Word: nibelungen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
People have read everything from Marxist philosophy to Jungian depth psychology into Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Not least among the difficulties of untangling its 16 hours of music and text are the contradictions which Wagner, bursting with knowledge in many fields and expert in none, wrote into his own libretto. Yet Wagner always insisted that his "poetry" was the important thing and that his music existed only to serve...
...first came to Hollywood and cried, 'This is the most beautiful toy in the world.' " So said French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau, 31, as he contemplated the prospect of staging the centennial celebration of the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's longest, densest and most puzzling creation. The results were on display last week at the somber brick Festspielhaus, which Wagner himself designed, and they brought on a storm of booing deep and raw. A few people both booed and clapped at once. Shouting matches broke out between...
...major event in the history of opera in America has been taking place in Seattle over the past two weeks. The Seattle Opera Company presented the four operas of Wagner's Der Ring der Nibelungen in German within a week. That is the way the Ring is regularly performed at the Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, but almost never in the U.S. Then the Seattle company spun around and repeated the cycle in English. That bilingual trick is a feat that no other company in the world has equaled...
...season at New York's Metropolitan Opera has been improving steadily. The height is its presentation of Wagner's four-opera masterpiece, Der Ring des Nibelungen, opera's most ambitious undertaking. All performances have been sold out, but the most clamorous demand has been for the ones in which Birgit Nilsson, the only great Wagnerian soprano today, sings Brunnhilde. Then a couple of weeks ago, people with tickets to other performances won a bonus. When Leonie Rysanek, scheduled to sing Sieglinde in Die Walkure, got sick, Met General Manager Schuyler Chapin approached Nilsson, who was free...
Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (assorted soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting; Seraphim, 19 LPs, $53.98). With Beethoven and Brahms, Furtwängler could be infuriatingly eccentric. When he was conducting Wagner, though, his stately, expansive, analytic style produced performances that were ingeniously congruent with the composer's convoluted purpose. Drawn from a 1953 series of radio broadcasts from Rome in mono sound that ranges from only dim to adequate, this is a Ring that every Wagnerian will at least want to hear, and probably own as a low-priced...