Word: kupfer
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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...
...other words, it resets the REM sleep clock to normal even while there are still symptoms of depression. Kupfer told the convention that REM patterns could become a powerful diagnostic tool-speeding up the process of finding the right drug or identifying patients for shock therapy. Said he: "We hope to find people who are clearly not going to respond three or four months earlier than we used...
...Kupfer's work seems to provide clinical confirmation of experiments involving REM sleep in cats. Harvard's Allan Hobson told the convention that he and his colleague Robert McCarley have been able to turn on the brain cells that control REM sleep in the animals. Their trick: using drugs that mimic the action of natural chemicals. Remarkably, they extended feline REM sleep from a normal six to ten minutes to nearly three hours. The Harvard cats obviously cannot describe their dreams or indicate if they really have any. But their cycles of sleep are so like those...