“Is this what you wanted,” Leonard Cohen asks in the refrain of his eponymous song, “to live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?” With the Bayreuth Festival traditionally opening the house for each performance by having members of the orchestra’s brass section play an appropriate snippet of the evening’s opera from the house’s outdoor balcony, I’d like to offer up this Cohen gem (from 1974’s “New Skin for the Old Century”) as an alternative suitable to any occasion.
Is This What You Wanted?
On Roland Schwab’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Ingo Kerkhof’s “Nach Tristan” at Bayreuth
