Last July, I posted several photos from our trip to Trier, Leiden, Paris, and Berlin. For some reason I never posted about our big evening at the opera.
Beth and I were in Berlin, thinking about what to do the next day. I said that Tristan und Isolde was the event at the nearby Berlin State Opera. I regretted that the opera would take from mid-afternoon till late in the evening, consuming a lot of our visiting time----but then, we thought, when would we have another chance to see Wagner performed in Berlin?!
The production had received tepid reviews like this one. But we got tickets and really loved the six-hour opera (including intermissions). What a great experience. As an aside, it was fun to see how well we remembered our German by reading the German and English lines provided above the stage. Daniel Barenboim conducted.
Another aside: I enjoy Bryan Magee's book The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (Henry Holt, 2001). Magee engagingly explains Wagner's work, the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, and the way Schopenhauer's book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung transformed Wagner's outlook and lead directly to the composition of Tristan und Isolde.
No comments:
Post a Comment