Wagner Performance in a Time of Corona: Hermann Grampp reports on Germany’s pint-sized Wagner year

Reviews of Das Rheingold (reduced orchestration by Jonathan Dove), directed Moss, conducted Runnicles, car park of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2020; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (piano reduction, excerpts), Siegfried Idyll, conducted Thielemann, Haus Wahnfried, Bayreuth, 2020; Die Walküre, directed Herheim, conducted Runnicles, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2020; Tristan und Isolde (reduced orchestration by Osamu Sasaki), directed Langridge, conducted Trinks, Hannover, 2020.

March 2021, Volume 15, Number 1, 70–75.

‘The year has been a good one for the society’ was president Graham Chapman’s assessment at the annual dinner of ‘The Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things’. Alas, the same cannot be said of the year 2020, either for society at large or for that comparatively small but resilient circle of Wagnerians in Germany and elsewhere. The sudden lockdown in March 2020 due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus meant the worldwide closure of opera houses, concert halls, and cultural venues of any sort.

However, in June Germany slowly resumed its cultural life, and during the summer months one could even have the impression that musical life as we knew it would finally fall back into place. It was but a small window of opportunity between June and October 2020, before Germany entered another lockdown on 1 November. The most spectactular achievement of the international music scene in the cursed year of 2020 was certainly the centenary of the Salzburg Festival, a daring project featuring 76,500 visitors, 110 performances, 96 per cent attendance, and not a single coronavirus case (but 3,600 tests).