In many countries, helpful background information and context is offered to audiences in the accompanying program – why are Australians missing out?
US actor Kevin Spacey is escorted into Nantucket District Court in January for arraignment on a sexual assault charge. His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.
CJ Gunther/EPA
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg) is a long, complex work. An ensemble performance by Opera Australia transports Wagner’s 16th-century guild of mastersingers to a modern-day men’s club.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to reporters in Toronto on Sept. 10, 2018, after announcing he’ll invoke the notwithstanding clause in his battle to shrink Toronto city council. Is Ford taking on the “Court Party?”
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov.
Doug Ford’s wielding of the notwithstanding clause is part of a broader opposition to judicial activism that has developed among right-wing politicians and academics in the post-Charter era.
Composing a symphonic landscape: Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 oil painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
Wikimedia Commons
With An Alpine Symphony, Richard Strauss achieved something remarkable: the painting of the German alps, complete with cow meadows and waterfalls, in sound.
3D goggles might be commonplace at the cinema, but few associate the opera with digital technology, or would ever expect to wear 3D goggles in a theatre. A new production of The Flying Dutchman, created…
Bicentenary celebrations have re-invigorated the ‘Wagner question’ around the world.
Jeff Busby
As part of the wave of Wagnermania currently sweeping Melbourne — including Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring Cycle and a month-long Ring Festival — a symposium titled Wagner and Us will take place at the…
The Valkyries in Opera Australia’s Ring Cycle aren’t the only ones to feel emotional.
Jeff Busby
Opera Australia is currently performing Richard Wagner’s most famous work, Der Ring des Nibelungen – The Ring Cycle – marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, at a reported cost of A$20 million…
Wagner has been inflaming people for a long time.
Jeff Busby
Even if you’ve not had the chance to see it, you’ll know Melbourne is currently going to town over Wagner and The Ring Cycle. There’s a clear historic precedent for this – but we have to go back a whole…
The Melbourne Ring Cycle is big, befitting the opera’s stature.
Jeff Busby
It should come as no surprise in the nation that gave the world the Big Pineapple, the Big Guitar, the Big Sheep, and, for that matter, a Big Ad, that the size of a cultural artefact in and of itself is…
The Melbourne Ring Cycle is expensive – but it may be worth it.
Keith Saunders
The cultural dollar is tight. Why spend taxpayers’ money on mounting Wagner operas rather than – say – erecting a mile-high statue of Kyle Sandilands on the moon warning alien civilisations what to expect…