Musical America Blogs

By Rebecca Schmid As Regietheater becomes the norm on opera stages in Germany, it is a pleasant, if not shocking, surprise to see a production of Die Zauberflöte that looks like a throwback to the time of its world premiere. The Staatsoper Berlin has revived a 1994 staging modelled after designs by the nineteenth-century Prussian [...]

By Rebecca Schmid Infektion!, the name of the Staatsoper’s annual Festival for New Music Theater could easily extend to describe the presence of John Cage in Germany this year. No other country outside the U.S. has planned as many events for his centenary of his birth, and Berlin is in some people’s minds already ‘Caged [...]

By Rebecca Schmid Few operas in history have gripped the human psyche to the same extent as Don Giovanni. Pushkin, Kierkegaard, and Bernard Shaw count among the literary figures to have written their own account of the daemonic seductor since Mozart and Da Ponte staged their ‘drama giocoso,’ a tragi-comedy, in Prague. Since the 19th [...]

By Rebecca Schmid The Staatsoper’s annual spring Festtage has become an even more distinguished event now that Daniel Barenboim serves as music director to La Scala in addition to his Berlin opera house. The festival, originally launched by the maestro in 1996 with Harry Kupfer’s Ring, features coveted soloists and premiere productions, as well as [...]

By Rebecca Schmid The author Karl Scheffler famously described Berlin as condemned to forever becoming but never being. When I arrived here nearly two years ago as a DAAD grantee in journalism, the city sprawled out like an unfinished collage. The Philharmonie on the gleaming, rebuilt Potsdamer Platz where I heard Daniel Barenboim perform and [...]