Rheingold at the Met

The Depths. The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 2010.

An excerpt:

The chief glory of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Rheingold"—the first installment of a multi-year enactment of the "Ring"—is Eric Owens's performance as Alberich, which announces the emergence of a major Wagner singer. I mention Owens ahead of the director, Robert Lepage, because in this age of director-dominated opera it's good to focus first on the singers, and because Owens's portrayal
is so richly layered that it may become part of the history of the opera. The last time I was so transfixed by a Wagner performance was in 1999, when René Pape, the charismatic German bass, sang King Marke in "Tristan und Isolde" and took over the opera midstream. Owens, similarly, assumed command of an uneven "Rheingold": the opera became, in essence, the story of his character.

By the way, Wagner made another appearance yesterday on the op-ed pages of the New York Times: the Rheingold / Facebook analogy that I noted last week also struck Maureen Dowd.