| Bio: |
\"(...) The most disfiguring perversions of all that this approach can lead to are some of those indulged in by opera producers. They will seize on the ideas in a Wagner work - or, worse still, ideas extraneous to the work that they regard as nevertheless relevant to it - and structure their staging of it round these. Thus a level that is not fundamental is treated as if it were, and the work is what one might call superficialized. This has happened so often since the 1960s that it can for the present be considered the rule rather than the exception. (...) But then came the great wave of left-wing political consciousness associated with the year 1968, since when producers have most characteristically made Wagner\'s operas vehicles for comment on contemporary and recent history. I have seen Das Rheingold set in a power station on the Rhine with Wotan as a frock-coated, top-hatted, nineteenth-century capitalist in charge of operations. (...) Producers who turn works of art into vehicles for currently topical ideas and attitudes show that they have no real understanding of what art is.\"
-Bryan Magee, \"Aspects of Wagner\" (Oxford University Press, 1988) |
