MAY - AUGUST 2012 WAGNER NEWS W a g n e r N e w s i s p u b l i s h e d b y t h e T O R O N T O W A G N E R SOCIETY

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1 MAY - AUGUST 2012 WAGNER NEWS W a g n e r N e w s i s p u b l i s h e d b y t h e T O R O N T O W A G N E R SOCIETY TWS CALENDAR Monday, May p.m. AGM, followed by an evening with Alan Held MEETING AT ARTS AND LETTERS CLUB, 14 ELM STREET INSIDE RING story continues at the Met, Jeannie Williams Götterdämmerung, as seen in HD Edward Brain The ticket allocation decision of the Bayreuth Festival Frances Henry News and Comments The Editor Books Leslie Barcza Wagner on Stage Members who still have not paid their current year membership fee, receive this Newsletter with a YELLOW DOT. Please send the payment to the address on the enclosed Membership Form. Greetings: There are two major events that have taken over the Wagnerian world and both are presented in detail in this issue of Wagner News. The first, of course, is the unfortunate change in the allocation of tickets to the Bayreuth Festival which I describe in more detail on page 4. And the second is the celebration of the Wagner Bicentennial in 2013, in which opera companies around the world are striving to present Wagner s works on their stages. There are so many complete Ring cycles to be presented - Berlin, Milan, Valencia and elsewhere - as well as other works of Wagner, that wherever one will travel one will be able to see a production, or two, or three. This includes our own COC which will present a well reviewed production of Tristan and Isolde, previously seen in Paris. I have been intimately involved in the protest of the Bayreuth decision. Along with Nathalie Wagner, President of the N.Y. Wagner Society, we have been extremely busy writing letters to the festival administration and to politicians involved with the management of the Festival. So far, no changes benefiting Wagner societies have been announced but, at the very least, the issue is to be raised at the May meeting of the administrative board of directors of the Bayreuth Festival. Although this is a small step forward, we need to be positive and hope for the best. In the meantime, if you are interested in attending the Bayreuth festival in 2013, write to the box office for an application form and keep your fingers crossed! Frances Henry Bayreuth 1876 Das Rheingold TWS web site: torontowagner@yahoo.com

2 2 RING STORY CONTINUES AT THE MET notes taken by JEANNIE WILLIAMS, member of the New York Wagner Society. Third in a series. Götterdämmerung Lovebirds As Deborah Voigt says of meeting at first opera rehearsals, it's often, "Hi -- Kiss me!" When you see Voigt and Jay Hunter Morris in the Metropolitan Opera's new "Götterdämmerung" (opening Jan. 27, 2012), keep this in mind: Voigt says of Morris, "I've had the great pleasure of singing with a lot of tenors and there's nobody I had such immediate chemistry with on stage. There's just something about you!" Morris, whose Texas accent is a charm, reveals: "At the first rehearsal, I liked her as a girl! She's a good GIRL!" Voigt adds: "We got all kind of giggly at the rehearsal... Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't." Conductor Fabio Luisi broke up at all these confessions at a Jan. 20 panel on the final Ring installment, led by Met General Manager Peter Gelb in the house. The ebullient Morris admitted his secret was that he had met "Debbie" a half dozen years ago at a San Francisco park concert, which she might not have recalled. "I knew who Deborah Voigt was, and spent a half hour chatting with her about nothing." That's when the first sparks struck. Director Robert Lepage said after the first rehearsal he feared that new entrant Morris would "destabilize" Voigt. (Morris stepped into "Siegfried" on a week's notice this season, and then into "Götterdämmerung" to replace Gary Lehman.) Big relief when she said to Lepage immediately, "Can you believe this guy!" Luisi also had good words for Morris: "After a half hour, the first thing I thought was -- I can trust this guy! It's so important, mutual trusting. I know he's with me and I am with you, every bar." Agreed Morris, "You know in the first five minutes of rehearsal, when you're feeling each other out. Is this guy from my tribe? I knew that (Luisi) is going to lead me to do my best work." So all is fine with the doomed lovebirds. And Luisi says all is well with him and the Met orchestra. Gelb asked the panel which parts of the Ring were most difficult for each. Luisi said, "Everything is very difficult! "Siegfried" is probably the most difficult from the conductor's point of view, and "Götterdämmerung" is the longest, so it's 17 hours of quite demanding music." But he appreciates the advantages of this orchestra: "They know the piece very well...the things that I make different from Maestro Levine they accept, and they are so quick and so sensitive." The Italian, named Met principal conductor last fall after James Levine's health forced him to bow out (now for the rest of this season and all of next), said, "I consider (the Ring) to be one big opera, not four." At the end, "I feel I have in my soul, my body, my brain -- I have every note from "Rheingold" (onward). I have to try to connect this huge music project to make sense. I can only understand "Götterdämmerung" if I have inside me the experience" of the other three. Luisi said he tries to attend all rehearsals. "Wagner is not the soundtrack of a movie," he reminds us. "It is an exploration of what is happening, what they think and remember. To translate it into visual form is very difficult. It takes a good director who listens to the music, and Robert is one of them." Lepage, whose first Ring and first Wagner this is, has grown in his understanding of the composer, notably his leitmotifs, through working with all the Ring artists. "The more you go toward the end, the more you see it's all kind of braided. He's a reconciler, it's about convergence.... Wagner was a man of the stage. He's trying to teach us this great meshing of everybody's talent, the Gesamkunstwerk -- it all goes into the story." He said he is totally open to ideas of others (a synthesis seen in the extreme in his improv works like "The Far Side of the Moon"). He said in the rest of the Ring, "women have the upper hand" (Erda, Fricka) but the final opera shows "a harder, colder world, which is reflected in the design," as with huge palaces created by the men in control. Morris said the most difficult part "is learning it, no doubt! There's a million words and not one page is easy." ("Amen!" said Voigt) And, "We had a new baby in my house when I was learning it." He has had the luxury of understudying Siegfried, but adds that the forging scene "is the hardest ever -- getting through it and still having a throat left." There are so many high notes, and it's hard and fast "and that is not always my best choice." He told Gelb, "Peter, if you had said I'm going with somebody who has done this, I would have said -- yes!" This time last year "you couldn't find three people in the world" who would think he could do it. And in his 20 years in opera "I would never have the courage to dream I would ever sing Siegfried at the Met." But now, "It's so much fun!" Another "Amen!" from Voigt. Morris said in "Siegfried" his character is "a boy, raw, rude and not very pleasant." But he is transformed by meeting a woman. "He even stands differently." And posture is the first thing Morris looks at for this character: "As a boy he has a certain freedom and looseness of joints that I don't possess any more." In "Götterdämmerung" comes the "fun ride" when "they give me the drugs and I can't remember." His most meaningful Ring moment is when "they give me more drugs and I remember, I'm reliving it... where I say, Oh, her eyes (Ach, dieses Auge, as he dies). Siegfried is flooded with memories of "the most wonderful time, the most wonderful girl." The soprano said, "The pinnacle for me is to do the whole journey (of Brünnhilde) in a week," with the full cycles. "I'll spend the rest of my career exploring and redefining her character. I'm just now getting a grasp." To which Gelb said, "You're being modest. I've been in rehearsals: You have taken control." For Voigt, the Farewell to Wotan ("I found myself verklempt") in "Die Walküre" and the Immolation Scene are the major Ring moments. Luisi agrees on the latter, " the most exciting and important moment, which explains the Ring -- all gone are the games of power, money, gold, cheating, being more important, as seen in the cycle, and in the end what counts is love. Love is the reason the gods die and why the ring goes back to the river. You understand this all in the last 15 minutes." Gelb seemed relieved to have reached the end of this mammoth project. He likened "Götterdämmerung" to a crucial inning at the end of a World Series. "I don't want you to think I'm stressed out, I'm not." He referred to "feats of heroic singing on this stage," and said the "reliable machine" might "occasionally hiccup but it never catches a cold." At the end, he hopes for "our theatrical redemption."

3 3 Götterdämmerung, as seen in HD by Edward Brain Having seen the first three operas of the Met Opera s new Ring Cycle in their HD cinema broadcasts I was expecting a lot from the HD broadcast of Götterdämmerung on February 11th. I was not disappointed. I found that the performance did not feel like the nearly six hours it took to complete, but time seemed to flash by. Personally, I thought that the production was breathtaking from start to finish. The Machine, while using 21st century technology, still allows for Robert Lepage to give a traditional style to the production. As I tend to prefer the more traditional/literal interpretation to opera productions, this makes the opera really stand out to me. This is especially true when we see Grane during Siegfried s journey along the Rhine and during the Immolation Scene, as well as the Rhinemaidens swimming in the Rhine during Act 3. It may not always be easy to put Wagner s stage directions into action on stage, but this production seems to have dealt with them successfully. Also, I found that Lepage made sure that some of the more minor details found in the music are played out on the stage. Two key examples of these are: 1) 2) Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried) Photos: Ken Howard When Siegfried looks at the ring in Act 3 (just after his encounter with the Rhinemaidens) and the ring motif flies out of the orchestra. This is a detail, I have found, is overlooked in other productions Siegfried is doomed but the audience is not always made to focus on it. When Gunther picks up Nothung later in the same Act, during the Funeral March. Again, there are a lot of different themes associated with Siegfried being played here, and depending on the production one can be focused on the stage action and not the music. But here Lepage makes sure that both the stage action and the music are in total harmony just the way Wagner would have wanted it. Another detail that I found powerfully moving was when Siegfried and Brünnhilde both swear on Hagen s spear. Hagen stands in front of the statue of Wotan, with several vassals making a circle around the three principals. This seemingly allows Hagen to use the situation even more, as we have the Guardian of Oaths symbolically watching over the vows. That, to me, makes it even easier for Hagen when he stabs Siegfried in the last act the vassals are even more likely to believe that Hagen is only doing a good deed. As with the other mentioned points in the opera, this simply adds extra detail to the production. Hans Peter König (Hagen, Ian Paterson (Gunther), Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Wendy Bryn Harmer (Gutrune) In addition, this performance came with an all-star cast, including Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Eric Owens (Alberich), Hans-Peter König (Hagan), Iain Paterson (Gunther), and Waltraud Meier (Waltraute.) All performed extremely well especially Deborah Voigt and Jay Hunter Morris who was singing his first performances of Götterdämmerung. In my opinion, the Met s new Principal Conductor, Fabio Luisi, handled the orchestration very well. All-in-all, this was very enjoyable and worth seeing. If you have not seen this production, I would highly recommend seeing it when the full cycles are performed in New York, this and next year. Tamara Mumford (Flosshilde), Jennifer Johnson Cano (Wellgunde) Erin Morley (Woglinde)

4 4 THE TICKET ALLOCATION DECISION OF THE BAYREUTH FESTIVAL by Frances Henry On Dec. 19, 2011 Wagner Societies around the world received an ominous letter, dated Dec. 15, 2011 and signed by Directors Eva Pasquier and Katharina Wagner, leaders of the Bayreuth Festival, informing us that Wagner Societies would no longer receive their yearly allocations of tickets. (Included in this decision were other special interest groups and tour operators.) The news was greeted with shock and outrage by the societies which had already submitted their yearly ticket request by the Oct. 18 deadline. Unknown to all of us, this was the very day that the Administrative Board of Directors made this decision but delayed communicating it with the Wagner Societies until mid-december. Why? What led to this pronouncement after we had enjoyed a happy relationship with the Festival for many years and had always scrupulously followed all their rules and regulations in regard to ticket sales? To answer this we need to go back to August of that year when it was announced that the Bayreuth Festival had been investigated by both the Bavarian General Accounting Office and the German Federal Court of Auditors. Since the Festival receives substantial funding from the Federal government of Germany, the regional state of Bavaria, and the municipality of Bayreuth, it comes under the scrutiny of these agencies of government. The reason for the audits was the claim that irregularities in ticket allocation had long taken place and, it was claimed, that there was also a lack of transparency in the entire process. In addition, certain criminal charges were laid against the Festival by the Department of Prosecution of the Federal Courts of Germany and Bavaria. Many Wagnerians, including some of our members as well as those from other societies, were well aware that the ticket allocation process was not entirely straightforward. We knew, for example, that box office staff had considerable influence in making ticket decisions and, in a more general sense, everyone knows that getting tickets for Bayreuth - outside of Wagner Societies - involved as much as a ten year wait! However, we and other societies were always meticulous in following all the rules and directives as established by the Festival management when submitting our orders for tickets. Over the years we had established a comfortable and satisfactory relationship with the Festival and were able to assure our members that we had always been successful in receiving most, if not always all, of our requested tickets. Thus, we were ill prepared for this sudden news especially when it came two months after tickets for 2012 had already been requested. Under the leadership of the New York Wagner Society, the largest in North America, we immediately sprung to action. Nathalie Wagner, their president and I, began drafting a letter of response to the Dec. 15 letter which was sent out to all of the remaining twelve Wagner Societies on the continent. We expressed our dismay at the turn of events and reminded the Festival of our important role in promoting and disseminating Wagner s music to our members and that our only purpose and special interest was to share our love of the operas and to provide a deeper understanding of Wagner s art. We also noted that Wagner Societies were not in the same category as tour operators and others since we are non-profit organizations. We stressed that many societies regularly send funds to the Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth and also offer scholarships to young singers and musicians. We were as well in close communication with Professor Eva Märtson, President of the Richard Wagner Verband International who also wrote a letter to the Bayreuth Festival management. Our letter, dated Jan. 4, 2011, was sent to and endorsed by all North American Wagner Societies and subsequently sent to the entire administrative board of the Festival. We did not receive an answer and in early February we wrote again. This time, the spokesperson for the Festival responded by telling us that the Board had decided to continue, and in fact, increase the number of tickets allocated to the Richard Wagner Foundation which sponsors primarily young German musicians to attend the Festival for a three day jaunt. A few tickets are to be allocated to those Wagner Societies who participate in this foundation by sending applicants. Our reply to this is that many societies prefer to sponsor their own scholarships that involve active musical training rather than a short trip to Bayreuth which does nothing to enhance their musical education. Nothing was said about our request but it was also implied that arrangements were not necessarily written in stone! Subsequently, there has been a flurry of communication between presidents and chairs of the famous 14 as we are now termed and other interested members. We are also in close touch with international Wagner Societies in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, the United Kingdom and others. Most of these societies have also written to the Festival management in protest of their decision. We are now also in process of writing to German consulates, embassies and Goethe Institutes to seek their lobbying help. There has been one further development in that the German and Bavarian courts have dropped the criminal charges initially laid against the Festival. And, as of this writing, the president of the Wagner Society of Leipzig, Mr. Thomas Krakow and Prof. Eva Märtson are meeting with Ms Eva Pasquier - Wagner and members of the Festival s administrative board to argue the case for the Wagner Societies. Both of these emissaries have received all of our letters and other documentation to assist them in making their case. We are all hopeful that something positive will come out of this meeting.

5 5 NEWS and COMMENTS the Editor THE RING IN THE WORLD Let them eat cake...! BAYREUTH It appears that our Newsletter was the first, at least on the North American continent, to report on the criminal investigation of Bayreuth s system of ticket allocation. Although the criminal charges were ultimately withdrawn, as a consequence of the exposure of details of some unwholesome dealings, the two Wagner sisters put Wagner Societies worldwide in the same basket with tour operators and cut off both from any special consideration. In practice, no more, even modest, ticket allocations for our members. In effect, the Wagner Societies are paying for the sins of others. For in-depth report on steps taken by North American Wagner Societies and the results to date, see Frances Henry, page 4. In early March, the Festival spokesman, Peter Emmerich, announced that from now 65% of the tickets will be offered for free sale, as against the 40% previously. According to Emmerich, waiting times for Festival tickets on open sale were from 5 to 7 years, with exceptional cases up to 13. He did not indicate whether he expects these numbers to decline. The Wagner sisters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner, were officially joined by (unnamed) Managing Director in charge of the administrative side of the Festival. In this sense Bayreuth has matured; all serious opera houses have a Commercial Director. In February, WELT Online has asked Katharina Wagner a few questions. Her answers describe how she sees Bayreuth. Challenged on the relatively high, for Bayreuth, number of empty seats during the 2011 season, she admitted that the demand for tickets was down from 10 people after each ticket, to 6, and explained it thus: - possibility of negative reaction to type of productions (Tannhäuser) - 25% increase in ticket prices, - profusion of high quality of Wagner productions elsewhere. Re Frank Castorf (the Bayreuth Ring director), she stated that his contract does not allow for any cuts in the Ring; however, yes, he may become constrained by finances or logistics (among these, intriguingly, the size of the orchestra pit). Asked what story his Ring will tell, Castorf replied (in loose translation): For me it is a journey back to the gold of our days - oil. LONDON ROH will celebrate the bicentenaries and the centenary (Verdi, Wagner and Britten) in the season. Wagner is to be honoured by a revival of the Ring with Bryn Terfel and Susan Bullock. Unfortunately, it will be overshadowed by Verdi, with three star - studded productions. FRANKFURT The Vera Nemirova/Sebastian Weigle production has by now gone through the individual premieres and will present two cycles in June. The ubiquitous Lance Ryan is Siegfried. As at the Met, this production features a permanent mechanical set, here a series of concentric circles, capable of moving individually and so creating countless permutations. Anja Fidelia Ulrich (Gutrune), Lance Ryan (Siegfried) Photo: Monika Ritterhaus MUNICH Two cycles of this new Andreas Kriegenburg/Kent Nagano Ring are to be given within the July Opera Festival. Lance Ryan is Siegfried in Siegfried. At this point both Das Rheingold and Die Walküre have premiered. Thomas J.Mayer (Wotan), Sophie Koch (Fricka) Photo: Wilfried Hösl

6 6 BERLIN The Staatsoper in Schiller Theater will offer two cycles of a new Ring, in April This Guy Cassier/ Daniel Barenboim Ring is a joint production of Milan s Teatro alla Scala and Berlin s Staatsoper, that started in 2010 and fulminates in The star studded cast includes René Pape (Wotan), Johannes Martin Kräntzle (Alberich), Waltraud Meier (Sieglinde), Peter Seifert/Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Lance Ryan (Siegfried in Siegfried), Ian Storey (Siegfried in Götterdämmerung), Juka Uusitalo (The Wanderer), Anna Larson (Erda), and Mikhail Petrenko (Hagen). René Pape (Wotan), Photo: Staatsoper Berlin BARCELONA Teatro Liceu, the Barcelona opera house, has announced an ambitious program of Wagner works in the season, to celebrate the bicentenary. September 1-6 of this year, immediately after the end of their season, the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra will present in concert The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde. (This marks the second time that Bayreuth visits Barcelona. In 1955, in the course of 15 days, there were 3 performances of each of Tristan, Die Walküre and Parsifal), Further to this, there will be the first installment of Robert Carsen s Ring - Das Rheingold -, a concert version of Rienzi and a projection of Fritz Lang s Nibelungen. For tickets go to: liceubarcelona.cat/bayreuthfestival. BOOKS Wagner as I Knew Him Wagner, wie ich ihn kannte Ferdinand Christian Wilhelm Praeger First publication:1885 Publication date: 2001, 2003 (reprints) Publisher(s): University Press of the Pacific; Best Books According to Sir W.H. Hadow this book "was received with great alarm and indignation by the Wagnerians, partly because it fell short of unthinking hero-worship, partly because it gave a full and indiscreet account of the Dresden revolution, Wagner's part in which it was a matter of religion to ignore or minimize. The German version of the book was suppressed at the instance of H.S. Chamberlain..." There can be no doubt that Chamberlain's efforts to suppress this book were motivated by the desire to eradicate all knowledge of Wagner's socialist views and of his revolutionary activities, which had become an embarrassment to the reactionary "Bayreuth circle". Hadow concluded: "I have read many books on Wagner... and have come to the conclusion that among contemporary biographies Praeger gives the truest picture." On the other hand Newman described him as, "generally untrustworthy", and he is sometimes misleading. Most of Praeger's account is based on what he was told by Wagner himself; in some cases it is likely that Praeger has misunderstood or that a conversation was less than perfectly remembered. It should also be kept in mind that Wagner did not always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Praeger also relied in part on other unreliable sources and he was not always entirely truthful about his own friendship with Wagner. Despite these faults, the book is a fascinating account of Wagner as he was known to one of his friends. Two years Wagner's junior, like him, Praeger grew up in Leipzig but settled in London from It was during a visit to Dresden in 1843 that Praeger was introduced to Wagner, perhaps by August Röckel, with whom he maintained a correspondence from which he quotes in this book. Thus Praeger's account of Wagner's revolutionary years is partly based on accounts by Wagner himself -- given during his Zürich years and so before he began to conceal his part in the Dresden revolt -- and partly on letters from Röckel, who served a thirteen-year prison sentence for his part in those events. Praeger and his wife got to know Wagner well at the time of his London concerts in the spring of This visit is described in detail, although Praeger might have exaggerated the part he played in the decision to invite Wagner. As well as being a writer, Praeger was a musician and composer. His accounts of the creation of many of Wagner's musical works, although based on conversations with Wagner and study of his scores (and in some cases manuscripts), are not always to be relied upon. For example, his comment that when writing Lohengrin Wagner composed the third act, then the first and second, is a misunderstanding based on examination of the orchestral draft of the score, which was composed in that order, although the earlier draft had been composed from act one to act three. Quoted from Monsalvat This compilation copyright by Derrick Everett. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright in contributed material is the property of its author

7 7 Wagner and Cinema Edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman Foreword by Tony Palmer The cover, resplendent with a sepia image from Fritz Lang s Die Niebelungen, drew me in as surely as if the book started humming the Forest Murmurs, or possibly the dragon music at the beginning of Act II of Siegfried. I was grabbed instantly by a title that I suspect will appeal to the Wagnerians who read this newsletter. Wagner & Cinema (2010) is as ambitious in its way as War and Peace. The title has Wagnerian echoes (cf Opera and Drama) that require a substantial book. At 500+ pages its scope is indeed worthy of its subject. The editors Jeongwon Joe and Sander L Gilman show ambition worthy of their title in the kinds of essays they include. Wagner and the silent film, which is at least a matter of historical proximity Wagnerian Resonance in film scoring, looking at Wagner s influence Wagner in Hollywood Wagner in German Cinema A section called Wagner Beyond the soundtrack that includes two essays about Bill Viola s The Tristan Project A Wagner filmography (primarily Hollywood, excluding silent films and German cinema) A collection of essays will inevitably have some hits and some misses, but so long as I get some good quotes and a few good passages I am satisfied. By those modest standards, Wagner & Cinema easily succeeds, as Tony Palmer s Foreword: When I first discussed my film with Wolfgang Wagner he gave me two crucial pieces of advice, although I confess I did not fully appreciate their importance at the time. First, never forget that the world is full of Wagner experts, he said, who know for certain how many eggs my grandfather had for breakfast on the third Thursday of the fourth month of 1875, and what s more, many of them know how long he boiled he eggs! To this universal truth, he added, there is one exception. Me. His grandson. And I don t know or care. And Wolfgang Wagner continues: If my grandfather were alive today he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood. He would not have been able to resist the technical wizardry at his disposal, nor the hordes of workers, nor the money. The money especially. He always headed straight for the money" Distribution: World Publication date: 2/2/2010 Format: cloth 504 pages, 28 b&w illus., 35 musical exx. PAPERBACK $29.95 Palmer, picking up on WW's enthusiasm, goes on to say: Wagner would have been like a crazy kid in a paint shop. You want a dragon? No problem. Dwarfs? Easy. Flood the stage? Well, we did Titanic...And you'll get a great musical soundtrack as part of the deal. There s something for everybody here, but as I already said, with such collections there has to be some hit and miss. I was especially happy to see three essays on German cinema, having found great joy in the films of Alexander Kluge, Fassbinder, Syberberg, Wenders, Herzog and others, all employing Wagner s images, methods and/or music to varying degrees, while re-thinking if not actually rehabilitating Germany s romantic past. The essays on Viola are harder to read if he s new to you (as he is to me) but the essays make me curious to explore further. I was glad to see a paper from Lawrence Kramer, the biggest name among the contributors, along with Sander L Gilman, whose closing essay serves as a kind of epilogue. Gilman closes with considerations of the appropriated Wagner, captive of Nazi ideology, and our own attempts to get at the truth underneath: All studies of culture depend on the sophistication of the reading of the context: not that such a reading can ever free itself from the perspective of the scholar making it. Thus ours is the pleasant work of an academic Sisyphus: always rolling the stone up the mountain of contextualization and interpretation so that others can take it, reshape it, re-read it, and roll it back again. Each reading adds to the sum; each reveals our own fascinations and preoccupations. Only at the end of days does the task end: remember that in 1945 it was not the cinema that registered the collapse of the Third Reich but the Greater Germany Radio that marked it by playing the overture to Richard Wagner s Twilight of the Gods. Perhaps that tune will also echo in our own readings and re-readings then. Bold as the title is, the book does not shy away from its ambitions. I recommend it to any TWS cinephile. Leslie Barcza

8 8 W A G N E R O N S TA G E MAY - AUGUST 2012 Listings correct to April For further information check with opera companies via: Das Liebesverbot Moscow (Helicon); July 5-8 Meiningen; May 13-July 6 Frankfurt (Oper); May 2-4, CON Rienzi Madrid (Real); May 21-27, CON Der Fliegende Holländer Bayreuth; July 25-Aug. 24 Savonlinna; July Augsburg; June 23 Hamburg (SO); June 9-13 Wien (SO); May Cologne; May 4-28 London (ENO); May 1-23 Tannhäuser Santiago; Aug Bayreuth; July 28-Aug. 27 Erl; July 27 Meiningen; July 1 Toulouse; June Eisenach; May 26 Lohengrin Bayreuth; July 27-Aug25 Erl; July 6-28 Karlsruhe; June 23 Tokyo (NNT); June 1-16 Kiel; May 19-June 9 Koblenz; May 12-June 12 Stockholm (Royal); May 2-8 Berlin (DO); May 1 Die Meistersinger Berlin (Komische); June 10-July 8 Cologne; May 5-June 7 Die Walküre Berlin (DO); May Leeds; June 16, CON Mannheim; May 27- June 24 Hannover; May 12- June 17 Siegfried Sofia; May 22-June 3 Cottbus; May 20-June 16 Halle (Oper); May 1 Munich; May 27- June3 Götterdämmerung Longborough; July Riga; June Dessau (Theater); May 12-June30, NP The Ring Munich (Fest); July 3-8; July NP Essen; June 26-July 1 Hannover; May 26-June 26 Frankfurt (Oper); June 2-17; June 22-July 1 Freiburg; May Detmold; May New York (Met); Apr. 7-24; Apr.26- May 3; May 5-12 Le Ring Paris (Athénée); May 2-11; NP Tristan und Isolde Seoul; Aug. 24 Bayreuth; July 26-Aug. 26 Erl; July 14 Hamburg (SO); May 28-June 3 Aachen; May 20-July 7 Cardiff; May 19-June 2 Würtzburg; May 6- June 3 Parsifal Bayreuth; July 29-Aug. 28 Erl; July 29 Amsterdam (NO); June 12-July 8 Saarbrucken; June 6 Wrocław; June 2 Wels; May 31- June 3 Praha (Narodni); May 18 Kassel; May 6-12 Hamburg (SO); May 6 Malmö; May 5-20 CON -Concert performance NP - New Production Please renew your TWS membership for Mail to: TORONTOWAGNER SOCIETY Richard Horner, Treasurer 197 Northwood Drive North York, Ontario M2M 2K5 TWS Executive contact numbers Co-chairs: Frances Henry: Lorne Albaum: Vice-chair Barry Hood: Secretary: Edward Brain: Treasurer: Richard Horner: Members: Jeff Rabin: Iain Scott: Jim Warrington Editor-Wagner News: Richard Rosenman: