Wagner

At Longborough Festival Opera, Richard Wagner is on the roof. Literally: his statue stands on top of the little pink opera house, surveying the Evenlode valley from beneath a stone beret. He’s not alone, mind. A figure of Mozart looks up indignantly. On the other side of the pediment stands Verdi, arms folded, glowering huffily at the floor. But Wagner is on top: a permanent reminder that this is the company that took on the greatest musical-dramatic challenge in the operatic universe, and in 2013 staged a full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen in a converted barn. And next week, they’re going to start all over again. The 2019

‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does feel like it’s swept by in a breath. True, Keith Warner’s 2007 production is looking creaky. But there’s still no mightier assertion of an opera company’s ambition than to stage all four music-dramas of Der Ring des Nibelungen in the space of a week; and no artistic experience remotely comparable to witnessing it. So, about

Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off its Wagner canon with its first Der fliegende Holländer. Next year a new production of the Ring begins, so presumably the small stage is considered inappropriate for the three Wagner dramas with indispensably large choruses. Not that Holländer can do without a chorus in Act Three, and very impressive it is in this production by Thomas Guthrie, but we only saw the townsfolk, and I think the Dutchman’s crew was pre-recorded, though perfectly synchronised. The conducting was, as always, in the sure and inspired hands of Anthony Negus, and the

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war. The funeral was poorly attended, and as the cortège halted, curious shopkeepers glanced at the wreaths: ‘It seems he was a musician.’ The classical music world is morbidly addicted to anniversaries of major composers. It’s still unclear whether the listening public

The Edinburgh International Festival began with a double helping of incest. Curiously, Greek — Mark-Anthony Turnage’s East End retelling of the Oedipus myth, which was greeted with universal acclaim at its premiere in 1988, and which has gone on to be one of British opera’s biggest export success stories — was tagged on the Festival website as being suitable for ‘risk takers’. Whereas Wagner’s Die Walküre — which ends its first act in ecstatic celebration of a sex act so transgressive that even in 2017 it can draw appalled gasps from an audience — was described as being ideal for ‘traditionalists’. Bizarre. Perhaps brothers and sisters sleep together all the

The new Grange Park Opera at Horsley is amazing, as everyone who visits it must agree. In less than a year a pretty large, comfortable theatre, with excellent acoustics and a large stage, has been erected from nothing, and among the first productions is one of Die Walküre, a demanding work in all respects, and one which, when it is largely successful, as the performance I went to was, provides an exalting and moving experience such as few works can. You probably need to be as difficult and abrasive a personality as Wasfi Kani to bring it off, but there is no doubting that she has. The ‘creative team’ has

In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable is combined in his greatest work with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are indeed in the presence of that rarest of achievements in art, the reinvention of sublimity.’ For a performance of any of Wagner’s mature works, either we feel we are in the presence of sublimity or the whole thing is a frustrating waste of time, as almost all performances are. At Longborough, which this year has revived its 2015 production of Tristan und Isolde,

Herbert von Karajan established the Easter Festival in Salzburg 50 years ago with a production of Die Walküre that is now considered legendary. In the sense that legends are rooted in memory, and mythological in substance, that much is true. Which is not to damn it with faint praise. This revival, staged by Vera Nemirova, was an old-fashioned representation of Wagner and many Wagnerians, having endured too many modern presentations of the Master, who has suffered more than any other composer from the curse of Regietheater, would say that that is No Bad Thing. A giant ash tree, in whose hollowed-out trunk reside Hunding and Sieglinde, was the single, simple

‘Let the people see what I have seen’, said the mother of Emmett Till. In 1955 her son, a 14-year-old black boy from Illinois, was falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, tortured, murdered and dumped in a river by the woman’s husband and his half-brother, both of whom were summarily acquitted by a white jury. The photographs taken of Till’s corpse – battered and bloated beyond recognition – succeeded in shaming and inflaming a nation: he became an icon of the civil rights movement. The recent police shootings caught on camera, and the response from Black Lives Matter, gave Dana Schutz – a New York-based painter of considerable talent – the

It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not in itself so shocking. Sordid maybe, as it was declared by the Chinese authorities that he had died of excessive alcohol consumption. But nothing more than that. The revelations that followed, though, transformed the case into an international cause célèbre, the inner workings of Chinese politics unravelling before the greedy eyes of the foreign media.

Frank Martin is one of those composers whose work seems to survive only by virtue of constantly renewed neglect. His quite large body of work is well represented in the CD catalogues, but rarely performed in the UK. One of his most powerful works is Le Vin herbé, though his fully-fledged opera on The Tempest also deserves revival. Welsh National Opera, ever adventurous, has mounted a staged version of Le Vin herbé, and despite its being more of a cantata than an opera and in English. The text is based on Joseph Bédier’s version of the Tristan myth, so some reference to Wagner, in discussing it, is inevitable. Written at

For the past few weeks I have been working my way through Decca’s gigantic set of every note Mozart wrote and quite a few that he probably didn’t — 220 CDs in a monumental hernia-inducing box. Chronological listening is not recommended. Mozart was technically a phenomenon, of course, but he didn’t reach maturity of expression, with one or two extraordinary exceptions, until he was in his early twenties. La finta giardiniera (or Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe, in the composer’s singspiel version — both are included in the Decca set) was written when he was 18, by which time he was exceptionally fluent in composition. Uncut it lasts three and a