Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

What China Sounded Like

A Resonant Centenary for Strauss in Vienna

Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s lavish operatic fairy tale of political and social renewal opened exactly a century ago—just as an unprecedented political crisis threatened to subvert the legitimacy of the hundred-year-old Austrian republic. Today, it has a somewhat different resonance for an Austrian republic shaken by scheming politicians.

I Feel Pretty

A Longed-For Tristan

The wonder of Tristan in Wagner’s opera is that treacherous though he is, indifferent to friendship and dangerous to everyone, especially the woman he loves, we identify with him and respond to him.

‘Così’ in Coney

The dark engine that drives the opera into such sexually disturbing corners of the psyche is the wager undertaken in daylight and consummated by night, the men betting on the women’s sexual susceptibility.

End Notes

All the World’s a Stage

Signor Tambourossini

Wagner on Trial

In Barrie Kosky’s new production of Die Meistersinger, which opened the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, the musical cobbler Hans Sachs has been restyled as his creator Richard Wagner, isolated in the witness box at the Nuremberg Trials, and we the audience have now become the tribunal, passing judgment on him.