Word: nibelung
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire...
...cultural supermarkets. Later, as conductor of both the New York Philharmonic and London's BBC Symphony Orchestra, he discomfited audiences by aggressively championing difficult new music. Ten years ago he stood the staid Wagner shrine of Bayreuth on its ear with a daring production of The Ring of the Nibelung...
...Other Places) and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (where Hall directed Orfeo et Eurydice). But last November he staged Verdi's Macbeth at New York City's Metropolitan Opera to a gang of mostly abusive reviews. Then this summer Hall premiered his production of The Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth, and things were no sunnier there. The work opened to bad reviews and an audience that sounded, as one reviewer wrote, "like hundreds of savage wolves baying for blood...
...avant-garde Film Maker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 4½-hour Parsifal is a heavily symbolic interpretation that, among other extraordinary devices, uses the composer's own face as a set. French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau's complete The Ring of the Nibelung (starting Jan. 17 on PBS with a documentary and continuing a week later with Das Rheingold) is a brash, iconoclastic view that sets the four-opera cycle in the mid-19th century, when Wagner wrote it. The videotaped Bayreuth Ring succeeds triumphantly, while Parsifal a spectacular failure...
...honorable antecedents. In the first of the 48 preludes and fugues that make up The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach unfolded a serene meditation in the key of C over a placid, unchanging rhythmic pattern. To set the proper bardic tone for his mythological Ring of the Nibelung operatic saga, Wagner spun the entire Prelude of Das Rheingold from a single E-flat major triad, embellishing a bass note into a torrent of arpeggios to depict the primal nature of the Rhine. Ravel built Bolero around a sinuous, reiterated melody, clad in shifting orchestral colors, which only once lurches briefly away...