Why they booed Domingo at Bayreuth

Why they booed Domingo at Bayreuth

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norman lebrecht

August 02, 2018

Opera audiences respect white hairs, on the whole.

When an artist has put in 50 or 60 years, he or she can expect at the very least a polite hearing and certainly not bad tomatoes.

So there’s a lot of head-scratching going on as to why Placido Domingo, 77, got so unmistakably and discourteously booed at the Bayreuth revival of Die Walküre.

One line is that is was simply a bad performance. Domingo, not the most flexible of part-time conductors, was simply inadequate to the demands of a complex Wagnerian score. He failed to shape the cntour of the piece or to give the singers the security they require. Bayreuth operagoers get to see the top conductors. It did not take them long to see that Domingo was not numbered among them.

Another theory is that the protest was intended for Katie Wagner who, knowing that her regular customers hate the Frank Castorf Ring, thought she could sell it to ignorant mugs with Domingo’s name as window-dressing.

Well, that worked well, didn’t it?

 

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