2024-06-16 23:49:20
The Prague Nationwide Theater Opera is making ready the entire Ring of the Nibelung by composer Richard Wagner. The cycle of 4 multi-hour romantic operas coping with the rule of the gods over the world and the everlasting issues of fundamental human relationships will start on February 12, 2026 with the premiere of the Golden Rhine manufacturing, and culminate in Could to June 2028.
Gold of the Rhine and Twilight of the Gods are to be seen within the Nationwide Theater constructing, Valkyrie and Siegfried within the State Opera. Each opera information will share the venture. “A brand new manufacturing of Wagner’s Ring will happen in Prague, 100 years after the final and solely manufacturing of the whole cycle in Prague,” introduced the creative director of the Prague Opera, Per Boye Hansen.
However, the folks of Prague have been in a position to see the whole sequence in 2005, when the Ring of the Nibelung was introduced on the Czech stage for the primary time by the chief conductor of the Düsseldorf theater, John Fiore, in co-production with the German Opera on the Rhine based mostly in Düsseldorf and Duisburg.
The performances with the Prague orchestra and German singers have been based mostly on the shape through which German phases performed the Ring of the Nibelung within the early Nineteen Nineties, directed by Kurt Horres and Tobias Richter. At the moment, the Nationwide Theater supplied an orchestra, extras, choir and several other soloists. Because of the completely different dimensions of the phases, the German facet additionally needed to re-manufacture some components of the surroundings, imported in 14 containers, for Prague. The recording was later launched by the Nationwide Theater in a non-saleable set of 14 albums and one DVD containing a documentary movie. The then head of the opera Jiří Nekvasil and former director of the theater Daniel Dvořák have been behind the venture.
Lately, The Wagner Cycles venture additionally visited Prague. It was initiated by the Dresden Music Competition and brings collectively teachers and musicians, who annually carry out one a part of the Ring of the Nibelungen tetralogy in live performance utilizing historic devices and making an allowance for the vocal and speech follow of the time of the work’s creation. Final time this 12 months, Valkýra was carried out on this approach in Prague beneath the baton of Kent Nagano.
The sequence of 4 operas The Ring of the Nibelung was created by Richard Wagner between 1848 and 1874 loosely based mostly on the motifs of historic Germanic mythology, particularly the Icelandic sagas and the knightly epic The Track of the Nibelungen, thought of probably the most well-known work of German medieval literature. The writer composed the tetralogy to his personal textual content. The operas Zlato Rýna, Valkýra, Siegfried and Nightfall of the Gods whole about 16 hours of music.
Sláva Daubnerová will direct. | Picture: CTK
On the time when the Ring of the Nibelung was written, Wagner was not solely a acknowledged composer, but in addition had an excellent monetary background. With the assistance of patrons, he may subsequently start to appreciate his modest dream. It was the development of a theater on the stage of which his personal performs can be introduced solely. Turned. Work started in Bayreuth in Bavaria in 1873, and three years later the whole tetralogy premiered right here. The Bayreuth music competition continues the custom of presenting Wagner’s operas to this present day.
Slovak native Sláva Daubnerová will direct the upcoming Prague manufacturing of the cycle in collaboration with artist Boris Kudlička. Robert Jindra will likely be accountable for the musical staging.
“Wagner labored on the piece for 26 years. Every of the components is totally authentic and creates a distinct ambiance, together with the music. They’re carried out by the world’s largest opera homes, but in addition by ensembles that don’t belong to well-known homes and thus don’t boast such a excessive popularity. The presentation of this magnificent nonetheless, works are all the time accompanied by nice expectations and are an enormous problem,” says Jindra, who has been the music director of the Prague Opera since 2022.
Based on the director Daubnerová, Wagner’s Ring represents the jewel of the Nibelungen, which carries a universality that works in each period. “It’s a rare sort of expertise the place, greater than with different musical works, we will understand the which means of artwork as one thing that transcends our existence, because of the monumentality of the work and its time scale,” he says.
The winner of the Slovak theater awards Dosky has already directed Strauss’s Ariadne na Nax, Leoš Janáček’s Voyages of Mr. Brouchkova or Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet in Prague.
Conductor Robert Jindra. | Picture: CTK
Per Boye Hansen remembers that Prague was a Wagnerian metropolis. Regardless of the composer’s anti-Semitism, his constructive reception right here was supported by the Jewish-German viewers. “All of the legendary administrators of the New German Theater since 1888 have been Jews: Angelo Neumann, Alexander Zemlinsky, Wilhelm Steinberg,” he remembers.
Neumann was certainly one of Wagner’s closest mates. Within the Eighties, he bought the efficiency rights to The Ring of the Nibelung and toured it all through Europe, contributing to the composer’s recognition.
“When Neumann arrived in Prague in 1885, he instantly started staging Wagner’s operas, with the then younger and unknown conductor Gustav Mahler taking up the baton for Zlat Rýn and Valkýra. It was within the Estates Theater, even earlier than the opening of the New German Theater in 1888, that was opened by Wagner’s Masters Singers from Nuremberg,” Hansen remembers.
Immediately, the Prague State Opera operates within the authentic constructing of the New German Theater.