg – replete with smudged borders between high church and low conduct, and a fairly unsatisfying denouement. Leaves on a staff? …
Continue Reading →Otello
Set for the 1895 Paris Otello (photo Gallico)
(Verdi) (1887) (Metropolitan Opera, November 2015) (Dir. Bartlett Sher) (Film Dir. Gary Halvarson) How can you go wrong with Shakespeare, Verdi and a Drinking Song? A great source (though suffering from some tinkering), seamless music with some outstanding features, and tight structure, yet it lacks the charm of, for example, the less synoptically impressive Il Trovatore. And it needs top-notch musical control, lest it blurs into mere noise. Othello by W.S. is a difficult beast because it is the most subtle hence most delicate of dramatic flowers. Iago is perhaps the most baffling and ingenious villain (who, by the way, cops…
Continue Reading →Il Trovatore
Ken Howard's photo of the Met production
(Giuseppe Verdi) (1853) (The Met, October 2015) The story of this opera can be summed-up in this little ditty: “Yes, Sir, that’s my baby, No Sir, I do mean maybe, Yes Sir, baby’s on the stove. What, Sir, why say ‘maybe’? Well, see, ‘cos that baby May be from another trove.” (With apologies to Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson) Sorry to trivialise Verdi’s lovely opera with the doggerel written above, but the plot of Il Trovatore, such as it is, is quite ridiculous. A gypsy hurls her own tot on the bonfire by mistake and closes the circle in conning a lascivious Duke…
Continue Reading →Twilight of the Gods
(Dir. Julian Doyle) (2013) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the successor to Schopenhauer and a great writer and weirdo, said he “would never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music.” “And Wagner did become Nietzsche’s awakener, who, by subsequently failing to live up to the youth’s ideals, dealt him wounds which, though they never healed, yet played a salutary role in his development into one of history’s most formidable philosophic writers and thinkers. Like King Ludwig, he at first placed Wagner upon so high a pedestal that the concussion of the idol’s fall shattered not only it but the shocked worshipper, too….
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