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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012) |
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| In memoriam: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012), the remarkable baritone who gave 19th-century lieder their definitive 20th-century voice. (The Guardian, 5/18/12; The New York Times, 5/18/12; The New Yorker, 5/18/12; The New York Times, 5/19/12) | In memoriam: Günther Kaufmann (1947-2012). Actor, Fassbinder collaborator, self-described "weisser Neger vom Hasenbergl." (Deutsche Welle, 5/12/12; The Guardian, 5/15/12) | Like the protagonist of Andres Neuman's Traveler of the Century, you won't want to leave Wandernburg, a magical walled city somewhere between Saxony and Prussia. The novel's "subject is translation, or traveling. Or love. Or the 19th century. Or Germany. Or Spain. Or the 20th century. Or all of the above." (The Book, 3/8/12; The Independent, 4/20/12; Bookforum, 5/4/12) |
| Fortunately, a behind-the-scenes look at the Ring Cycle critics love to hate makes for fascinating cinema. Wagner's Dream chronicles the troubles and triumphs of Robert Lepage's current production at the Met. (j.b. spins, 5/2/12; Film-Forward, 5/7/12; The New York Times, 5/7/12) | Q: "So after all the hassles, the initial malfunctions, the $16 million price tag," and Met general manager Peter Gelb's "repeated proclamations that the Lepage 'Ring' is revolutionary, what are we left with?" A: "The most frustrating opera production" ever, says critic Anthony Tommasini. (The New York Times, 4/25/12; The Boston Globe, 5/6/12; The New Yorker, 5/7/12) | Götterdämmerung, the final installment in the Metropolitan Opera's new Ring cycle, ends not with a bang but a whimper. Director Robert Lepage's notorious set machine does not -- alas -- "collapse into a heap of smoldering planks at the end of the Immolation Scene, which would have been appropriate." (The New York Times, 1/28/12; The Wall Street Journal, 1/31/12; The New York Observer, 2/1/12) |
| In memoriam: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012), the remarkable baritone who gave 19th-century lieder their definitive 20th-century voice. (The Guardian, 5/18/12; The New York Times, 5/18/12; The New Yorker, 5/18/12; The New York Times, 5/19/12) | Kraftwerk "is the Warhol of pop -- apolitical, fond of mechanical reproduction, and almost creepily prescient." Sasha Frere-Jones explains how this pop band ended up in a museum. (The New Yorker, 4/30/12) | "Please don't call Jonas Kaufmann 'the German tenor': it raises too many preconceptions about a restricted repertory a German tenor should address, and Mr. Kaufmann wants to sing it all." (The New York Times, 4/20/12) |
| The life and work of Albrecht Dürer, "who brought the Renaissance over the Alps 500 years ago and used a brush made of guinea pig hair to paint his finest strokes," just got a little more intriguing. A large exhibition of his early works opens at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum on May 24. (Spiegel Online - International, 5/1/12) | Fiona MacCarthy is looking forward to "Bauhaus: Art as Life," the UK's largest Bauhaus exhibition in 40 years, opening at the Barbican on May 3. Here's why. (The Guardian, 4/27/12) | As if being the world's top-selling artist weren't enough, now Gerhard Richter is a film star, too -- "serious and purposeful but also unexpectedly good-natured." See the master and his squeegee in Corinna Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting. (The New York Times, 3/13/12; j.b. spins, 3/16/12; Toronto.com, 3/30/12; boston.com, 4/11/12) |
| Like the protagonist of Andres Neuman's Traveler of the Century, you won't want to leave Wandernburg, a magical walled city somewhere between Saxony and Prussia. The novel's "subject is translation, or traveling. Or love. Or the 19th century. Or Germany. Or Spain. Or the 20th century. Or all of the above." (The Book, 3/8/12; The Independent, 4/20/12; Bookforum, 5/4/12) | It seems there's already a new candidate for the worst book on Hitler ever written. "Forget about Hitler the political nihilist and despot, the warmonger and mass-murderer. What Munn gives us is a Hitler not worse (or better) than Simon Cowell of The X Factor fame." (The Guardian, 5/17/12) | Now that Herta Müller is a Nobel laureate, the English-language release of Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) is a literary event. And for good reason: "this is not just a good novel, it is a great one." (The New York Times, 4/9/12; Financial Times, 5/5/12; NPR, 5/8/12) |
| In memoriam: Günther Kaufmann (1947-2012). Actor, Fassbinder collaborator, self-described "weisser Neger vom Hasenbergl." (Deutsche Welle, 5/12/12; The Guardian, 5/15/12) | If you haven't seen Jean Renoir's 1937 antiwar masterpiece Grand Illusion, don't delay. "Rialto Pictures's release of a new restored print is perfectly timed, and not just for the film's anniversary. When European unity has again show how fragile it can be, and polarizing ideologies have fractured democracies everywhere, 'Grand Illusion' offers an unsentimental vision of common humanity. (The New York Times, 5/10/12; The New Yorker, 5/11/12; The New Yorker, 5/11/12) | As if being the world's top-selling artist weren't enough, now Gerhard Richter is a film star, too -- "serious and purposeful but also unexpectedly good-natured." See the master and his squeegee in Corinna Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting. (The New York Times, 3/13/12; j.b. spins, 3/16/12; Toronto.com, 3/30/12; boston.com, 4/11/12) |
| "British playwrights have tended to fall into two camps in the past 15 years: the type that succeeds on Broadway and the type that succeeds in Berlin." Guess which type Simon Stephens would like to be? (The Guardian, 5/9/12) | Kultur at ENO! Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera Jakob Lenz is based upon "a novella by one German Romantic playwright, Georg Büchner, about the mental breakdown of another." What's more, Rihm's virtuosic score recalls "Alban Berg's own Büchner-based masterpiece, Wozzeck." Onstage at the Hampstead Theatre through April 27. (Classical Iconolast, 4/18/12; The Independent, 4/18/12; The Telegraph, 4/18/12) | Cate Blanchett shines in the Sydney Theater Company's international touring production of Botho Strauss' Big and Small (Gross und Klein). At the Barbican, "there were four ovations from the audience, which I think we can safely wager is the first time for a while that London audience has felt that way about lengthy German surrealist drama." (The New York Times, 4/4/12; The Observer, 4/14/12; The Arts Desk, 4/15/12) |
| The Olympic torch relay got its start at the Berlin games of 1936. "Though propagandists portrayed the torch relay as ancient tradition stretching back to the original Greek competitions, the event was in fact a Nazi invention, one typical of the Reich's love of flashy ceremonies and historical allusions to old empires." (The Atlantic, 5/10/12; The Guardian, 5/16/12) | 67 years after the end of WWII, the German War Graves Commission still locates and reburies the bodies of 40,000 missing soldiers each year throughout Russia and eastern Europe. (Spiegel Online - International, 5/8/12) | "It was one of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years' War, but until recently there was no trace of those who died there. Now a mass grave is shedding light on the mysteries of the Battle of Lützen." (Spiegel Online - International, 4/27/12) |
| "Americans often like to think of themselves as pragmatists: If there is a bad crisis, you need to do what it takes to solve it. But the legacy of the postwar remaking of Germany was a deep commitment to legal rules -- that a crisis is precisely when you need to create a workable system." Harold James considers Germany's status as "the new European Überpower." (The New Republic, 5/15/12) | So Europe is dis-integrating, and Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union earned only 26% of the vote in Nordrhein-Westfalen. But on Twitter, @Queen_Europe still reigns. (Deutsche Welle, 5/14/12) | For a sardonic tour through the highlights of Germany's Fairy Tale Road, look no further. (Financial Times, 4/21/12) |