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From an opera concert with Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera in Olavshallen, Trondheim, 11 March 2021. Conductor: James Gaffigan Valkyries: Helmwige – Sigrid Vetleseter Bøe, Gerhilde – Camilla Stenhoff Vist, Schwertleite – Siv Oda Hagerupsen, Waltraute – Åse Krystad, Ortlinde – Tonje Eero Hove, Rossweisse – Maria Nohr, Grimgerde – Nina Sætherhaug.Richard Wagner: The Valkyrie - Ride of the Valkyries

PARIS — Marat Gabidullin's face is lined from years of exposure to the elements, and his hair is thinning. But at 56, he has the trim physique and muscular arms of a man 30 years younger. He wears a chunky ring bearing the image of a skull.The skull is the symbol of the Wagner Group — a private Russian mercenary force believed to be financed by an oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The group is fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. And it's widely believed that at least some of the "little green...

The Nazi years lie like a bolt over the memory of a good Germany, of the composers, poets and philosophers who gave the world so much beauty and enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries: Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Wagner and the Romantics. Nevertheless...in only a few years, a nation of culture was turned into one of modern barbarians. Could the philosophical abstraction, artistic elation and yearning for collective salvation that drove the country also have contributed to its ultimate derailing into the kind of mania that defined the years of National Socialism? After all, it wasn't just the...

Explanation: Looking for an interplanetary vacation destination? Consider a visit to Europa, one of the Solar System's most tantalizing moons. Ice-covered Europa follows an elliptical path in its 85 hour orbit around our ruling gas giant Jupiter. Heat generated from strong tidal flexing by Jupiter's gravity keeps Europa's salty subsurface ocean liquid all year round. That also means even in the absence of sunlight Europa has energy that could support simple life forms. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to make reservations at restaurants on Europa, where you might enjoy a dish of the local extreme shrimp. But you can...

A rare library of books on witches and the occult that was assembled by Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler in the war has been discovered in the Czech Republic. Himmler was obsessed with the occult and mysticism, believing the hocus-pocus books held the key to Ayran supremacy in the world. The books - part of a 13,000-strong collection - were found in a depot of the National Library of Czech Republic near Prague which has not been accessed since the 1950s. Norwegian Masonic researcher Bjørn Helge Horrisland told the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang that some of the books come from...

If you’re a music lover, you may have heard of the so-called “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Audiences were stunned to hear this infamous harmony when the opera premiered on June 10, 1865 in Munich, Germany. As Tristan turns 150, let’s take a look at what makes the Tristan chord so unique. The “Vorspiel,” or Prelude, to Tristan begins with with a “dissonant” chord. The terms “consonance” and “dissonance,” “music” and “noise” are largely subjective. Now, in an era where our ears can enjoy everything from Chopin to Chick Corea, what our modern ears hear as “consonant”...

Ukraine likes to conjure up the magic word "Galicia" to create an identity of European belonging. Richard Wagner picks apart this myth-cum-trademark in an EU bid he believes is misplaced. Ukraine is firmly anchored in the Eurasian region that traditionally answers to Moscow. The cultural-historical fusion with Russia reaches deep into the past to the Kievan Rus, the original formula of the East Slavic concept of state, as does the Byzantine-Orthodox hold on mentality and society. The majority of the population speaks Russian and geographically and geo-politically speaking, the country has a number of non-European coordinates that are indispensable to...

200 years after his birth, the composer's family and fans remain split on his legacy. He was a brilliant composer, a confirmed anti-Semite and an undeniably significant influence on the history of music. And today, he would have been 200 years old. That man, of course, was Richard Wagner. “Only Jesus, Napoleon and Hitler had more written about them,” said the German newspaper Die Welt’s culture affairs critic Manuel Brug recently. Wagner is considered one of the more revered and most vilified composers in the annals of the classical music. He was not only an anti-Semite; his compositions were practically...

Today, May 22, is the 200th birthday of famed composer Richard Wagner — so his native Germany is awash in concerts, lectures and recordings to celebrate the Jubiläumsjahr (Jubilee Year). But predictably, the additional attention has stirred up an intensified version of the never-stale debate over Wagner’s authentic legacy: aesthetic prince to be honoured, or moral leper to be shunned? Germany was once considered the pinnacle of aesthetic and philosophical sophistication, and at that pinnacle sat Richard Wagner. But after the war, Wagner (who is universally acknowledged to have been a racist and anti-Semite) retained more fame as Hitler’s muse...

Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the depths of darkness, riven by dreams, it seems like the vertiginous imaginings of opium.” (Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, meant this as a compliment.) The twenty-three-year-old Gustav Mahler, after hearing Parsifal, wrote, “I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled...

ehudgins@atlassociety.org  April 11, 2007 -- I love opera! Thus recently at the Kennedy Center I saw Die Walküre, the second installment of Richard Wagner's monumental four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, about gods and goddesses, giants and dwarfs, and mortal human heroes. The music, singing and acting were superb. But the program notes seemed like Al Gore channeling Karl Marx. Consider "dramaturg" Cori Ellison's description (bold in the original) of the opera's themes. First, nature:  "The despoiling of nature through greed and ambition begins even before the stage action does, with Wotan sacrificing his own eye to drink from the Well...

The Los Angeles Opera will spend a $6m (£3.2m) gift from two philanthropists on staging its first production of Richard Wagner's epic Ring cycle. The four-opera production, which takes days to perform, took 28 years for the German composer to write. Tenor Placido Domingo, who is general director of the opera company, thanked Eli and Edythe Broad - who made money from house building - for the donation. "I hope to sing the role of Siegmund, if I am still singing then," he said. "The far-reaching generosity of their gift will help make this vision a reality," the 65-year-old added....