WAGNER SYMPOSIUM

Today’s Symposium, hosted here at the hotel across the street from the opera house where I’ve been staying, proved quite interesting; William Germano, of Cooper Union in New York, spoke fascinatingly on “Wagner in Pieces,” that is fragmentation/breaking things or making them whole, particularly with respect to recording excerpts of Wagner’s music. I’d never noticed before that halfway through the cycle, Old Nothung is destroyed by fire and flood to create New Nothung the way the entire universe is at the end of the cycle. Then Jean-Jacques Nattiez, author of the wonderful book Wagner Androgyne, spoke about the Chéreau production of Bayreuth 1976, with which he was closely involved, and in particular took us through the DVDs explaining all those things which the camera didn’t quite pick up. In the afternoon, we heard from Wayne Gooding, editor of Opera Canada, with a history of singing Mime, Alberich, and Hagen (including some very old stuff which I’d never heard), and a round table panel of singers from the production. The audience started to hijack the conversation to crab about the non-representational Siegfried they’d seen the day before, although it was hardly the right forum since none of the directors nor company artistic staff were there. The singers did the best they could!