Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Glyndebourne Festival Opera (where Hall directed Orfeo et Eurydice). But last November he staged Verdi's Macbeth at New York City's Metropolitan Opera to a gang of mostly abusive reviews. Then this summer Hall premiered his production of The Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth, and things were no sunnier there. The work opened to bad reviews and an audience that sounded, as one reviewer wrote, "like hundreds of savage wolves baying for blood...
...staff of associate directors had remained faithful. (Miller and Blakemore, who defected from the National in the mid-'70s, were both holdovers from the reign of Olivier, Hall's predecessor.) Then Pinter, whose plays Hall had been directing since 1962, felt abandoned when Hall left for Bayreuth just as Pinter was staging a troubled production of Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place at the National. Without alerting Hall in advance, Pinter resigned as an associate director of the theater. Last week Pinter told TIME, "The fundamental problem of the National Theater is that...
Singing her first Briinnhildes last summer in Bayreuth, she emerged as one of the dismal production's few saving graces, a Wagnerian of fiery voice and passionate temperament. At the Metropolitan Opera last week, the German soprano solidified that reputation in Tristan und Isolde, harnessing the mercurial spirit of the Irish princess to a voice of raw, almost primal urgency in a finely calibrated, carefully nuanced reading that gave flesh and blood to a mythical archetype. Says Behrens: "I want to make music in its logical context. I sing the beautiful parts as beautifully...
...then, Hockney's main contribution to the stage has been as a colorist. Through the '60s and '70s, opera audiences got used to an intimidating degree of abstraction in sets and costumes-sweeping bare stages with a significant prop or two, or else labyrinths of neo-Bayreuth gloom where spotlights jabbed accusatory fingers through banks of theatrical fog. This design orthodoxy, based on texture, shadow, "sublime" cavelike space, was a necessary reaction against older conventions of the painted background: the unenchanted tempera forest with every stale leaf in place. But it left out color, and the main...
Presiding over the music in magisterial fashion at his Bayreuth debut was Solti, 70. The manic drive and headlong energy that once characterized his Wagner have since been tempered by a lyrical impulse that has broadened and deepened his interpretation, although he has lost some of his electric excitement in the process. When, as for much of this Ring, there was nothing compelling to look at onstage, the listener could always concentrate with pleasure on the primary motivating force of Wagner's unique vision: the music...