Word: wagnerism
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...last week. To be sure, they also booed Set Designer Hans Schavernoch and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. But the real invective -- a great, throaty vassals' chorus of opprobrium -- was reserved for Kupfer, the tousle-headed East German director who had committed the unpardonable sin: staging a brilliantly theatrical production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that had little to do with musty tradition and everything to do with revivifying...
...Salzburg Festival may be more glamorous and expensive than Bayreuth, but a new Ring -- this is the first in five years and only the tenth ever -- in ! the sleepy West German city is a memorable event in the world of music. It was here that Richard Wagner, music's great megalomaniac, built an acoustically perfect theater to house his revolutionary music dramas; here that he produced the first Ring cycle in 1876; here that Wagner, his wife Cosima and his father-in-law Franz Liszt are buried; here that Wagner's grandson Wolfgang keeps alive the sacred flame. To Wagner...
...here, too, sacrilege has become the order of the day. "Children, create something new!" ordered Wagner near the end of his life, and in the postwar period, directors have taken his exhortation literally. Wieland Wagner, Wolfgang's late brother, gave tradition a kick in the lederhosen with his spare, psychologically penetrating productions of the 1950s and '60s. In 1976 French Enfant Terrible Patrice Chereau booted it out the door entirely with a conception that updated the story to the Industrial Revolution and nascent Marxism. Now comes Kupfer, with a daring viewpoint that is as Teutonic as Wolfgang's thick Franconian...
...Wieland and Chereau proved, a radical Ring will ultimately be accepted if it is presented with dramatic force and intellectual coherence. Each new Ring director has the obligation to seek the spirit, not necessarily the letter, of Wagner's four-opera cycle, and Kupfer, director of East Berlin's Komische Oper, is no exception. He presents a cinematic rethinking of the myth that projects the action far into a grim, post-nuclear-war future, in which gods, dwarfs, giants and humans stumble through the detritus of a lost civilization in a futile search for salvation. As stern as a Lutheran...
Perfect Wagnerites know that the operas are built from short musical phrases, called leitmotivs, that symbolize characters and ideas. There are themes for Siegfried's sword and Wotan's spear, for renunciation of love and for its redemption. Artfully intertwined, they underpin Wagner's own libretto, based on the sagas of Norse and Germanic legend. In presenting what the composer called a "stage-festival play," Kupfer found physical leitmotivs to complement the musical ones and give his production a visual as well as a musical unity. Characters do not just stand and sing; they stand and deliver, fighting with fury...