Category Archive: OPERA
Das Ende
"Wakey, wakey Brunhild!" (Otto Donner von Richter) (c. 1892)
17 August, 1876 In Bayreuth, Wagner’s great dream of a music festival playing nothing but Wagner (specifically, the Ring Cycle), concluded today 140 years ago. How many in the crowd cried “Danke Gott!” Or maybe, being mostly Bavarian and made of sterner stuff than most, many said “Grüß got!” For it had been a good day, a great week in fact. The Twilight of the Gods ended some 16 hours of music drama that left the audience drained and etiolated, but in a good way, like a pious married couple on the morning after the wedding. For his part Wagner…
Continue Reading →Werther
(by Jules Massenet, 1892) Royal Opera House, London, June 2016 Werther loves Charlotte but she is affianced to Albert and a sense of duty. Werther understands the score; she must do her duty. He will (so he threatens) vanish, violently. But will he, a poet not a marksman, manage to blow himself away? Well, we liked this production. It is a slight piece of work, modern, situational rather than plot-driven, and it can glow only if the doomed non-couple have the requisite conviction. In this production, they did. Massenet’s adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), his animalistic Sturm und Drang…
Continue Reading →Roberto Devereux
(by Gaetano Donizetti) (Metropolitan Opera, screened July 5, 2016) We’re still not quite sure what to make of this Met rendering of Donizetti’s brilliant little bel canto sweetmeat. It seems to have been given the Heaven’s Gate treatment. But there is much to like – the static set by David McVicar (more Georgian/art nouveau fusion than Elizabethan) provided a sense of stability and economy, serving well as various rooms at Nonsuch Palace (looking a little Hampton Court), The Duke of Nottingham’s digs, the Tower, and as a gallery for the peripheral players. The Errol Flynn, Bette Davis…
Continue Reading →The Curse of Rigoletto
The Long Goodbye
Rigoletto, by Giuseppe Verdi: Opera National de Paris (April / May 2016) (filmed by François Roussillon) This production, in terms of staging, is something pretty rare indeed: an unqualified disaster. Pardon the bigotry, but only a a progressive German director like Claus Guth (witnessed at the outset, describing the work as “very curious”) could manage this melange of bubble-gum psychology and single entendre. Here are the most depressing sets that ever existed: a gigantic grey egg carton and some moving stairs to accentuate mental trajectories, or serve for a couple of dance numbers. And the doppelgängers! Rigoletto (a somewhat stupefied…
Continue Reading →Wagner and Modernism
Wagner by Albrecht Leistner, 1911 (photo by Koernerj2000)
Modernism has many adherents and many parents. It began, more or less, in the late 19th century (particularly in France) and flourished in the 20th century (early on, particularly in Italy – Ezra Pound’s admonition to ‘make it new’ probably reflected his italianate longings). Although some point to Kant as the great begetter of modernism, there are folks who were closer to home that can stake a better claim. In France: Édouard Manet, Gustave Flaubert and especially Charles Baudelaire, and rather more globally, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche regarded Baudelaire in this context as Wagner’s ‘intelligent adherent.’ But surely Wagner takes the prize, both in…
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