Gwyneth Jones and Chéreau
In 1979, while I was interviewing Dame Gwyneth Jones in Bayreuth, the soprano put her hands around my top of my head to try to explain why I found her Brünnhilde so sensual. As her hands pressed against my skull, an electric charge flowed through my body.
Colin Bayliss
Clemens Bieber
Bea and Alec Bobotek
Stephen Charitan
Jerry Floyd
Diana Herbst
Hildegaard Arnold Kiel
Walter Meyer
Anne Midgette
John F. Runciman
Per-Erik Skramstad
Julia Thornton
Mark Twain
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A couple of days later, thinking I was at the Haus Wahnfried museum, I knocked on Winifred Wagner's front door. A housekeeper answered and asked if I wished to see Frau Wagner. Because my trip was funded by the West German government and there had been a furor over Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film, Winifried Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried, I declined the offer. A mistake I regretted almost immediately and even more keenly after Frau Wagner died the following year.
In that pre-internet era, critics could only transmit reviews to newspapers via telex and all telex time was reserved by other writers. As soon as I completed attending seven Bayreuth performances, I took a train to Frankfurt, to file my review at the city's Associated Press (AP) office. The route from my hotel to the AP went through Frankfurt's red light district. Alhough I had watched Wagner's Blumenmaedchen cavort onstage in the Festspielhaus less than a day earlier, I was startled by the graphic, lurid erotic displays in many of the city's shop windows. I overcame my shock and my review was soon filed in Frankfurt and published in the now-defunct Washington Star.
I wrote of my admiration for Harry Kupfer's stunning Der fliegende Holländer but panned the Patrice Chereau Ring, using a snide term, "Chereaudaemmerung", to describe the production. A year later this Ring was taped and when it was telecast in the U.S., I realized how wrong I had been. I also completely understood why Dame Gwyneth expressed her enthusiasm about Chereau's direction in such a sensual, tactile way.
After seeing the Chereau-directed production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead at the Metropolitan Opera in December 2009, I am ever more convinced that Chereau is one of our very greatest directors. Since the centenary Ring cycle at Bayreuth, Tristan und Isolde is the only Wagner work that Chereau has directed. Here's hoping he directs Parsifal sometime soon.
Quite coincidentally, I saw Catherine Zeta-Jones in Sondheim's A Little Night Music in New York, just two days before the Janacek opera. Like Dame Gwyneth, Zeta-Jones is Welsh and the actress's lovely, lilting voice, her physical beauty, and sensual stage presence made me think of my encounter with Dame Gwyneth at Bayreuth 30 years ago.
