Latest news with #Seiffert
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.
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert review – mystery in the aftermath of the Third Reich
It is late afternoon, March 1945, when a German schoolboy cycling home through the dusk sees a number of women under armed guard at the verge. The boy has grown used to the regular transport of workers to the munitions plant beyond town and instinctively senses that this group is different; out of place and suspicious. But by now the war is in its death throes and abnormality has become a given. Allied forces are pouring in, foreign labour is bleeding out. Everyone on Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg, seems depleted and confused, no longer sure who belongs and who doesn't. Hitler's war machine was propped up by millions of workers, predominantly brought in from Poland and Ukraine and forcibly deployed to canneries, factories and farms. Once the Deed Is Done, the fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert, covers the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich's collapse, when this vast pool of slave labour became a logistical headache and a humanitarian disaster. Ruth Novak, a 32-year-old Red Cross volunteer from England, arrives at the plant to find the guards fled, paperwork burned and scores of hunched, hungry men left behind the iron railings. Undeniably, there is more than enough relief work for Ruth and her colleagues to tackle. But the mystery of those missing women throbs like a sore tooth. There ought to have been more labourers inside the factory, Ruth thinks. So what has become of the rest of them? Seiffert is drawn to small figures on a big canvas. Her subjects are the everyday casualties of 20th-century European history and the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war. Once the Deed Is Done stirs memories of the centrepiece tale from Seiffert's Booker-shortlisted debut, The Dark Room, with its depiction of a people cast adrift, struggling to find a route home. But its panoramic sweep owes as much to 2017's A Boy in Winter, a miniature epic that viewed the Nazi invasion of Ukraine at ground level. The tale shuttles between a set of parallel narrative strands that turn out to be more braided than they first appear. While principled Ruth provides the novel's moral compass, she's an outsider. Seiffert efficiently joins the dots between the shuttered factory and the community that surrounds it, tracing the lines of interdependence and complicity. She shows us the vanquished young soldiers dealing contraband cigarettes in the town square; the stoical parents waiting for official word on their sons; the hard-bitten old timers, furiously protesting their ransacked plum orchards. The townsfolk aren't wicked, exactly, but none is entirely blameless either. 'These people,' marvels shrewd, wary Stanislaw, who works as Ruth's translator. 'They let all of this happen right under their noses?' Seiffert has cited Joseph Roth – that great chronicler of mittel-European dislocation – as a literary influence. She writes in a similar fashion: plainly, almost bluntly, keeping every character at arm's length and dispassionately explaining what each is thinking and feeling at any given moment. The pace is steady and the palette strictly limited; the occasional splash of bright colour might have offset its shades of grey. But Seiffert's direct approach serves the characters well, brings this straitened and provisional world to life and provides a bedrock of basic humanity. The people are exhausted and careworn, reduced to their bare essentials. Their focus, therefore, is largely on manageable, practical tasks. What is to become of the abandoned workers at the plant? Under Ruth's supervision, the site is made over as a camp for displaced persons (DP). The Poles take the near quarter, the Ukrainians the far side, while the remaining nationalities spread out through the tents in the field. In town, the Germans drape white pillowcases from their windows to reassure the British soldiers. Out here the inmates are stitching homemade Bohemian, Belgian and Italian flags, carving temporary embassies out of their former prison until they are allowed to depart for whatever remains of their homes. The factory fills up and becomes almost boisterous. It is a fine sight, Ruth decides, 'like a continent in miniature'. The back wall of the DP camp gives out on a lush water meadow. Beyond that, though, lies the Heide, the heath, an open country of juniper, gorse and bogland which appears to extend all the way to the coast. The Heide's borders are uncertain. People walk in and get lost, or run there to hide out, and the children are warned not to swim in the millpond. The Heide, Seiffert implies, might be another Europe in miniature. If so, it serves as the camp's dystopian cousin: pitiless and exposed, sometimes treacherous underfoot, and offering scant shelter to the displaced people passing through. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert is published by Virago (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
