The Vargas Blog

The New York Film Festival opened on Thursday (likely as a result of Yom Kippur) instead of the usual Friday night with Richard Linklater...

Ask anyone who grew up in the late 1970s about the play Gemini , or its author Albert Innaurato , and they might not remember anything about...

Norma , Vincenzo Bellini ’s great bel canto opera has opened the Metropolitan Opera season only three times. I was there at the 1981 open...

Author Judith Cabaud will be at Barnes & Noble (33 East 17th Street, New York City) to sign her new book Mathilde Wesendonck, Isolde...

Whether or not you read German, the book to get this year if you are a fan of the works of Richard Wagner is Wieland Wagner, Revolutionär...

On Monday night the Metropolitan Opera opens with a new production of Norma , by Vincenzo Bellini .  The new production will be staged by...

And with the new name comes a new look for the old blog.  I hope you like it.  Do let me know.  I don't think I'm going back to th...

In a total fit of narcissism, I have changed the name of my blog from the "Wagner Blog" to " The Vargas Blog ." Why?  ...

Mother! (With an exclamation point, no less!) What can one say about a movie called Mother! that starts off with the word “baby” and go...

René Pape , who is singing the role of King Marke at Bayreuth this summer, stayed at my hotel.  He arrived a few hours before the perform...

Parsifal , Wagner 's last major work for the lyric theater, which premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus , was the opera presented fo...

During the immolation scene that ends Wagner 's great epic The Ring of the Nibelung , the dead body of Siegfried lies burning on a pyr...

The new production of Tristan und Isolde by Katharina Wagner premiered last year to great acclaim.  It is a production that has been out...

Of the four operas in Frank Castorf 's The Ring of the Nibelung , it's Siegfried that has drawn the anger of the audience the mos...

While walking around Bayreuth I ran into opera singer Johannes Martin Kränzle who plays Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger: the first...

After subjecting us to his low-down, white trash film noir with music by Richard Wagner which Frank Castorf calls his Das Rheingold , th...

After three years of listening to the boos overpower the cheers, together with a list of controversial reviews and awful word of mouth, I ...

There was no denying that Barrie Kosky 's new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was envisioned in part for the TV screen. ...

The new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that kicked off the 2017 Bayreuth Festival is the brainchild of Australian director...

At the beginning of The Mummy a supposed Egyptian proverb appears on the screen asserting that we never die, but assume new forms and kee...