Word: tristans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is no doubt that Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is an opera about sex. But how sexy it is depends on whether the audience relies more on its eyes or its ears. While the score throbs with passion, most of the dramatic action takes place in the souls of the title characters, with very little left for the stage...
BAYREUTH (July 25-Aug. 28) offers a new production by Wolfgang Wagner of Die Meistersinger under Karl Böhm's baton, a Ring cycle conducted by Lorin Maazel, Parsifal under Pierre Boulez's musical direction, plus a Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde...
SPOLETO (June 27-July 14). The eleventh season of the Festival of Two Worlds in the Umbrian hills opens with a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde staged by Gian Carlo Menotti, whose approach to the opera is "romantic," and who intends to stress its "erotic and youthful theme." Other highlights: noon chamber music, a triple bill of Avant-Garde Composer Luciano Berio's Laborintus II, Goffredo Petrassi's Estri and Henry Pousseur's Response...
...Bomarzo at its premiere, wrote that by the government's standards, "Dante's Divine Comedy would have to be considered a political libel and Hamlet an incitement to matricide." Composer Ginastera, pointing to the libertine antics of such operatic heroes as Don Juan, the unmarried exploits of Tristan and Isolde, and the sadism of Salome, suggested tartly that the government should have done with it and suppress all operas. Which it might well do if Ongania ever got hold of the librettos...
...marvelous conversations with Eckermann, the elderly Goethe once remarked that the difference between Classicism and Romanticism was the difference between health and disease. He did not live to know the work of the arch Romantic Wagner, who could reflect both: if Tristan suggests illness, Die Meistersinger is a paragon of health. Last night, the latter's Prelude - which more successfully survives detachment from the whole than most of the other Wagner excerpts that turn up in the concert hall - came through with a good deal of its innate robustness and exuberance. In some places the strings were overpowered...