IN NEW YORK, THE Metropolitan Opera’s controversial new production by Robert Lepage of Wagner’s Walküre, the second installment in his staging of the complete “Ring” cycle, features a celebrated cast, including Bryn Terfel, Jonas Kaufmann, and, as Brünnhilde, Deborah Voigt. The stars of the show, however, seem to be the two dozen multipurpose planks of  Carl Fillion’s ostentatious set. The Ring cycle is one of Wagner’s most famous works, and in the new production, the set not only plays a major part, it also reflects Wagner’s earlier personal life where the floor beneath his feet must have felt highly movable very often. Here is a 1905 commentary from our archives.

By William Ashton Ellis.

Fillion’s set. Click to enlarge.

NOW THAT THE PUBLICATION OF Richard Wagner’s letters to Mathilde Wesendonck has drawn renewed attention to the unhappiness of his own first marriage — an unhappiness of profounder origin than I am at present permitted to state — it is of peculiar interest to gain another side-light on the latter; a side-light which throws into still greater relief the truth of his remark, to his sister Clara, on the hopelessness of all attempts to “reason with Minna.”

The document I am about to produce made its first appearance in Germany so recently as last February, in the appendix to a voluminous collection of the letters of Peter Cornelius, nephew of the great painter, and well-known himself as poet-composer; it is a letter to Cornelius, though, from Richard Wagner, who has just consigned himself to melancholy solitude beside the Rhine, for composition of the music of his Meistersinger. But we must first go a little way back, to Richard’s second severance from Minna.      Continue reading “Wagner’s other ‘ring cycle’ and its problems.” »