Word: wagnerism
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Ever since Richard Wagner first staged his Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876, producers, directors and set designers have been trying to figure out how best to present his sweeping 16-hour cycle. Wagner set the first production in timeless, mythic German prehistory. In his revolutionary postwar interpretation, the composer's grandson Wieland emphasized the influence of Greek drama on Wagner's aesthetics. French Director Patrice Chereau detected a 19th century Marxist dialectic at work with his controversial 1976 Bayreuth staging, while Set Designer Pet Halmen and Director Nicolas Joel used aspects of Kabuki drama in their recent...
...seeming naivete of Swiss Director Francois Rochaix and American Designer Robert Israel, however, is the result of a thoughtful and ultimately respectful examination of the sense of the piece. Rochaix and Israel are not the first to note the parallels between Wagner's life and his works, but few have ever acted on them so explicitly. Central to understanding the Seattle Opera's Ring is the notion that Wagner and Wotan are cognates, and that just as the composer uses leitmotivs, or musical symbols, to weave and bind his sprawling tapestry, so should Wotan employ theatrical symbols -- props -- to underscore...
...Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (see following story) had their first shows of paintings in Vienna. Their intense, expressionist works did not flirt, like Klimt's gilded sultanic pictures, with bourgeois prettiness and what the catalog calls "proto-psychedelic sweetness." Schiele, who died young (in 1918, along with Moser, Wagner and Klimt), has been the subject of more passionate popularity than Kokoschka over the years: his images were the more earnestly pained and ugly. As Varnadoe writes, Viennese arts had lost their capacity for compromise between "the giddy and the sullen...
...scant reference, for example, to the troubling de facto alliance between the Secessionist aesthetes and Vienna's populist right against late 19th century liberalism, or to the right-wing regime that ran the city during the % Werkstatte's glory days, or to the unpleasant fact that the bank Wagner designed was established as an alternative to the "Jewish banks." By remaining ahistorical, MOMA has abetted a kind of pernicious boutiquism: as beautiful as the wallets and postcards and fabrics and jewelry are, the show occasionally takes on the knickknacky aspect of an upscale mall. The distinction between museum shop...
...today's end-of-the-century ferment. Sometimes the connections are plain: a brooding eroticism pervaded Viennese art, and today in Manhattan, a well-attended theater piece called Vienna: Lusthaus is heavy with that musky retro scent of doom and libido. The handsome stripped classicism of Loos and Wagner has clear echoes in the architecture of Michael Graves, Andres Duany and Mark Mack. Today as then, the hip bourgeoisie is overeager to embrace bratty, nihilistic expressionist painters. If the confident, public-works liberalism of the 1960s is our version of Vienna's 19th century Ringstrasse urban renewal, then Reagan...