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”Wagner in Budapest” Opera Festival
Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold
Music drama in four scenes
12 June 2012, 6.00 pm - 9.00 pm
Bartók Béla National Concert Hall
Wagner: Das Rheingold
Featuring: MR Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Ádám Fischer
We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear, and of which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great fourfold drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a reaction by personifying the reacting force only, any more than Archimedes could lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever. You must also personify the established power against which the new force is reacting; and in the conflict between them you get your drama, conflict being the essential ingredient in all drama. Siegfried, as the hero of Die Gotterdammerung, is only the primo tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he has been stabbed in the last act, to sing rapturous love strains to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in Donizetti´s Lucia. In order to make him intelligible in the wider significance which his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon assumed in Wagner´s imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen.
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