Word: kupfer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They booed Harry Kupfer in Bayreuth last week. To be sure, they also booed Set Designer Hans Schavernoch and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. But the real invective -- a great, throaty vassals' chorus of opprobrium -- was reserved for Kupfer, the tousle-headed East German director who had committed the unpardonable sin: staging a brilliantly theatrical production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that had little to do with musty tradition and everything to do with revivifying...
...late brother, gave tradition a kick in the lederhosen with his spare, psychologically penetrating productions of the 1950s and '60s. In 1976 French Enfant Terrible Patrice Chereau booted it out the door entirely with a conception that updated the story to the Industrial Revolution and nascent Marxism. Now comes Kupfer, with a daring viewpoint that is as Teutonic as Wolfgang's thick Franconian accent...
...Wieland and Chereau proved, a radical Ring will ultimately be accepted if it is presented with dramatic force and intellectual coherence. Each new Ring director has the obligation to seek the spirit, not necessarily the letter, of Wagner's four-opera cycle, and Kupfer, director of East Berlin's Komische Oper, is no exception. He presents a cinematic rethinking of the myth that projects the action far into a grim, post-nuclear-war future, in which gods, dwarfs, giants and humans stumble through the detritus of a lost civilization in a futile search for salvation. As stern as a Lutheran...
...characters and ideas. There are themes for Siegfried's sword and Wotan's spear, for renunciation of love and for its redemption. Artfully intertwined, they underpin Wagner's own libretto, based on the sagas of Norse and Germanic legend. In presenting what the composer called a "stage-festival play," Kupfer found physical leitmotivs to complement the musical ones and give his production a visual as well as a musical unity. Characters do not just stand and sing; they stand and deliver, fighting with fury or embracing with abandon, falling down faint in ecstasy. < As Wotan (Bass John Tomlinson) bids...
...such charge can be leveled against Kupfer. In a striking final tableau, after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively...