| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 26-Aug-2012 Felsenreitschule | Zimmermann's Die Soldaten at the Salzburg Festival |
 The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant. The reason Berg’s opera Wozzeck succeeded, he argued, was not simply because Berg was Berg, but also because he had acquired the necessary historical distance to begin adapting the text to his own musical ends. Almost a century separates the play and the opera, and as Adorno puts it, ‘what Berg composed is simply what matured in Büchner in the intervening decades of obscurity’.Read full review... | |
| 19-Jun-2011 Westergasfabriek: Gashouder | Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos makes Nietzsche sing |
 Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was not that of an isolated contemplative but rather full of personal frustration, eventually ending in syphilitic madness. While his work has been often linked with music--most notably in his relationship with Wagner and Richard Strauss’s tone poem based on Also sprach Zarathustra--making his life into an opera may seem a dubious proposition. But that is exactly what Dionysos, a new music theater work by Wolfgang Rihm that is currently being seen at the Holland Festival, attempts to do.
Read full review... | |
