Director’s Notes Everything seems to have been said about Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung. From Nietzsche to Jung and Freud, from Mahler to Shaw, Donington, Magee, a remarkable number of scholars and thinkers from all fields have commented on the work. Still today, in Wagner Societies around the world and in intellectual circles, the discussion continues. It is hard to think of another piece that has captured music and theatre lovers’ imaginations so completely. And yet, despite the various essays and countless interpretations, including the composer’s own, The Ring has resisted all attempts to define it. During the 20 years Wagner took to compose it, his entire worldview shifted and he even sometimes contradicted himself when commenting on his masterpiece. The Ring’s reach is larger than anyone’s grasp and the life that lies beneath it speaks in its own voice. Within The Ring, Siegfried remains the most abstract of the four operas and this is what first attracted me to it. It holds a very special place in the Ring Cycle. The audience comes to the theatre with the foreknowledge of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre—it is a memory play of sorts where the spectator already knows what the hero does not which allows Wagner to make the most powerful use of his famous leitmotif structures.
Above: Christian Franz starred as Siegfried and Robert Künzli as Mime in the COC’s 2005 production of Siegfried.
The mythical sources of Siegfried, as well as the whole cycle, its pre-Freudian symbolism and its musical complexity perfectly illustrate the revolution Wagner’s ‘music drama’ wrought in the operatic world. In much the same way that Beethoven transformed symphonic
My gratitude goes out to the late Richard Bradshaw for the invitation to be part of this incredible journey he and the COC undertook more than a decade ago.
music, Wagner made emotions and inner thoughts the landscape of his work. And this is exactly where we started— by exploring the introspective nature of the piece in the hopes of hearing its true voice shine through.
François Girard
IN MEMORIAM: MARIA RADNER Last March, the COC was among many opera companies around the world greatly shocked and saddened by the untimely death of German contralto Maria Radner. Ms. Radner made her COC debut in 2009 in The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, and was scheduled to sing this winter at the COC as Erda in Siegfried. Only in her early 30s, she had already built an international career singing a wide range of alto repertoire, particuarly renowned for her performances in works by Wagner, Mahler and Strauss. Ms. Radner died on March 24, 2015, along with her partner Sascha Schenk and their infant son, Felix, when Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed near the French alps.
CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY 2015/2016
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