Erling E. Guldbrandsen Reviews

Reviews from the Bayreuth Festival

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Erling E. Guldbrandsen

Erling E. Guldbrandsen is professor at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo since 2004. He has published widely on Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, J.S. Bach, Pierre Boulez and musical modernism, on Norwegian opera after Wagner, and on music history, contemporary music, aesthetics and performance studies.

His most recent publication on Wagner is “Staging the King. Readings of Wagner’s Tristan” (in Studia Musicologica Norvegica 41, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 2015).

His next book, Transformations of Musical Modernism, which he is co-editing with prof. Julian Johnson at the University of London, Royal Holloway, is forthcoming on Cambridge University Press in 2015. Guldbrandsen also works as a music critic (for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. and for the weekly paper, Morgenbladet) and he has covered the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth since the 1990s.

For his recension of Lohengrin (performed at the Norwegian national opera in March 2015) he received the award, “Critique of the year”.

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One of the finest monuments in sound ever to have been raised to the everlasting glory of music. (Claude Debussy on Parsifal)

"The thing about Wagner is that there can be no true success in any production of his operas, only degrees of failure. There is so much in these bloody pieces, all you can do is try to live up to them." (Keith Warner, The Guardian)

"I have never come across an audience with so much hatred, so much anger, such a thirst for revenge. They take everything personally. It makes you a little bit scared, and it's really quite terrifying." (Lance Ryan on the audiences at Bayreuth)

"People sometimes complain that Wagner operas are too long, that they get stiff and sore about 10.30 because they have rushed in to hear one of his works straight from work and are not properly prepared for listening to his music. The audience, as much as the artists, must be prepared for a performance."
(Benjamin Britten to Alan Blyth, Gramophone)

"I was bowled over. It was the year after Wieland Wagner had died; to be able to see his productions was a total knock-out. These bare stagings, where everything was done with lighting. The light changed with the music, and the shadows and patterns seemed as archetypal as the music itself. Nobody had done that on the stage before. I thought it was extraordinary and wonderful."
(Patrick Carnegy to The Guardian)

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