Word: wieland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...project began, however, with the movie's two German-born producers, Wieland Schulz-Keil and Chris Sievernich, who decided to film The Dead three years ago. "There was never any doubt that we'd do it with John and no one else," says Schulz-Keil. "His way of making movies meshes perfectly with the subject matter. Both he and Joyce tell a story by giving everyday objects allegorical meaning, turning the everyday into the sublime." The decision to hire Anjelica and Tony, the producers insist, was theirs...
...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 Wiesbaden production...
...strives to banish interpretive routine to get at the heart of the composer's message. "My function," he says, "is to be a necessary middleman, not a willful, distorting, idiosyncratic, egocentric middleman." His high performance standards are derived from three major influences: Toscanini, Soprano Maria Callas and Director Wieland Wagner. From the incandescent Toscanini, Levine learned the value of a taut, singing musical line. Callas, the indomitable spirit who assaulted her audiences with intense, molten performances, taught Levine that opera must always be convincing as drama, not simply a collection of voices gift wrapped in period costumes. Wagner...