By Rebecca Schmid, Berlin: War looms largely in the background of Lohengrin, yet one wouldn’t expect to find tombstones and blood-stained uniforms. The director Kaspar Holten, in his German debut at the Deutsche Oper, takes a morbid, socially-critical approach to Wagner’s blend of fairy-tale and historic drama. As the Danish native states in the program notes, the victory column to the German-Danish war of the late nineteenth century is only a few kilometers from the opera house, something which he ...

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Any Konzept-Production of the Ring is bound to draw very strong reactions. This past week, I heard people call Francesca Zambello’s depiction of the American empire's fall everything from obvious and clichéd to the final step away from Wagner’s association with the Nazis. My impression, based on far fewer experiences with the cycle than many others in the audience, is mixed. But to my eye, Zambello’s Ring contained highly inventive gestures that are both in keeping with Wagner’s ...

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The epic struggle in Wagner’s Ring exists on many levels, pitting man against nature, god against man, and, ultimately, god against himself. Recent productions of the cycle have bred visions at once radically different in their inspiration and fundamentally similar. Most strikingly, video projections have served as a powerful means of communication. Francesca Zambello’s 2006 staging, currently being reprised in its entirety at the San Francisco Opera, uses mesmerizing video to evoke images of nature. In Das ...

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As a young journalist in Berlin, I have observed an unendlessly fascinating classical music scene. New music and avant-garde programming thrive in off-spaces and converted industrial buildings. Operatic stagings no know bounds. Just like the city itself, the arts world is always becoming, but never being. Not that the burden of history doesn’t show its face. In some ways, everything still seems doubled: the Konzerthaus in the east, the Berlin Philharmonic in the west; three opera houses, two broadcast orchestras and choruses. ...

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