Latest news with #Lohengrin
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Renowned Wagner tenor Peter Seiffert dies aged 71
The renowned German opera singer Peter Seiffert has died at the age of 71, his agency reported on Tuesday. Seiffert, a celebrated interpreter of Wagner, passed away on Monday in his adopted home near the Austrian city of Salzburg after suffering from a severe illness. The Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of Wagner music, released an obituary stating, "The opera world loses a truly great, a wonderful singer with him." Seiffert, known for the lightness of his voice, portrayed the title role in Wagner's "Lohengrin" and Walther von Stolzing in "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (The Master-Singers of Nuremberg) at the festival from 1996 to 2005. The festival noted that Seiffert impressed not only with his voice but also with his profound character interpretation. Bavarian Minister of Arts Markus Blume praised Seiffert, saying, "He was not just a singer but also a storyteller, magician and charmer." The conservative politician highlighted the strong connection Seiffert had with Bayreuth and the Bavarian State Opera, noting the audience in Bavaria adored him. Seiffert was born in 1954 in Düsseldorf as the son of singer and pop composer Helmut Seiffert. He began his career in the late 1970s at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg. From 1984 to 1992, he was a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. His career also took him to many major opera houses in cities such as Vienna, Milan, London and New York. Seiffert's signature roles included not only Wagnerian heroes like Parsifal, Tannhäuser or Tristan but also characters from French and Italian works, such as the title role in Verdi's "Otello." Seiffert was awarded the German honorific title of Kammersänger (Chamber Singer) for distinguished singers of opera and classical music multiple times.
Euronews
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Surprise secrets: Katharina Wagner presents 'Lohengrin' with a twist
Living with the name Wagner is both a blessing and a curse at times, admits the great-granddaughter of the German composer. Katharina Wagner says she has learnt to live with the positives and the negatives of her famous forebear. A renowned artistic director in her own right, Wagner will present 'Lohengrin' at Barcelona's Teatre Liceu from 17 -30 March. The romantic opera tells the story of the eponymous character and is taken from medieval German romance. A mysterious knight arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to help Elsa von Brabant, a noble in distress. He marries her, but forbids her to ask about his origin; she later forgets this promise and he leaves her, never to return. The work is best known for its prelude, the so-called Bridal Chorus, which is often used at weddings, and the Grail Narrative. Lohengrin is the main protagonist, but Elsa also has a strong character. Wagner's Barcelona production will have a surprise twist to this story, but Euronews Culture has been sworn to secrecy.... The opera was first performed in 1850, although Wagner himself was unable to attend due to being exiled for taking part in the May Rebellion of Dresden, one of the last of a series of uprisings that took place across Europe in 1848. The composer finally saw a full performance in 1861. Today, his great granddaughter believes the opera retains much of its original charm over 150 years later. 'It's very dear to many people. You can tell it as a fairy tale where the hero just appears. But for us, this man appears for a special reason,' Katharina tells Euronews Culture at her office inside the Teatre Liceu. 'He says, well, don't ask me who I am and don't ask me where I come from. And this is strange, isn't it? And it's an opera about trust as well, but it's very strange that you shouldn't ask. Who is this man? Where does he come from? What is his plan?' The artistic director has many favourites among her great-grandfather's large number of compositions: 'It depends on my personal mood. I really enjoy Tristan and Isolde and, of course, Parsifal. I think both are magnificently composed with wonderful music." Opera lovers will know Wagner's masterpieces well, but many will also be familiar with the composer's work from films such as Apocalypse Now, which features the famous Ride of the Valkyries. 'Often I am told that Wagner is considered the composer who wrote long operas. I hope that more people try to go and see an opera because it's something special," Katharina says. The 46-year-old is the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of her great-grandfather's music. She also lives in the German town, which is devoted to the memory of the composer. Next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the festival and it promises to be a special occasion. For the first time, Rienzi will be performed at Bayreuth. The Ring Cycle conducted by Christian Thielemann will be another highlight. The celebrations will start with Beethoven's 9th Symphony. When asked about the Wagner name, Katharina says it is a double-edged sword: 'The problem is, if you're born into that family, you can't choose it. Sometimes of course it's a blessing, and sometimes it's a curse." Of course, the Wagner name has brought criticism for the composer's well-known antisemitism and his most infamous admirer, Adolf Hitler. In 2009, Katharina stated that there was an obligation to deal with the family's connections to the Nazis. She said her personal and some other private archives of members of her family would be open to scrutiny. Unfortunately, there are still private archives of other family members which are not available for the public. In 1850, Wagner wrote an article called Judaism in Music, which was perceived to be antisemitic. Adolf Hitler supported the Bayreuth Festival and befriended Winifred Wagner, the British-born wife of the composer's son Siegfried. This connection allowed the festival to remain largely independent during the Third Reich. After the war, Winifred Wagner was convicted of supporting the Nazis. 'Richard Wagner wrote horrible essays about Jewish people. Of course, I do not align with those views," Katharina says, who does not shy away from confronting her family's dark past: 'No, i'm not [reluctant to confront the past] because it's important. I'm absolutely not tired of it. No. And I know that parts of my family are also not tired of that,' she says. Returning to the music, Katharina truly delights in directing opera: 'You have to enjoy your profession. I do. Well, to be honest, the most interesting thing for me personally as a director is when I, or another director, talk about the concept for the first time in a small group," she explains with a smile. "And then, at the end of the day, every little detail, every little building block comes together and you develop the stage together. Then comes the direction, the singers, the lighting and the costumes. And that's a wonderful moment. And working together on stage is, I think, one of the best moments in this job.' 'Lohengrin' by Richard Wagner, Gran Teatre Liceu Barcelona March 17-30 The Gutenberg Bible from the Diocesan Museum in Pelpin is one of the most valuable and interesting preserved volumes in the world. In 1502, it was donated by Nicolaus Crapitz, the bishop of Warmia, to the Franciscan Reformed Convent in Lubawa, where it stayed until the 19th century. After the dissolution of that convent, it was placed in the Library of the Seminary in Pelpli. Now, the priceless book, and one of the earliest works of the famed printer Gutenberg, is on show in Warsaw. Aside from being complete, with both of its volumes intact, its value stems from the fact that nearly all of its pages remain. It also possesses the original 15th-century binding. Despite being printed several hundreds of years ago, the book has contributed to modern historical discoveries. It was thanks to a minor technical defect on one of the pages of the first volume that researchers were able to discover more about Gutenberg's process. They determined that the mistake was made due to a shape in the font falling out of the mounting. Thus, new discoveries surrounding the movable type, arguably one of the most important inventions, were able to be made. 'The idea itself [of movable type] was extremely innovative, because it allowed printing many identical copies of a book in a very short time. The use of movable type allowed the printing technique to be disseminated in Europe, which is why this innovation by Johannes Gutenberg is considered a great breakthrough. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that in 15th-century Europe, people were eager to print, print pictures, and print books, but not from movable type,' says Marcin Bogusz, curator of the exhibition. Fate, however, was not always kind to the ancient book, despite its fame and international value. In the face of the war threat in 1939, the book was taken to Canada via Warsaw, Paris and Great Britain. "It was taken to Canada, where it was deposited in a bank, and waited together with other objects most important for Polish culture and history, such as the manuscript of Gallus Anonymus' chronicle or royal regalia, until the end of the 1950s, when it was sent back to Poland," Bogusz adds. It returned to Poland in 1959, but before it was brought back to Pelplin, where it originated, it was put on display for several days at the National Museum in Warsaw. In order to take care of the unique work, the presentation of the Gutenberg Bible required careful preparation. The bulletproof, air-conditioned display case maintains the appropriate conditions for the work: a temperature of approx. 20-23°C and relative humidity below 45-55%. 'Thanks to this, the most delicate substrate, which is paper, performs well and does not suffer,' explains curator Marcin Bogusz. There are also restrictions to the way in which the book can be illuminated. The Bible can be exhibited for no more than 60 days a year, with only a small amount of artificial light - and away from the harmful UV radiation of the sun. Pages rich in handwritten elements are particularly sensitive to light. Thanks to the efforts of art conservators, all these requirements allow experts to preserve this unique monument of European culture for future generations. The Bible display is accompanied by a thematic walking tour path devoted to the late medieval culture of writing and printed books. The walk will lead visitors along the path of painted and sculptural representations of books, people reading or writing, as well as inscriptions of various forms and functions. Images of people with codices in their hands and inscriptions on medieval paintings are meant to help visitors realize how important a book was at that time. But aside from influencing the way we consume books, writing, and media, the Gutenberg Bible also had an impact on important trends in the visual arts. Artists at the time also used prints, then a modern invention, in order to create their own works. 'Although it was accepted that in old workshops artists created compositions themselves, a normal practice in old art, quite popular and common, was for artists to reach for copperplate or woodcut images, which they copied in their works. This extraordinary popularity of copperplate engravings by Martin Schongauer or Albrecht Dürer shows us how incredibly popular printing was at the turn of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,' emphasizes the curator. The monuments in the Medieval Gallery that have been influenced by Gutenberg's work have been marked with a special symbol. Visitors familiar with the other works in the gallery can now see the impact of the precious book on countless other creations of the time period.
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
LPO/Guggeis review – Wagner and Strauss touches both body and soul
It was Donald Tovey who first coined the phrase 'bleeding chunks', referring to the often unsatisfactory practice of excerpting Wagner's operas out of context. German conductor Thomas Guggeis's rather neat solution here was to stitch them together into a relatively seamless whole. It certainly worked well in the second half of this Wagner and Strauss program, the London Philharmonic segueing effortlessly from Tannhäuser into Lohengrin and on to Die Meistersingers von Nürnberg. Guggeis, whose Wagnerian credentials are impeccable, was an urgent presence, his eloquent body language and balletic arms conveying his every musical wish. If it was a little distracting at times, the results spoke for themselves. In the Tannhäuser Overture, the burnished brass of the Pilgrims hymn contrasted with skittish violins and woodwind in the Venusberg music. Sensual strings were coaxed to an orgiastic climax replete with crashing cymbals and clacking castanets before Guggeis crouched low to tease out a balmy post-coital epilogue. The subsequent Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin featured radiant violins and a sonorous brass chorale. The Meistersingers Overture was crisp and confident, with an ardent sweep to the love music. It was a pity the brass smothered the violin figurations towards the end, taking the top off of an otherwise fine account. The first half was less fluid. Of course, the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde comes pre-stitched, as it were, a 17-minute musical odyssey that tops and tails four hours of opera to create a surprisingly effective tone poem. Opening with an impeccable pianissimo, Guggeis crafted the music's twin peaks with persuasive attention to dynamic detail. While Strauss's Four Last Songs don't exactly mirror Tristan, they share common themes of transcendence and memory. Renée Fleming is an experienced hand, having first recorded them in 1996. The voice retains much of its creaminess, even if the acrobatics in the opening Frühling (Spring) seem more of a stretch these days. She was at her finest spinning the long lyrical lines of Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep) and in the resigned musings of Im Abendrot (At Sunset), where her communicative gifts reached out to touch the soul.
Telegraph
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A magnificent return for Renée Fleming, plus the best of March's classical concerts
Renée Fleming/ Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆ Since her retirement from the operatic stage was announced in 2017 the great American soprano Renée Fleming has had more comebacks than the Spice Girls. She's played Pat Nixon in John Adams' Nixon in China, taken the lead role in a brand-new opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the scene of her greatest triumphs, and recorded an album of song which carried off a Grammy Award. And she insists she never said she was retiring anyway. Now in her mid-60s, Fleming is throwing most of her energies into music-and-health initiatives and rations her appearances carefully. Her performance last night with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was billed as 'An Evening with Renée Fleming', but most of the evening was actually taken up with orchestral highlights from Wagner's Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger, each flowing into the next in a rapturous phantasmagoria. On the podium was young German conductor Thomas Guggeis, who seemed over-controlling and somewhat rigid in the purely orchestral pieces, but was a wonderfully sensitive accompanist to Fleming – which was what really mattered. As for Fleming herself, she sang only the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, and one lovely encore. It seemed a small thing to fly across the Atlantic for. But it was worth it. Fleming's voice may not have the power it once had, and there were times, especially in the refulgent last song when she was overpowered by the orchestra. But the exquisite sheen is still there, and that magnificent control of the melodic line, which never wavered. And above all the connection with the emotional heart of Strauss's masterpiece. Strauss's songs distil a lifetime of experience and his tempestuous 60-year marriage to his beloved Pauline, in feelings of gratitude and an acceptance of mortality. Nature acts as the mirror of these feelings, beginning with a rush of ecstasy in Spring, and darkening towards the sunset of the final song. Fleming caught that transition beautifully. The ending of September where she sang of falling leaves was perhaps the evening's most blissful moment – a feeling amplified by the lovely sunset-glow horn solo from John Ryan. In the third song where the words speak of sinking into sleep, it was a smiling, eyes-closed, almost-inaudible form of oblivion Fleming offered. We were back in the world of Wagner's Liebestod (Love-Death) from Tristan and Isolde, which the LPO and Guggeis had shrewdly played as a curtain-raiser to set us in the right mood. Though Fleming's sound was predominantly radiant it could take on a dark intensity, which rung out with startling force on the very first word of the first song – 'dämmrigen', half-light. Lovely though all this was, the evening's best moment vocally actually came in the encore, Strauss's rapturous, quiet Morgen (morning) where the lighter orchestration meant that Fleming's exquisite small voice could float freely, and the words were properly audible. As Fleming departed with a friendly smile, the applause wasn't the wild kind that often greets a diva's fleeting appearance. It was a heartfelt acknowledgement of real artistry.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Directors Mine the Gold at the Heart of Wagner's ‘Ring'
Is it oil? Is it youth? Is it tactile? Invisible? For Wagner, the magic gold that is stolen from the bottom of the Rhine at the start of his four-opera 'Ring' cycle, setting the plot in motion, was a tangible, shiny nugget. It is embedded in the riverbed, his libretto says, and its gleam fills the water until the dwarf Alberich, mesmerized by the powers it can unleash, rips it from the rock, to the despair of its guardians, the three Rhine Daughters. Shaped into a ring that circulates among different characters over the rest of the 15-hour cycle, the gold confers authority but also wreaks havoc, inspiring envy, betrayal and death. Over the past 50 years, directors — including Calixto Bieito, whose staging of 'Das Rheingold,' the first 'Ring' installment, opens at the Paris Opera today — have interpreted the gold not as an actual piece of metal, but as an embodiment of whatever is the most precious (and corrosive) resource in the world of a given production. In a free-associative 2013 staging at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Wagner first presented the 'Ring' in 1876, Frank Castorf suggested that the gold was the fossil fuels that flow through and degrade virtually every aspect of contemporary society. This is part of a decades-old trend toward treating Wagner with audacious freedom — viewing his librettos as allegorical starting points, and updating and transmuting his plots and props to highlight certain themes and steer well clear of the old horned-helmet-and-breastplate clichés. 'Lohengrin' might take place in a laboratory rather than medieval Antwerp; the title character of 'Parsifal' might be dressed like a Latter-day Saints missionary. Bieito said in an email that in his production, the gold is depicted, in part, as cryptocurrency, a component of his staging's allegory of the ever-continuing rise of Big Tech. Bieito's Paris 'Ring' takes its place among a burst of major productions of the cycle around Europe, some still unfolding. I spoke to the directors of cycles in London, Munich, Brussels and Bayreuth about their approaches to the almighty gold, illuminating some of the vast range of possibilities when it comes to staging the most influential epic in opera history. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. Barrie Kosky The gold comes from the earth, and it's a part of nature. But Wagner also makes it a bit outside nature: It's glistening in the water, it's not of the water. We chose to present it in the beginning as a kind of fluid that comes out of an old, burned-out tree. I wanted to give this sense that the gold is like fat from the tree, like the blood from the veins of the earth. I wanted it to have a very organic feel, a sort of gold goo, like gold blood. And we make very clear that this tree also reflects part of the body of Erda — Mother Earth — who guides us through our 'Ring.' In our production, Mother Earth is dreaming her dream, which is also our dream, so the gold comes from her body and flows out of her body and is stolen from her body. It's a metaphor of what we've done with precious metals for thousands of years. To extract metals from stones, pan gold from water, find diamonds, we've literally ripped these elements out of the earth's body. And of course they're beautiful, but they've also been instruments of greed and evil. Whether that evil is the gold mines or diamond mines in Africa, or whether it's what people have done for gold, what has happened to them — that's the brilliance of Wagner's metaphor, it's timeless. Especially with the 'Ring,' you have to find something that is both archaic and contemporary. That is the challenge of Wagner. Romeo Castellucci As a symbol, the gold means many, many things. But in my opinion, the main meaning is about desire. The gold, at least at the beginning of the 'Ring,' takes the place of sexual energy, sexual attraction, the sex drive. The first image in our production is the female body covered in gold: the Rhine Daughters, who are naked and painted in gold. There is a lot of water falling from the ceiling, and the water washes away the gold, which melts off the bodies and goes all over the floor. Alberich tries to hug the body of one of the women; he tries to embrace them, and makes himself dirty with the gold but can't really embrace it. You cannot touch this gold. It's everywhere, in a way — like desire. It's an idea, it's not an object. It drives you in a direction, but it's not an object. It comes from the water and it's still a kind of water, completely liquid. It changes shape; it's constantly in transition. The shape of the gold is the shape of yourself. It's kind of an energy — a dangerous one, because everyone who touches the gold dies, in a way; you cannot truly realize desire. I don't think it has anything to do with capitalism. It's much more profound, more symbolic. It's not so simple, in my opinion. Tobias Kratzer For me, the gold is not just a symbol for money, which is probably the most likely interpretation. I wanted to give it a more magical touch. For me, it's almost a source of magic that can't be controlled, not by the gods or the mortals. And everyone has to deal with it somehow. In the first scene of my 'Rheingold' — it's all set in an old church that's being renovated — the Rhine Daughters are teenagers, dressed kind of like in the Netflix series 'Stranger Things,' who have found something underneath the floor. A universal power, one might say. It gives them magic abilities; they can change into different shapes. One turns into an old woman, one turns into a goat, one turns into a young girl. I never show it as gold. It's more of a golden fog, but it can materialize as gold water, or an object. But it's more of an element — not the element of gold, exactly, but something that can be used. And it's a little tongue-in-cheek, how Alberich is catching this fog in kind of a plastic bag. It is then in a glass tube in the second scene, acting like something of a secret power. It's more of an ingredient: If you bring it into contact with other objects, it transforms them or gives them other qualities. But by the end, it can also be used to do the only thing that neither gods nor men can do: to change time, to reverse time, to fast-forward time. Valentin Schwarz The 'Ring' is not so much about a given prop, an object, but about the carrying of the thoughts and emotions of the characters who own these objects and who put their wishful projections onto them. The 'Ring' is about generational conflict, about putting trauma onto the next generation, and unresolved conflicts and questions. And it's about dominance and power and influence. So it was a kind of epiphany: We thought of the innocence of a child. After all, the ring itself is quite useless in 'Rheingold,' like a child. So we came up with this idea of the gold being a child, who is stolen in 'Das Rheingold' and over the course of the cycle gradually ages into the character of Hagen, who enters the plot in 'Götterdämmerung.' And at the end of that opera, our Hagen realizes that the child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, who is not in Wagner's libretto but who we invented, is threatened with the same fate, the same abuse, that he experienced. A child can't speak at first, but develops feelings and grows. At a certain point, it was important that this child becomes a part of the cycle, develops consciousness, and becomes a character in his own right. But Hagen is not the end. With the child of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, these ideas and traumas perpetuate; they go on and on. There is no end to a 'Ring.'
