Word: reau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...come two radical settings of Wagner. German 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...
...Ring is more sophisticated and more imaginative. In selecting Chéreau, Bayreuth Festival Director Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, gambled that the French enfant terrible would inject bold ideas into the family opera enterprise. He was right. Chéreau began by setting the legend during the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. His Rhine maidens are a trio of prostitutes frolicking by a hydroelectric dam, and his Wotan is decked out as a rich capitalist. In 1976 audiences were outraged, but by the end of the run in 1980, when the production was filmed, the Ring...
...latest Bayreuth style came into full bloom in 1976 with the centennial production of the Ring cycle, staged by the French enfant terrible Patrice Chreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Using such anachronisms as the Rhine Maidens playing near a hydroelectric dam, Chéreau fashioned an allegory of the industrial revolution from Wagner's mythic tale of greed and its consequences. A vivid mixture of naturalistic detail and wild flights of imaginative fancy, the Chéreau Ring set the tone for what followed...
...startled them with lucid, penetrating readings of standards like Debussy's La Mer. Under his baton the orchestra reached a level of technical precision that it had lacked for years under his predecessor, Leonard Bernstein. From 1976 to 1980, Boulez presided over the controversial Patrice Chéreau productions of Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth-an incisive interpretation of the mythological saga, which can now be heard, in digital sound, on Philips Records (16 discs...
This is a time of startling directorial innovations in opera. Patrice Chéreau's controversial Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring cycle (1976) featured Rhine maidens frolicking near a hydroelectric dam and Siegfried wearing a dinner jacket. But what Brook has done goes beyond accepted notions of radicalism. Essentially, he has recomposed Bizet's masterpiece, discarding whole sequences, changing the order of arias, even putting the overture near the end. The implicit arrogance of all this does not trouble Brook. "Opera is not a musical contract on paper, something between attorneys," he says. "The whole essence...