Götterdämmerung is the fourth and final opera in Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, and premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 17 August 1876 as part of the first performance of the entire work. The first three operas tell the story of the overthrow of the old world order of the gods, who rule through order, contract and treaty, by the mortals whose power derives from morality, reason and, above all, love. The moment that encapsulates the...

Excessive in every material and conceptual aspect, hypertrophic, beyond the limits of anything reasonable, redundant in the text to desperation, with a minimal dramatic action that tests the ingenuity and patience of stage directors, with terrible vocal demands, inhumane for the protagonists. Exhausting for everyone, audience included, the Wagnerian Tristan und Isolde is in its overflow one of the most sublime and genius excesses created by Western culture. Once again we have been put...

Philipp Stolzl, the stage director of the Der fliegende Holländer’s version that is being performed at Liceu, states in the programme (quoted by Brigitte Heusinger): “We tell it (the story of the Dutchman)from the perspective of Senta… and we draw the psychograma of a woman that escaped into the world of legend and fantasy and does not manage to come back from it. Now, years later, Senta is a disoriented girl in the body of an adult woman”. The idea of...

What a surprise – it is very unusual to see a 35-year old opera production still performed with such subtle intensity in terms of acting and personal interaction. I assumed the Berliner Staatsoper has highly experienced evening supervisors for their performances (which they most likely have anyway) just to learn that Harry Kupfer himself oversaw the rehearsals of the revival of his 1979 Salome production – which made the audience follow the opera with high...