Wagner Fest — Tony Rogers
The Editor explains what's on offer here
|
Why All the Fuss?
— Spud Money
| "If you need a hint of what
The Ring is all about, just think lust for power, wealth and sex for openers, and
universal murder, suicide and destruction for closers, with a bit of
gratuitous redemption thrown in for good measure." |
A tongue-in-cheek sketch of what Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle
Der
Ring des Nibelungen is famous for
|
The Ring in Australia
— Tony Rogers
The importance of the 1998 production in Adelaide, South Australia,
of the Ring
|
Gaudeat Auditor
— Tony Rogers
The best bits of the Ring
and other Wagner works the newcomer should listen
to
|
Enter an Archetypal Zealot
— Tony Rogers
| "I am the very model
of a modern Wagner devotee." |
A parody of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General
(from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance)
|
Detective Story
— The Wanderer
Wagner and Inspector Morse
|
A Ring of Pilgrims
— Bet Briggs
The responses of five different people to the Ring: author
Mark Twain, composer Anton Bruckner, German scholar John Robertson and
his wife Ethel (novelist Henry Handel Richardson) and an ordinary man called
Jim
|
The Tin Voice Laughed
— Olive Conduit
| "Particularly telling is her 13-second
'duet' between
Siegfried and Brünnhilde (from Siegfried), where she manages to
give the impression of both a male and a female voice." |
Failed soprano Anna makes good as a musical humourist
|
Wagner's Revolutionary Years
— Joan Willmott-Clarke
Wagner and the aftermath of the upheavals of 1848
|
Web Line —
Tony Rogers
A few Web sites devoted to Wagner
|
The Power of the Feminine
— Clare Hansson
| "When I hear
Wagnerian music, I hear rampant masculinity and surging power. I also
hear luscious eroticism." |
Woman as Wagner's Muse
|
Down Limerick Lane
One limerick from
NonesuCH, and another double-barrelled one from
the Editor
|
Quintessential Quirky Quotes
Comic and Classic, from
Everywhere and Everywhen
|
A French Connection
— Bet Briggs
| "So appreciated was
Wagner in literary France, that a monthly journal devoted entirely to him, La
revue wagnérienne, was founded in Paris in February 1885." |
The influence of Wagner on literary France in the 1880s
|
A Word in Your Pink Shell-like
— Harlish Goop
Fifteen anagrams with a Wagner twist
|
The Therapist Prescribes . . .
— Peter Wimsey
and I.Q. Lowe
| "When my daughter was
practising a series of shrieks from The Valkyries I shook my maracas
at her and demonstrated my tango steps." |
An egocentric psychologist recommends the healing power of Wagner
to a disturbed Billy-Bunter-loving tango man
|
Is There a Believer in the House?
— Tony Rogers
One man's story of how he came under the spell of Wagner's music
|
"A Gripping Drama . . ."
— Alfred E. Watson
A satirical review of the first performance in England of the complete
Ring
(from Punch, 1882)
|
An
Australian Brünnhilde — Bet Briggs
The career of soprano Florence
Austral
|
Where Three Ways Meet
— Tony Rogers
| "Out
there in Wagner-land is to be found a veritable treasure-trove of
trivia. Here, in no particular order, is a tiny representative
miscellany — partly sedate, but mainly droll." |
A selection of items our
editor has assembled from the immense storehouse of Wagnerian trivia
|
Wagner the Innovator
— E. Roy Strong
The vision, the leitmotivs, the orchestra pit, the orchestration
|
Ring-Barking Mad
— Tony Rogers
Another parody, this time of Joyce Kilmer's Trees
|
From the Back Verandah
— Fizzgig
Wagner's music at the movies |
