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A Complete Delight
Wagner's 'Die Walküre'
at New York Metropolitan Opera,
enjoyed in HD from Arizona
by MARIA NOCKIN
In 1843 Richard Wagner was reading Jacob Grimm's German Mythology, and a decade later he borrowed several works on the Nibelungen story from the Royal Library in Dresden. Clearly he was looking at the possibility of writing a work that would deal with mythical heros. During that same time, philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer opined that the twelfth century epic poem, The Nibelungenlied, would make a suitable subject for German opera. Over the next two years a series of articles in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik invited composers to write an opera based on it. By then, Wagner had already made use of material from the epic in Lohengrin...
Copyright © 6 June 2011
Maria Nockin,
Arizona USA
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