I found Stefan Herheim's staging of "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" totally incomprehensible.
Mr. Holten's staging of "Die Walküre," Act I, is typical of his humanizing approach to the characters.
"Those are complicated hoops," said Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer, whose new staging of "Die Meistersinger," above, had its premiere last summer.
Her proclivity for radical reinterpretation had been trumpeted to the world by her 2007 staging of "Die Meistersinger," whether one liked it or not — and most critics did not.
One might place the start of the festivities with the late Patrice Chéreau's stunning production of "Elektra" in Aix-en-Provence, France, in July, or even with the 2012 staging of "Die Frau ohne Schatten" (The Woman Without a Shadow) at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, a production that the Royal Opera House in London will present in March.
La Scala, which has broken from Italy's traditionally conservative production values, even yielded two finalists in this prestigious category: "Peter Grimes" in a bleak, emotionally raw production by Richard Jones, and Claus Guth's staging of "Die Frau ohne Schatten," in which the action is experienced as a hallucination of the Empress, depicted as a bedridden invalid.
Shock, rage, denial, grief, resignation, serene acceptance: textbook stages of dying, though not necessarily in textbook order.
When Ms. Halifax's father was in the final stages of dying, she told me, he was suffering deeply and the scene was hard to watch.
The story of a dying girl and the morbid young man who loves her, "Restless" rolls Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of dying into a single, dreamy state of feeling.
Stone bulls his way into our emotions with his usual force but with greater clarity, sanity, and measure than in the past, and he is better at violent spectacle and at capturing the stages of dying than any other director.
