On the occasion of the Bayreuth Festival the Grüner Hügel, or Green Hill, that is home to the Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus was littered with 500 multicolored “mini-Wagners” — garden-gnomelike figurines of the composer, hands raised as if ready to conduct. These cute statuettes share the hill with an outdoor exhibition, “Silenced Voices,” honoring 53 Jewish singers, musicians…
He was a brilliant composer, a confirmed anti-Semite and an undeniably significant influence on the history of music. And today, he would have been 200 years old. That man, of course, was Richard Wagner. “Only Jesus, Napoleon and Hitler had more written about them,” said the German newspaper Die Welt’s culture affairs critic Manuel Brug…
Opera companies throughout the world are staging Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle this year to fete his 200th birthday on May 22, but Hungarian Jewish conductor Adam Fischer is having no part of it during his “Wagner Days” festival in June. Fischer, who launched his festival in 2006 in the Bela Bartok concert hall at the…
A descendant of Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, promised to hand over the correspondence of her late father to the Bavarian State Archives. Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer and director of the annual Bayreuth Festival of his works, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin that she plans to give Wolfgang Wagner’s letters…
A new production of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhauser” opera in Dusseldorf, which drew harsh criticism for staging Nazi atrocities, has been cancelled after less than a week. At opening performances by the Deutsche Oper am Rhein company at the Dusseldorf Opera House over the weekend, the audience reacted negatively to scenes featuring the gassing of concentration…
Former German infantryman Hans Himsel lived through scenes in 1944 at the Bayreuth opera house worthy of the finale of Richard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” when Valhalla goes up in flames. In this bicentenary year of Wagner’s birth, Himsel, 90, recalled the last wartime production at Bayreuth. It was August 9, 1944 and the cast performed “Die…
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illluminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 While it is well known that the great composer Richard…
Stephen Fry has one of those faces you likely recognize but don’t know why. Did he live in the old neighborhood? Did you go to school with him? Or, as is the case, is he someone almost famous? Fry was a Golden Globe nominee for playing the title role in the 1998 film, “Wilde.” He’s…
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