Word: freischutz
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Postmodern directors have been shaking up grand opera for quite a while, especially in European cities like Hamburg, where this production was first unveiled in 1990. But rarely has opera received a shaking like this. The victim is Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz (The Free-Shooter). First performed in 1821, it was the granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn...
...Richard Wagner. It has been called an "El Dorado for premieres," and so it was: among the operas first performed there are Wagner's The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser, and Richard Strauss's Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier. Symbolically, the resurrected Semper Opera opened with Weber's Der Freischutz, the last work heard in the hall before it closed in 1944 to await the violent, cataclysmic end of the Third Reich...
Would that the opening night's performance had been worthy of both the moment and the surroundings. Instead, it was prosaically conducted by Wolf-Dieter Hauschild and, with the exception of Bass-Baritone Theo Adam's noble Hermit, provincially sung by an all East European cast. The Freischutz production further suffered from Joachim Herz's relentlessly proletarian staging. The first great German romantic opera and a major influence on Wagner, Freischutz is the story of a forester, Max, who almost falls into the devil's clutches trying to regain his lost marksmanship and win the hand of his beloved Agathe...
...author's award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato. John Sayles' I-80 Nebraska, M.490-M.205 is a mannered attempt to turn truckers and their CB jargon into folk legend: the headless horseman as Teamster. The most inventive topical piece is Guy Davenport's The Richard Nixon Freischutz Rag, a whimsical satire in which the former President makes small talk in China. Sample...
Lowell House Opera produces "Der Freischutz" by Carl Maria von Weber. Mostly Harvard cast. David Commonday, music director. Repeat performances Saturday and Sunday nights. Admission $3.50, $2.50. Lowell Dining Hall...