Pro and Contra Castorf: Mark Berry, Tash Siddiqui and Peter Bloom report from Bayreuth

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Castorf, conducted Kirill Petrenko, Bayreuth, 2014.

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 50–61.

Mark Berry contrasts Frank Castorf’s Ring with Patrice Chéreau’s centenary cycle 

When guest-editing The Wagner Journal this time last year, I contributed a brief editorial, entitled ‘Wagner Rescued from the Opera House?’ I tried to suggest the incompatibility, as recognised by Wagner and his more discerning interpreters and successors, between Wagner’s works and the everyday life of a typical opera house. As Pierre Boulez, whilst at work on the Ring at Bayreuth, put it: ‘Opera houses are often rather like cafés where, if you sit near enough to the counter, you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”’ What was needed, Boulez noted approvingly, ‘was an entirely new musical and theatrical structure, and it was this that he [Wagner] gradually created’.