Day: 18 August 2023
Never ending story, Tristan und Isolde, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023Now in its second season at this Wagnerian wonderland, director Roland Schwab’s Tristan und Isolde has again proven to be a favourite of the Bayreuth audience and this year – and that is without the context of contrasting with a seemingly deeply unpopular production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There is always the risk with […]
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A tale of Nordic revenge, Die fliegende Hollander, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023A Flying Dutchman without any ship let alone any sea? A retelling of Wagner’s tale as a son’s revenge on a community that had driven his mother to suicide? Another mother’s killing of a madman who has taken control of the mind of her own rather mad daughter? Well, a director can take his Der […]
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Theatrical genius, Tannhauser, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023How can it be that your preconceptions of a production based on just seeing some performance photography can get it all so, so wrong? Theoretically, this production of Tannhauser for Wagner’s Festspielhaus should have been just what I loathe in contemporary stagings: merging actual performance with live video and pre-recordings, waving wokism in your face, […]
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A doubly surreal Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023This new Parsifal for Bayreuth was really two productions: one for the small number of us with Augmented Reality glasses and the second for the vast majority of the audience without. While the embracing of whatever technology enhanced his own work was a hallmark of Richard Wagner, I doubt if he would have enjoyed this […]
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