Word: sellarsization
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Peter Sellars may be indicted with a catalogue of crimes against Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's Ring cycle--indeed, at times he treats it like a woman of the streets, to be used and then discarded at will. But he avoids one crime, the reverential acceptance of performance traditions...
This Ring is the artistic descendant of past parodies--notably Anna Russell's 20-minute reductio ad absurdum--but it is less a parody than a tease. At times it also seems not so much an operatic tetralogy as a four-ring circus, with Sellars as ringmaster, urging his audience...
Sellars boasts, with obvious irony, that his is "Boston's first complete Wagner Ring cycle." It is actually an anthology of the Ring, the most famous and most inspired passages spliced together from each opera, with the gaps in the music and plot filled in either by stage gimmickry or...
Each of the four operas takes less than an hour, and the whole evening adds up to about four hours in all--less than any one of the original operas except the "prologue" Das Rheingold. Sellars handles the musical cuts as skillfully as possible, and except for some of the...
To purists this approach is sheer heresy--they remember Wagner's demand that his works be called "music-dramas." But most scoff at that today, and take the music much more seriously than the drama. Sellars does the opposite, and compensates for the loss in musical clarity with wonderfully adroit...