In late September 1940, a month after negotiations between the French and German governments dissolved the Third Republic and established the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, Walter Benjamin found himself a refugee with dim prospects for legal exit from France. The German-Jewish man of letters boarded a train from Marseilles toward the Spanish border with […]
Tag: Opera
Posted inInterview
The Depths of Darkness
“When I finish a cycle with Broadway tunes, or what I would call The Pops, there’s a release of energy. But, for the meat and potatoes of those concerts, I’m on my own. Of course, I’m not being told what to do, so it’s hard to think, well, how did that go over?” The rich, […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
I Listened to 31 Recordings of “Parsifal” in a Month
David Blaine sat in a Perspex box for 44 days. Sir Ranulph Fiennes crossed Antarctica on foot. When one isn’t athletically gifted, one’s endurance stunts must take a different form. So I listened to every recording of “Parsifal” on Spotify. Though “Parsifal” is Wagner’s slowest and oddest music-drama, I love it dearly, and I wanted […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Clear White Light
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of […]
Posted inReport
The Struggle Bus
The walls of Berlin’s Schiller Theater have seen their fair share of artistic leaders. The theater opened in 1907 and was rebuilt in 1951, after World War II, under Boleslaw Barlog. He stayed well into the 1970s, fashioning the Schiller Theater into one of West Berlin’s leading venues. In 1975, Hans Lietzau took over from […]
Posted inEssay
The Götterdämmerung of It All!
I’ve long accepted the fact that I am one of tens of thousands of people who suffer from Wagner derangement syndrome. Many people listen to or watch the works of Wagner, but only an errant few become lifers. Given the sheer baggage of Wagner and the irksome coincidence of our shared surname, this is, of […]
Posted inReview
Clanging Emptiness
In Fellini’s 1983 film “And the Ship Sails On,” a luxury ocean liner departs to scatter the ashes of a deceased opera singer. Like the big ship in the film, an opera house inevitably reflects the sociopolitical situation around it. When decadent, they inevitably fail. Yet the occupants of an opera house can fall into […]
Posted inReview
Rings Under the Eyes
My year of chasing new Ring cycles across Europe ended, appropriately enough, in flames. On May 4, at London’s Royal Opera House, the second performance of Barrie Kosky’s “Die Walküre” provided a shattering conclusion to a busy, bruising season that has seen a staggering number of new productions of Wagner’s tetralogy undertaken by Europe’s major […]
Posted inBarTálk
A Proper Continuum
On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After […]
Posted inProfile
James Smidt Checks His Watch
Dressed in a black and gold silk Versace loungewear set, with giant Louis Vuitton sunglasses sliding down the brim of his nose, James Smidt sipped his second Manhattan as we chatted at the rooftop bar of The Empire Hotel in Lincoln Center. I asked him to describe his own aesthetic. “Cunt. Tastemaker, epochal artistic mover […]