[Marxism] NYT: Wagner Gets a Touch of Marx

[Sam B <sam.b.ann.arbor@xxxxxxxxx>]

May 16, 2009

MUSIC REVIEW | 'SIEGFRIED'

In This ‘Ring,’ Wagner Gets a Touch of Marx

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is
presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments
over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the
performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule
of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with
the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.

The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at
the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das
Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But
this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.

Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer
Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of
American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class
conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

In “Siegfried” the struggle has reached “critical mass,” Ms. Zambello
writes in a program note, with the oppressed (the Nibelung dwarfs Mime
and Alberich) living in poverty, a once-powerful mogul (the god Wotan)
reduced to scavenging, and the natural world ravaged by greed and
rampant development. In the context of the current economic crisis,
this American “Ring” seems eerily resonant. [...]

Full:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/arts/music/16sieg.html?ref=arts

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