FREDRIC JAMESON
REGIEOPER, OR EUROTRASH?
The opening of a new Danish production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser would not be the occasion for extended theoretical comment were it not for a world-wide Wagner revival, in which the sheer number of new stagings of Wagnerian music dramas has overtaken, we are told, the revivals of virtually all now classic 20th-century (or ‘modern’) operas. Perhaps the career of its director, Kasper Bech Holten, director of the Royal Danish Opera at the age of 27 and soon to join the new cultural globalization of internationally mobile conductors, virtuosi, multi-lingual actors and soccer players, can add an additional perspective to what looks like the development of a new historical phenomenon, which neither Wagner’s genius nor Holten’s talent are sufficient to explain.
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