Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They booed Harry Kupfer in Bayreuth last week. To be sure, they also booed Set Designer Hans Schavernoch and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. But the real invective -- a great, throaty vassals' chorus of opprobrium -- was reserved for Kupfer, the tousle-headed East German director who had committed the unpardonable sin: staging a brilliantly theatrical production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that had little to do with musty tradition and everything to do with revivifying...
...Salzburg Festival may be more glamorous and expensive than Bayreuth, but a new Ring -- this is the first in five years and only the tenth ever -- in ! the sleepy West German city is a memorable event in the world of music. It was here that Richard Wagner, music's great megalomaniac, built an acoustically perfect theater to house his revolutionary music dramas; here that he produced the first Ring cycle in 1876; here that Wagner, his wife Cosima and his father-in-law Franz Liszt are buried; here that Wagner's grandson Wolfgang keeps alive the sacred flame. To Wagner...
...such charge can be leveled against Kupfer. In a striking final tableau, after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively...
WAGNER: HIGHLIGHTS FROM "THE RING" (CBS). Just in time for the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, West Germany, the short version. Montserrat Caballe sings the immolation scene; Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic in excerpts from the other three Ring operas...
...Wagner's four- evening cycle of mythological music drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen, has been regarded as the Mount Everest of music, a daunting work that remains the ultimate test of operatic mettle. Despite its imposing demands, the Ring has been scaled repeatedly in the past four years -- at Bayreuth, San Francisco and Seattle, among other places. Last week the Metropolitan Opera took up the challenge, opening its 103rd season with a production of Die Walkure, the first installment of a new Ring...