Word: reau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...reau Ring is perhaps even more effective on TV than in the opera house. What is sacrificed in scenic grandeur, such as the looming pile that is Valhalla or Hunding's chilly glass-paned palace, is gained in unorthodox but expressive detail that may be overlooked in the theater. In Wotan's sorrowfully reflective second-act monologue in Die Walküre, Bass-Baritone Donald McIntyre stands before a full-length mirror; tearing off the patch that covers his lost eye, Wotan searches for his soul and finds only an emptiness that foreshadows the twilight of the gods...
...years later; Chéreau's Ring seems less outrageous than adventurous, and it has influenced succeeding productions of Wagner at Bayreuth. Syberberg's daring Parsifal, on the other hand, is likely to become a curiosity. Truly cinematic opera remains a Grail-like goal, waiting for its own Parsifal to redeem the promise of artistic salvation...
...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...