The Metropolitan Opera is currently presenting Wagner's Ring, and the return of the Robert Lapage controversial production. Last Saturday I attended...

It’s that time of the year, when that midsummer classic the Bayreuth Festival begins once again. I will be attending this yearly ritual, and ahead of ...

In this podcast, we explore the link between the musical score of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, written by composer Bernard Herrmann, and th...

When Parsifal is playing in town at the Metropolitan Opera it is a not-to-be-missed event.  Luckily this year, I get to see it twice.  My first visit ...

A guidebook to the city of Bayreuth, written at the turn of the century, got me thinking: I wonder what a trip to Bayreuth would have been like in tho...

The Christmas season does not usually bring to mind the music of Richard Wagner, but it should, for on Christmas morning, in the year 1870, Cosima, th...

The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer) is Richard Wagner’s answer to Halloween.  The story of a ghostly sea captain who is doomed to sail the s...

My favorite moment in the Ring of the Nibelung occurs in the second act of Die Walküre.  Brünnhilde visits Siegmund to tell him that he will die in ba...

My journey to Bayreuth this summer was filled with so many great performers by a host of very talented singing actors.  Thinking about the month of Au...

After so many years of doing these podcasts I realized that I had never done a program dedicated exclusively to one of my favorite Wagner operas, Tann...