Latest news with #Sieglinde
Pink Villa
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Pink Villa
Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9: The Sieglinde Hunt Begins—Recap, Release Date, Where To Stream And More
In ' His Butler, Furious,' Wolfram panics when Sieglinde vanishes. Devastated, Sieglinde learns from the village crone that she is her daughter, born from a tragic mustard gas experiment. Deceived since birth, Sieglinde was raised in a staged village to unknowingly develop deadly chemical weapons. Outraged, she rejects Wolfram and escapes with Ciel and Sebastian. After battling costumed "werewolves," Sebastian eliminates the village crone and burns the facility. Meanwhile, military forces mobilize under Hilde, who declares Sieglinde must die if she leaves the forest. Ciel convinces Sieglinde she can now create something to help the world instead. Expected plot in Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9 Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9 will likely adapt Chapter 100 of the manga, where German forces track Sieglinde through the forest. Snake and Baldroy ambush the soldiers using snakes and an explosive marmalade trap. Baldroy fights Wolfram, while Snake distracts him. Wolfram grabs Sieglinde—actually Ciel in disguise—and is held at gunpoint. Meanwhile, Finnian flees with the real Sieglinde and Tanaka, recalling how Ciel named him. Using his enhanced strength, Finnian outruns pursuers. Grete ambushes them, but Tanaka slices a bullet midair, telling Finnian to continue. Elsewhere, Sebastian finishes his destruction mission. Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9: Release date and where to stream Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9, titled 'His Butler, Crossing Paths,' will air on Saturday, May 31, 2025, at 11:30 pm JST as per the anime's official website. Due to global time zone differences, the release time may vary for international viewers. In Japan, Black Butler Season 5 Episode 9 will be broadcast on Tokyo MX, BS11, Tochigi TV, Gunma TV, and later on MBS and AT-X. It will also stream on d Anime Store, DMM TV, and U-NEXT. Internationally, fans can watch it on Crunchyroll, Muse Asia, and Bilibili Global in select regions. For more updates on the fifth season of the Black Butler anime, keep up with Pinkvilla.
Pink Villa
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Pink Villa
Black Butler Season 5 Episode 8: Emerald Witch Origins Revealed—Recap, Release Date, Where To Stream And More
In 'His Butler, Encouraging,' a mysterious figure investigates the witches and werewolves. Sieglinde completes the Ultimate Magic but collapses from exhaustion. After waking, she asks Wolfram if she can go outside, though he reminds her of her restrictions. Ciel later visits and invites her out. In the basement, she explains miasma and its role in empowering werewolves. However, Sebastian reveals the truth: miasma is actually poison, and Sieglinde has unknowingly created the deadliest toxin. She learns that her knowledge and beliefs were based on lies and manipulation. Black Butler Season 5 Episode 8 will adapt chapter 98 and may reveal the truth about Sieglinde Sullivan's upbringing and her connection to the village. As her fabricated reality unravels, the episode will likely examine how and why the poisonous gas—disguised as miasma—was created. The motives of those who manipulated Sieglinde could be exposed, revealing the larger conspiracy surrounding the werewolves and witches. This may become the turning point that changes Sieglinde's decisions, especially in relation to Ciel and Sebastian. Black Butler Season 5 Episode 8, titled 'His Butler, Furious,' is slated to air in Japan on Saturday, May 24, 2025, at 11:30 pm JST, according to the anime's official website. International release times may differ due to varying time zones. In Japan, Black Butler Season 5 Episode 8 will air on networks including Tokyo MX, BS11, Gunma TV, Tochigi TV, AT-X, and MBS. It will also be available for streaming on platforms such as DMM TV, d-anime Store, and U-NEXT. For international viewers, the episode will be accessible on Crunchyroll and Muse Asia's official YouTube channel Keep an eye on Pinkvilla for more updates from the fifth season of the Black Butler anime.
New York Times
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Soprano Jumped Into the ‘Ring.' Now the Role Is Entirely Hers.
In Wagner's opera 'Die Walküre,' Sieglinde develops in the shadow of controlling men. 'This house and woman belong to Hunding,' she tells a stranger seeking refuge — who turns out to be Siegmund, her brother and lover, and the only man to show her true respect. But later, as Siegmund wonders aloud whether he will kill himself and his partner, rather than facing a future alone in the godly realm of Valhalla, she is fast asleep. Agency over Sieglinde's life choices passes from one man to another. How, then, does a performer make her mark while playing a character defined by absence? The Welsh-Ukrainian soprano Natalya Romaniw provides an answer in Barrie Kosky's new production of 'Die Walküre,' which continues through Saturday at the Royal Opera House in London. (It will be broadcast in cinemas on Wednesday.) She is offering a vividly psychological portrait of a woman whose spiritual core has been shattered, leaving behind a shell of a person, unable to settle in any emotional state. 'It's important to find the arc,' Romaniw said of Sieglinde's character development in a recent interview. From a starting point as 'the epitome of femininity (very caring, loyal),' the appearance of Siegmund prompts Sieglinde's 'reawakening.' Elation follows, then madness; when Sieglinde awakens from sleep in Act III, describing visions of Hunding's dogs — a symbol of potential retribution for her infidelity — the weight of guilt and shame drives her into despair. Sieglinde, Romaniw said, concludes by believing 'that dishonor is just the end.' Romaniw has become a regular at Covent Garden. She made her house debut in 2022 by replacing Anna Netrebko in Jonathan Kent's celebrated production of Puccini's 'Tosca.' Earlier this year, she portrayed a devastating Helena in Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera 'Festen.' And for 'Die Walküre,' Romaniw is jumping in for another A-list soprano, Lise Davidsen, who has bowed out of her engagements because she is pregnant. Sieglinde is Romaniw's first major Wagner role. Historically, she has been known as a Puccinian, her lyric soprano more associated with roles like Tosca and Cio-Cio-San. By her own admission, 'Wagner's not something I think about often.' But for Kosky's production of the Wagner's four-opera 'Ring,' which is being rolled out over several seasons, the director has sought out singers making role debuts 'so they could come with absolutely no preconceptions to the rehearsal,' he said. Still, Sieglinde is not a role that singers take on at short notice. 'I've rarely seen a singer come in under that sort of pressure, doing that sort of role in this kind of production, and fearlessly and relentlessly work for seven weeks,' Kosky said. It's a risk that has paid off. The Times of London called Romaniw's 'O hehrstes Wunder' scene in Act III 'the most thrilling vocal moment in this 'Ring' so far.' Antonio Pappano, who is conducting the production, said by email: 'The evenness and warmth of the voice and her ability to inject each phrase with the right depth of feeling makes her ideal for this part.' Romaniw, he said, 'has made the role her own.' ROMANIW GREW UP near Swansea, Wales, and was raised by her mother, a police officer working on domestic violence cases, and her grandparents. Nobody in her family was especially musical, but there was something operatic about her Ukrainian grandfather, a confident, eccentric character who would break into song regularly while walking down the street. She moved to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama without having ever seen an opera. (Verdi's 'Falstaff,' her first, was a fun introduction. 'Then I saw 'Capriccio,'' she said with a laugh. 'I still can't get into it.') In just her second year of college, Romaniw represented Wales in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, next to singers with contracts at La Scala, the Bolshoi Theater and the Metropolitan Opera. 'What I had was fearlessness,' she said. 'And I was very, very gullible.' Romaniw was surprised, then, when she felt fear. While in Houston, on the Young Artist program there, sudden lucidity onstage led to major performance anxiety, she said. 'You can put yourself in some really crippling positions where you inhibit yourself, because you're too obsessed with wanting everything to be perfect,' she said. This anxiety, added to the feeling of 'too many cooks' involved with her technique, had her returning to Britain feeling like 'a nervous wreck.' It took six months to get psychologically ready to take any singing advice again. Romaniw has been an ambassador for the charity Help Musicians for the past five years, and is happy to speak about topics like stage fright, weight changes and mental health issues, which previous generations of opera stars might have shied away from. 'Selfishly, I used to quite enjoy it if I saw someone of quite high status making mistakes,' she said. 'I was like, 'See, they're human!' I would have given anything for someone to say, 'I sang Gilda at E.N.O. and I missed the top note.'' In recent years, Romaniw's voice has developed as her body has changed. When she was pregnant in 2023, she was singing Ariadne in Strauss's 'Ariadne auf Naxos' at Garsington Opera. Suddenly she felt her sound deepen. 'It was really refreshing and surprising to sink into these long, big, broad lines,' she said. 'My breath work got better, because I had that lower-down support that helped me feel like I could just soar over the orchestra.' Soaring over an orchestra is necessary to sing a Wagner role, and it's a perennial worry for performers who take on his operas. Romaniw's sound is lighter than Davidsen's, but at Covent Garden it traveled with clarity, across the register. 'With the whole Wagner thing, I've always known to be careful,' she said. In the future, she expects to take on two more lyric roles from his works: Elsa in 'Lohengrin' and Eva in 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.' She doubts, though, that Brünnhilde will come any time soon. 'I'm probably on this Wagner bus now,' she said, even if she is determined to get off that bus at regular intervals. 'There's always time for Wagner.'
South China Morning Post
07-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Mother-son bond strengthened by 700km walk on Spain's Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route
For more than 30 days, Tobias Schlegl walked the Camino de Santiago – the world's most famous network of pilgrimage routes – with his 73-year-old mother, Sieglinde. Advertisement She had long dreamed of walking the Camino, also known as the Way of St James, and Schlegl, a journalist and paramedic, wanted to reconnect with her. The historic routes, which date back to the 9th century, extend from different European countries and lead to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain What followed was a 700km (435-mile) journey of laughter, exhaustion, pain – and unexpected joy. 'The Camino really hurts. I don't want to romanticise it – it was real suffering,' Schlegl, who is based in Germany, says.
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Die Walküre: A bleak but brilliant vision of damaged nature and toxic relationships
One major advantage of unveiling a production of Wagner's Ring cycle year by year over four years is that you don't need to decide at the beginning how it will end. The director of the Royal Opera's new year-by-year staging, Barrie Kosky, has said that he does not know how this story will turn out by 2027: in this second instalment, his vision is an unvaryingly bleak and tortured picture of damaged nature and toxic relationships. As in the opening Das Rheingold, the scorched trees and gloomy landscapes of Rufus Didwiszus's sets create a compellingly bare, stripped-back scene of an earth destroyed. The wizened, aged, naked figure of Erda (Illona Linthwaite) observes continually: you feel she has seen it all before, covering her eyes in horror. She oversees interactions for both humans and gods in which we can believe: the awakening, forbidden love of Sieglinde and Siegmund; the fraught relationship between Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde. There is not much to be gleaned from the first act's dreary blank wall of Sieglinde and Hunding's house, until the moment when the buried sword that Siegmund extracts reveals one of the production's ingenious twists. Solomon Howard's Hunding is a commanding figure (until Wotan dismisses him later with a Tosca-like backward flip), Natalya Romaniw's brightly sung Sieglinde a wife who screams in fear until she realises that Stanislas De Barbeyrac's ardent, lyrical Siegmund is her twin and her love. If this first act is slow to ignite, the second is totally compelling, starting from the crisp, strongly articulated Wotan of Christopher Maltman, whose argument with Marina Prudenskaya's imposing Fricka in purple, arriving in period limousine, is a power marriage all gone wrong. Elisabet Strid's youthful, tomboyish Brünnhilde starts as a rebellious child but quickly matures into an achingly independent adult in her heart-rending scene with her father in which their every fleeting emotion is captured in Kosky's direction. It was always to be expected that Kosky would want to delve into the constant problem of Wagner's anti-Semitism, and here the appearance in Act II of a charred body that is then viciously destroyed prepares the way for a shocking rethinking of the Ride of the Valkyries at the start of Act III, as they collect incinerated bodies, a sensation rescued theatrically only by the individual characterisations of the coven-like Valkyries. Vocally, this is a fascinating Walküre: all the singers, Maltman and Strid especially, but also Romaniw (who came in late to replace the more heavyweight talent Lise Davidsen), are comparatively youthful, fresh voices without a heavy inheritance of years of Wagner singing. The words are paramount, and their impulsiveness is matched by Antonio Pappano's conducting, which drives the music forward, sometimes feeling a little loose, but always effective in pushing the story forwards. Pappano is now Conductor Laureate at the house whose music he directed so effectively for 22 years. Who knows, perhaps a more optimistic vision of the future of humanity may emerge in the remaining instalments of this impressive, stimulating Ring cycle.
