Misinformed

 

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

August, 2015

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Associate Justice Samuel Alito, when he's not busy making things up about constitutional law and taking away women's rights, hangs out with right-wingers from more than one country. The NY Times has an article about his visit to Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis (gift link), a notorious German conservative. He reported $900 in tickets to musical events on his most recent disclosure form....and the tickets seem to have been to the Bayreuth Wagner Festival.

The justice is somewhat misinformed about how difficult it is to attend the Bayreuth Festival these days:

More details have emerged about the justice’s trip to the princess’s castle, including an interview with him by Christian Eckl, the editor in chief of a newspaper in Regensburg, who recognized the justice from reporting in The Times about the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. (Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in the case.)

In the 32-second video, Justice Alito, with a beard and wearing a dark pinstriped blazer, spoke to an off-camera interviewer. The justice said the castle, seen in the background, was “amazing” and that he was looking forward to going to the Bayreuth Festival to see Wagner’s operas.

“I will enjoy it,” Justice Alito said. “A friend of mine has waited his whole life to get tickets to go, and so it’s quite a privilege to be able to go.”

Justice Alito did not say in the video which friend he was referring to, and he did not disclose any additional names on his annual financial form.

When I went to the festival in 2015, I'd gotten my tickets through my local Wagner Society, where I'd been a member for quite a few years without having attended. But the friend who went with me got her tickets on the festival web site in May of that year...five minutes after I told her I was going. You no longer have to spend years on a waiting list to get tickets.

Views of the New Bayreuth Ring

Valentin Schwarz directs, Cornelius Meister conducts.

• Zachary Woolfe, NY Times
• Mark Berry, Boulezian
• Das Rheingold
• Die Walküre
• Siegfried
• Götterdämmerung 
• Martin Kettle, The Guardian

Bayreuth Festival Cast Cast Change

In other Wagner news, Christine Goerke has withdrawn from her scheduled Bayreuth Festival debut, which was to be as the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde this summer, when the role will be divided among three sopranos. She is not currently able to appear in productions in Europe with very long rehearsal periods. The Festival's announcement notes that Goerke will appear in 2023 as Isolde in their new production of Tristan und Isolde, and also says that they are sorry about her withdrawal but they understand the circumstances.

Irene Theorin, who was a wonderful Brünnhilde in the last SFO Ring, replaces Goerke.

Yes, I just might take a vacation in Germany in 2023.

Verena Wagner Lafferentz

Catching up on old news: Richard Wagner's last surviving grandchild, Verena Wagner Lafferentz, died in April at age 98. She was the youngest child of Winifred and Siegfried Wagner.

I remember standing in front of the Wagner family tree in Haus Wahnfried, Bayreuth, in 2015, and being shocked to discover that one of Siegfried's children was still alive. I'd somehow completely missed her existence, overshadowed as she was by brothers Wieland and Wolfgang and their roles at the festival.

She had led a retiring life after World War II, and remained silent on the matter of her family's relationships with the Third Reich and prominent members of that rightly-reviled regime. She was romantically linked to Hitler, according to her Wikipedia page, which features a photo of Verena, her older sister Friedelind, and Hitler, and married to Bodo Lafferentz, a Nazi officer and party member who was many years her senior.

Elsewhere:

• Alex Ross had a few things to say about her
• NY Times obit
• Telegraph (UK) obit

Accessible Programs

I go to a lot of concerts, and I see a lot of programs.

Most programs are utilitarian, which is fine by me: they use black type on white paper, and the type is a readable size (hint: 11 points or bigger). (Click the photos below to enlarge them.)

For example, Bayreuth Festival, 2015, from the Lohengrin program:

I don't much like the fact that the two sections have different ledding (the space between the lines), and I don't love the font, but it's readable.

Here's a photo of the program for San Francisco Opera's recent Cav and Pag:

Again, I don't love the font; there are better-looking sans serif fonts, and the point size could be a tiny bit bigger, but it's readable.

Sometimes SFO runs off the rails, however. This is the director's note to Roberto Devereux:

The body type is black, but it's printed against a beige background that is imposed over a photo of the set, so the effect is that it's black type over constantly shifting blocks of background color, and the blocks are often curved, so sentences are printed over two different colors.

This is really a pain to read.

And here is what Shotgun Players is giving audiences at Women Laughing Alone with Salad, which I was tweeting about three minutes later:

Yes, that is white type on an acid-green background. For the love of God, don't do this to your  audiences! The lack of contrast makes this very very difficult to read. I basically threw the program against the wall - well, returned it to the stack of programs, because the theater staff isn't responsible for this thing.

There are standards for accessible contrast; they are easy to find on line; program designers should keep in mind that audiences (meaning donors) are disproportionately older. Some of us, regardless of age, have lousy eyesight along one axis or another; some of us are legally blind. Please don't make it hard for us to read the programs. Use black type in a large-enough point size on a white background.

Domingo at Bayreuth?

So it's been reported that next year, Plácido Domingo will conduct Die Walküre at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, the holy of holies for Wagner devotees.

All I can say is, why? Are they having that much trouble selling tickets to the famously (not necessarily correctly) hard-to-get-into Festival? Has anyone from the Festival heard him conduct?

He is a terrible conductor! I mean, he is minimally competent; knows how to keep time, knows how to cue an entry, knows the operas (I presume). However, if you listen to the musical line and details, well...he is a terrible judge of tempo and structure. I watched a good chunk of his Operalia contest one year, with him conducting, and it was just embarrassing. He got to be front and center and get as much attention as those young singers, while they had to deal with a celebrity conductor with, at best, mediocre skills. I felt very, very sorry for them; they deserved to be working with excellent conductors, not a tenor who picked up conducting to extend his career as far as possible.

When I was at Bayreuth two years ago, I heard a significant range of conductors, from the puzzling Kirill Petrenko to the excellent Alain Altinoglu and Axel Kober to the incandescent genius of Christian Thielemann. You would think that Bayreuth has its choice of good to great conductors, so you have to wonder WTF is going on here.

"Because I Will Not Be Tied Up in Bavaria Next Summer..."

No, actually, that is not what the BSO press release says, but most of us can read between the lines when Andris Nelsons announces to the Tanglewood audience that he'll be there for four weeks and ten concerts next summer.

From the press release:

Today at 2:30 p.m., Music Director Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its final concert of the 2016 Tanglewood season, featuring the orchestra’s traditional season-closing performance of Beethoven’s overwhelming and uplifting Symphony No. 9, a work that never fails to inspire awe at the power of music. This is Maestro Nelsons’ first time leading the BSO in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Symphony.

At the start of today's Boston Symphony season-ending performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons will announce to the audience some details about his commitment to the 2017 Tanglewood season; he will spend four weeks and conduct ten concerts, his longest commitment to Tanglewood since becoming BSO Music Director in 2014.

Announced today: Written statement from Andris Nelsons about his commitment to the 2017 Tanglewood season:

“As we complete the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s season at Tanglewood with one of music’s most glorious masterpieces, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, I am absolutely thrilled to announce that I will be spending four weeks and leading ten concerts during the 2017 Tanglewood season, beginning with the BSO’s opening night program of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on July 7.  In addition to conducting the traditional season-ending  Beethoven's Ninth Symphony again in 2017 and a program with the talented young musicians of the Tanglewood Music Center, I am also very excited to announce that I will be leading two opera programs, one of them a complete concert performance of a major work. Though we are still in the process of making final programming decisions for the 2017 Tanglewood season, we look forward to sharing the full season announcement about these and other programs this fall. 

Tanglewood's rich 79-year tradition—highlighted each summer by so many significant musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries—is breathtaking in its scope and impact, thanks to its founder Serge Koussevitzky. This tradition, along with incredibly loyal patrons and donors—all so fervently dedicated to their music festival, and the exquisite physical beauty of the grounds and surrounding Berkshire Hills—most definitely adds up to an extraordinary embarrassment of riches.  I feel so blessed to be part of such a passionate musical community, all of whom are welcome members of the BSO's wonderful extended family!”

Bayreuth Sale at ArkivMusic

ArkivMusic celebrates the opening of the Bayreuth Festival with a sale on Bayreuth-related recordings. "Related" because they're including various recordings by Marek Janowski, who is conducting this year's Ring, but whose own Wagner records were not made at the festival. Also, Furtwägnler's RAI Ring: not from Bayreuth. Und so weiter.

But if you're looking for a cheap Ring recording, look no further. Among others:

• Furtwägnler, RAI Ring, $34.99
• Janowski, Dresden Staatskapelle Ring, $27.99 (Sorry about Theo Adam, but otherwise the singing is excellent)
• Solti, VPO, Ring, $38.99 (Legendary, but not my favorite)

Throw in a few Parsifal recordings, odd ends of Meyerbeer and Weber, and last year's Bayreuth Tristan und Isolde on DVD (Thielemann/Herlitzius, Gould, dr. K. Wagner) and you've got a nice sale.

At the Grave of Richard Wagner

Bouquet from Wagner Society of Northern California

Haus Wahnfried, Bayreuth

The urn containing Cosima Wagner's ashes is buried in the mound of Wagner's grave as well.

Whither Bayreuth?

Attending the Bayreuth Festival raised a few questions in my mind about the Festival's repertory. Here we've got possibly the greatest opera house in the world, used for perhaps three months a year for rehearsals and performances of an extremely limited repertory.

The cult of Richard Wagner is the primary reason for this. Whatever the composer might have envisioned for the future of his house, his family has spent the 130 years since his death carefully cultivating the religion. Cosima froze the Festival's production style in the 1880s for decades. The Festival can't even perform Wagner's first three operas there, because Wagner himself forbade it.

Well, Wagner's been gone a long time. Perhaps the moment has come, or will come some day, to rethink the repertory performed. Would continued family control and such limited repertory be tolerated for any other composer?

I do realize that there might be a practical limitation on how much the theater can be used. It's 140 years old, it's wood, and I have no idea how fragile it is or how much use it can tolerate. But let's run the Bayreuth repertory thought experiment anyway.

1. Put Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi into the rotating repertory. There, we've had a nearly 30% increase in what can be performed! More importantly, these operas shouldn't be ignored, however much Wagner might have wanted to disown them. He wrote them and they are part of where he came from. We can understand his mature operas better if we hear them more often. Are they really worse than any number of other operas that hold the operatic stage for one reason for another? Faust? Elisir?

2. Perform early German Romantic operas, especially Weber's Oberon and Freischütz. Schubert wrote a few operas, reputed to be weak. There's Schumann's Genoveva. How about Marschner's Der Vampyr? There've got to be others worth hearing.

3. Perform the works of the French Wagnerians. Wouldn't you love to hear Reyer's Sigurd, and works by Chabrier, D'Indy, and others?

4. Perform works by Wagner's German and Austrian successors, especially those who are underperformed. We don't really need more Strauss performances, but James Conlon might have a few ideas. Recovered Voices at Bayreuth!

Bayreuth Tickets: Not as Hard as You Think

I've gotten a number of question from friends about how, exactly, you get tickets to Bayreuth. Everybody knows that it takes seven or eight years - except that it doesn't, depending on how you go about obtaining tickets.  Here's the story from the Festival itself, and here's what I know:

1. Join the Society of Friends of Bayreuth (Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth). This gets you ticket-offer priority of some kind, though the required donation to the Society is something like 200 or 225 Euros/year.

I sort of got my tickets through the Society. I joined the Wagner Society around a decade ago, with the idea that SOME DAY I would have the time and money to go to Bayreuth. The various Wagner Societies used to get significant ticket allotments, but that is no longer the case. The Wagner Society of Northern CA got two sets of tickets this year through the Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth, and I got one of them. 

2. Join a Wagner Society (see the above). If you're a fan, you might want to do this whether you're trying to get Bayreuth tickets or not. Note that the Wagner Society of Northern California isn't currently listed at the link.

3. Apply directly to the Festival. Yes, you might be on the Festival's waiting list for seven years.

4. Buy from the Festival web site.

Yes, the Festival has started making some tickets available on their web site! In fact, this is how my friend Joan went: In May or June I happened to mention to her that there were tickets available that way, and ten minutes later she had Ring tickets and a hotel reservation. Her Ring seats were in the loge, the boxes at the very back of the house, not the best but she had a REAL CHAIR to sit on. A week or so later she got decent seats to Tristan. 

The house is small by American standards, seating only 1900, and its layout is unusual, so there aren't what I would call bad seats. However, sitting in the front row for Flying Dutchman was really strange; the sound from the pit not as beautiful as elsewhere, but you were on top of the action AND had decent leg room.

To get seats this way, you will need to keep a eye on the web site. I do not know exactly when the Festival will offer seats there. As of now (September, 2015), they are accepting orders, via the web site and by mail, but you can't yet buy directly.

5. Returns

This is risky - apparently there are sometimes day-of returns, and you show up before the performance to buy. Long lines, I imagine, and nobody from the US is going to schlep to Germany in hopes of returns. But if you are living in Europe, or you have tickets to X and want to see Y....

6. Secondary market

One festival-goer- whose name and email I did not get - told me and Joan that the festival now allows some sales on a secondary market in Germany. Of course I also have forgotten the NAME of the web site where this goes on, plus it is said that if you are caught with secondary-market tickets, they'll throw you out of the house. so this should also be deemed somewhat risky.

Letter from Bayreuth

Me, in a possibly recognizable location

My SFCV Letter from Bayreuth is posted. I know how long it was when I sent it in - about 25% over the expected word count - and I'm afraid to check out long it is now. I wrote it in about a day and a half over the weekend, and after a week of contemplating everything I saw and heard, the process was comparatively painless. Big thanks to those of you I chatted with about the productions, the singers, and the Bayreuth experience. You know who you are.

As you might expect, there is a lot that I left out, because it really was not part of writing a review of this year's Festival. My article certainly doesn't convey the crazed intensity of seeing seven operas in eight days, especially at Bayreuth.

Performances there start either at 6, for Flying Dutchman and Rheingold, and at 4 for everything else. Dutchman and Rheingold both last about two and a half hours, so you're out in time to have dinner at a reasonable hour - well, if you consider 9 p.m. reasonable, since it will take a while to get to your hotel or a restaurant.

But consider the schedule if you're going to an opera with a 4 p.m. start time. I was staying at the Arvena Kongress, which is a 20-30 minute walk from the Festspielhaus, depending on how fast you walk, whether you're taking photos along the way, how much you dawdle. You might want to relax and do some people-watching before the show. So you leave around 3, meaning you have to get dressed starting around 2 or 2:30, depending on how elaborately you dress.

That doesn't leave a lot of time to do things in the morning, so if you have shopping or laundry to do, or you want to wander around Bayreuth, a charming city, you need to start around 9 or 10. This means being up, dressed, and breakfasted before then. Und so weiter.

Here is what a typical day looked like for me:

• 9 a.m. or earlier, or sometimes later - wake up
• Breakfast, which is excellent at the Arvena. Chat with friend I traveled with or fellow festival attendees.
• Lectures - my friend sometimes went to the 10:30 at the hotel, sponsored by the Wagner Society of NY, or to the 2:45 p.m. at the Festspielhaus, sponsored by the Wagner Society of the Midwest, or both.
• Or do something else, like laundry.
• 2 p.m. - latest time to eat lunch
• 2:30 p.m. - Dress for opera
• 3 p.m. - Head for Festspielhaus
• 3:30 p.m. - Arrive; have coffee or mineral water, or, if running desperately late, lunch
• 4 p.m. Settle in for up to two hours of Wagner. 
• Start first intermission, which is one hour long. Have coffee or mineral water or something sweet.
• Settle in for Act 2.
• Start second intermission, which is one hour long. Have dinner. I tried the sausage once, and it was not great. The stir-fried noodles - I am not making this up, you know - turned out to be tasty and economical, especially with shrimp added.
• Settle in for Act 3.
• Emerge from Festspielhaus around 10, blinking stupidly.
• Walk back to hotel, arriving at 10:30 or so, depending on how much time you spent chatting with people after the opera.
• Eventually calm down enough to sleep.

Thank goodness for the day off between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which we did not spend going to Nuremberg, because it would have killed us. Instead, we slept late and went to see Haus Wahnfried, Siegfried Wagner's house, and the Richard Wagner Museum.

At the end of it all, I felt a little the way Jeffrey Kahane felt after giving a lecture, performing the Goldberg Variations, taking a lunch break, and performing the Diabelli Variations:

"Well, I don't have to do that again!"

It's not that I don't want to go back: as Alex Ross tweeted, the SFCV article is about my first pilgrimage to Bayreuth. I'd like to hear Parsifal there, and, well, anything Christian Thielemann conducts. But seven operas in eight days is a lot of opera, especially when it's Wagner. 

As  you'll see from my article, I wasn't thrilled with Flying Dutchman. I will stick with my judgment, but I am well aware that I saw it on my last day and my depleted mental state may have influenced me. However, it's equally likely that, having seen the wonderful Lohengrin the night before, I had a very good idea of what worked and what didn't. 

Photos from Germany

Friedensengel, Munich

I mentioned elsewhere that I somehow managed to take about 1200 photos in 17 days in Germany, which surprised me, as I did not lug around my dSLR all the time.

I've started posting them on Flickr, breaking them down as best I can. So, I am not uploading 120 photos from the Bavarian State Museum in one huge album; I'm breaking them down into several different topics.

You can see the collection (a listing of the albums) right here. Rest assured, there will be some kind of best-of collection of maybe 50 photos, for those of you who would like the highlights version.

The Rats Begin to Chew the Sheets.

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Klaus Florian Vogt (Lohengrin) and Annette Dasch (Elsa)

Hans Neuenfels's remarkable Lohengrin production got its very last performance the other day, and I am lucky to have seen it. Popularly known as the Rat Lohengrin, that performance got the biggest ovation I have ever heard for any performance. Somewhere around Klaus Florian Vogt's fourth or fifth curtain call, people started standing up, and by the time the whole cast came out for their fourth or fifth curtain call, the unison clapping had started. The ovations went on for maybe 15 or 20 minutes after the last chords.

• Vogt's Lohengrin astounding. He sounds beautiful enough on record, even more so in person, but on record you can't tell just how much projection and power he has, this with a vocal timbre associated primarily with Mozart. Also, he can act. Also, he is as beautiful as his voice.
• Remarkable direction and conception of Lohengrin, Elsa, and the King.
• Rats weirdly charming and, again, beautifully directed.
• Lab or asylum? I'm not sure.
• Beautiful set design.
• Jukka Rasilainen the best Telramund I have seen, vocally and dramatically.
• Petra Lang better than in SF, where I disliked her intensely, but sounding....rather pressed toward the end. I do not hear a susccessful Isolde in her (Bayreuth, 2016).

No, I couldn't resist the post title. Could you have?

Tristan und Isolde: Longer Version

Some bullet points:

• Production emotionally very dark, which can mostly be justified. Yes, trapped in a maze of sorts for Act I worked very well.
• Act III staging of Tristan's sick-bed hallucinations was ghostly, beautiful, and effective. Excellent use of a scrim, too.
• Kinda dubious about the Act II torture chamber.
• Portraying Marke as an evil torturer is contra everything in the libretto and score, though K. Wagner mostly made it work.
• My traveling companion thought Tristan had died and then been resurrected by the attention of his friends (Kurwenal, the Shepherd, and a third unidentified character), but what I saw was exactly the kind of thing you see in every other production of the opera.
• Stephen Gould's Tristan mostly beautiful sung, with some odd stabbing at the notes in Act I.
• See previous long post about Herlitzius's Isolde.
• Georg Zeppenfeld!! That was a gorgeously sung Marke, and what a voice. (He has appeared in SF once, as Sarastro in the production we saw between Hockney and Kuneko.)
• Christa Mayer an excellent Brangane, well sung and acted.
• Towering work from Christian Thielemann. Astonishing, yet unmannered and natural, control over every musical element.

Castorf Ring: Siegfried and Goetterdaemmerung

Bullet points:

• Petrenko's conducting did not improve in any substantive way, despite the very exciting Walkuere Act 3, those these operas were, I admit, better than the truly boneless Rheingold. He remained pedestrian, without an instinctive feel for the shape and process of these great works and without much feel for their sound-world, too.
• One example of where he fell down is the beautiful chords that accompany Bruennhilde's awakening, which reappear at the beginning of Goetterdaemmerung and again during Siegfried's narrative, when he is dying and finally remebers her. These chords must be majestic and must glow, and they carry with them some mystery as well. Petrenko did not time them well; did not take enough time for the pauses; did not allow them to expand, did not judge the dynamics well. 
• Stefan Vinke's vocal stamina is truly astonishing, and, singing Siegfried, he sounded fine at the end of both operas. He doesn't have the most beautiful voice, though he could sing sweetly when the score calls for it and he's reasonably musical; I'd say he could back off the loudness a bit.
• Catherine Foster (Bruennhilde) was pretty good, not great. Her voice is built more like Karita Mattila's than like those of many sopranos we consider Hochdramatische, with most of the power in a very clear and cool top, IOW she would sound to most of us more like a Salome or Chrysothemis than a Bruennhilde. She had pitch problems when she woke up, and pitch problems during the immolation. First time I have heard the soprano having more trouble at the end of Siegfried than the tenor.
• Personal to Frank Castorf: ¨Ḧeil dir, Sonne!¨ should tell you that it's not midnight when she wakes up.
• There's a lot that I am willing to buy about Siegfried's loutishness, but not his having sex with the Forest Bird.
• That was otherwise a nice staging of her scenes.
• But I would like an explanation of how Br. changed her clothes and location while asleep. 
• Stephen Milling's fabulous Hagen was he closest thing to a show-stealing performance I saw at Bayreuth. He is awesome.
• The Personregie was truly remarkable in its detail and care and character development, whatever you thought of the production as a whole. I'll just point to everything Allison Oakes did as Gutrune in the last few scenes, especially in her solo bit between the funeral march and the entrance of Hagen and Gunther. Great direction and execution.
• Call me shallow: yes, I do think that there ought to be something spectacular going on at the end of Goetterdaemmerung. If you're not going to put on a worldwide barbeque, figure out something to match what you hear in the music.
• Great work by Claudia Mahnke as Waltraute and the Second Norn.

Tristan und Isolde:, Short Version

I came out of the Festspielhaus at the end of Act 2 raving because HOLY MOTHER OF GOD it was the greatest 90 minutes of Wagner conducting that I have ever heard live. I could not believe the sounds coming out of the pit.

Thielemann FTW!

Seriously, they could have just played the whole thing a second time and I would have gone home happy.

Acts 1 and 3: also pretty damn good. More tomorrow, very likely. Plenty to puzzle over in the production.

Herlitzius

Evelyn Herlitzius

Deutsche Oper web site

So I do not get the great love for Evelyn Herlitzius. What she does on stage, at least tonight as Isolde, is not, for me, more compelling or better acted or more involved than what I have seen from a half-dozen or so singers, most of whom sound a whole lot better than she does. Even at its best, it's neither a distinctive nor beautiful voice, and her execution is wildly inconsistent.

I will say this for her: she sounds significantly better in person than she did on the opening-night Tristan broadcast, and in fact so did Stephen Gould (the excellent Tristan). This is one of the rare times in my life that I've heard a broadcast and then heard the same production, singers, and house live, and it adds support for my long-time contention that opera house miking for radio almost always makes singers sound worse than they sound in the house.

Still, I find her vocal inconsistency troubling. Sometimes she'll hit the first note of a phrase dead on, and her voice will have presence and spin, and the phrase comes out with a beautiful line. Other times, she misses, and hooks up to the note she is trying to hit. She was best in tonight's Tristan either singing softly, when she was always in tune and had a consistently good attack, or at triple forte (most of the time). She does always land on the right pitch....eventually.

I don't know what causes this particular problem and her general tonal inconsistency: a voice that is naturally difficult to control; age; wear and tear; forcing for volume; singing beyond your means (a lyric voice in dramatic roles); poor technique; other vocal issues. Anja Kampe was originally scheduled to sing Isolde in this production, and she has it all, a beautiful voice and great stage presence. I really wonder what it would have been like with her.

Noted

The Nibelungenlied is a heroic epic surpassed only by the Iliad of Homer. It was written at about A.D. 1200 by an unnamed poet, for performance at court in Austria somewhere between Vienna and Passau. In it there culminated a tradition of heroic poetry reaching back to the sixth or fifth century A.D. in the lands of the Germanic peoples, and so well did it succeed in its own age that, for want of copying, all earlier poems on the theme in German were lost for ever. Modern poet and poetasters have often returned to its subject, prominent among them Richard Wagner with his gigantic music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen with which (as with his Parsifal and his Tristan -- whatever their merits as modern works of art) he has unfortunately harmed the cause of medieval German poetry by intruding reckless distortions between us and an ancient masterpiece. Thus those who come to the Nibelungenlied from Wagner will be much surprised by what they read in it.

                       -- Arthur Thomas Hatto, 1965; introduction to his prose translation of the Nibelungenlied

Castorf Ring: Die Walkuere

Again, the bullet points version.

• Orchestra sounds great; it's a much darker, fatter sound than I am used to hearing in San Francisco, where a sleek tone is favored.
• Some odd directorial choices, including crucial scenes played almost out of sight, indoor scenes played (apparently) outdoors, lack of interaction between character in important scenes (Wotan monolog to Bruennhilde in Act II, their big scene together in Act III).
• And still very conventionally staged in most ways, certainly nothing like Rheingold.
• Johan Botha, born to sing Siegmund. No, he's not much of an actor, but his voice has absolutely perfect placement for the role, and he is both tireless and vocally expressive.
• Anja Kampe (Sieglinde) was the audience favorite tonight, and she was wonderful.
• Ditto Claudia Mahnke's Fricka, but this was one of the scenes where the interactions with Wotan were inexplicably blank.
• I really really like Wolfgang Koch's singing, would enjoy hearing his Wotan in a more conventional production. It's got the necessary solidity of tone and expressiveness.
• Did not love Catherine Foster (Brunnhilde) in Act II, though the whole Annunciation of Death scene was very well done; in Act III, she blossomed and turned into a goddess.
• Fantastic group of Valkyries, a couple of whom sounded ready for Bruennhilde. A big wow here.
• Kwangchul Yoon also has got the perfect voice for Hunding, what used to be called a "black bass."
• I am struck by how much of a difference it can make to observe certain stage directions, for example, Wotan audibly striking his spear against something when he calls to Loge; in this case, it was an oil drum sitting on stage.
• I wonder how many fire marshalls it takes when you're using live fire in a 140-year-old wooden opera house.
• Kirill Petrenko looked at the score before Act 3, noticed that it's kind of an exciting opera, and woke the fuck up.