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Götterdämmerung on June 10 and 17

In the frame of the Riga Opera Festival the Latvian National Opera invites to visit performances of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung on June 10 and 17.

This final part of Richard Wagner’s monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen will be conducted by the rising star in the classical music world Joana Mallwitz (June 10) and much-praised master of Wagner’s music Cornelius Meister (June 17), regularly conducting at the leading opera companies of Europe and the States, including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Paris, Vienna, Copenhagen, and San Francisco. The performances will be cast with internationally known Wagner singers, among them the Swedish tenor Lars Cleveman (greeted with rave reviews at the opera houses in London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bayreuth), the British soprano Catherine Foster (performing regularly in Hamburg, Helsinki, Budapest, Weimar), and the charismatic Swedish baritone Marcus Jupither (singing in Oslo, Stockholm, Salzburg, Paris).

In Götterdämmerung, the work's essential conflict between the longing for love and the greed for power - which Wagner developed and deepened during the course of the Ring's previous operas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried - comes to a shattering culmination. The hero Siegfried unknowingly betrays his bride Brünnhilde. She swears vengeance - and sets off a chain of tragic events that brings the world to an end. Götterdämmerung concludes the Latvian National Opera's ambitious project to present Wagner's monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen for the first time in over one hundred years in Riga. In 2013, the 200th anniversary of the composer's birthday, we will perform the complete cycle.

It is unclear what is harder: to stage this five-hour, vocal-symphonic machinery or to understand and express the characters of this tangled and deep plot. Riga’s production succeeds with both. The LNO staging is full of tension and humour.

Dmitrij Tsilikin, Vedemosti




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