The highlight of this year's Bayreuth Festival is the new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged by director Tankred Dorst, and conducted by Christian Thielemann. This new production of Das Rheingold, the prelude to Wagner's "Ring," premiered on July 26, 2006. In this program you will hear extended excerpts from this performance, which was broadcast live to the world on Radio Bavaria. The cast features baritone Falk Struckmann as Wotan.

Most critics will agree that the richest period of Wagnerian singing in The United States took place during the 1940's, and '50's at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. This podcast pays homage to the incredible talent of those historic decades, and features performances by Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel, Herbert Janssen, Ramón Vinay, Margaret Harshaw, Otto Edelmann and others. Their voices are heard in live excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, and Die Walküre.

The Bayreuth Festival will open this year on July 25 with a performance of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner's first "mature" opera. This production is a controversial modern, Freudian staging of the work that has been greeted with boos year after year since the first time that it premiered in 2003. In this podcast we will listen to excerpts from last year's production (whose cast is almost identical to this summer's scheduled artists) as well as classic and rare examples of past performances of this romantic opera.

In contrast to the first "complete" recording ever made at the Bayreuth Festival in 1928, which was the subject of our two previous podcasts, we now offer excerpts from the latest Tristan und Isolde from the Festspielhaus. This modern dress production premiered on July 25, 2005, and the action of the opera takes place aboard an ocean liner. This "Ship of Fools" production, as the European press dubbed it, stars soprano Nina Stemme and tenor Robert Dean Smith. The Bayreuth Orchestra is under the direction of Eiji Oue.

In our second and last podcast in this series celebrating the historic recording of the 1928 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, we take a look at the Act II Love Duet and the last act of this work. Although Act III was the most heavily edited portion of this entire recording, and most of the demanding music of this complex score is not heard on this recording, it is interesting to get a glimpse of what these memorable singers must have been like during the actual performances of the work during that summer's festival.

This podcast presents excerpts from the 1928 recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Technical difficulties during this period of recorded history prevented British Columbia Records from capturing the audio during an actual performance. Instead, the three acts were recorded between performances in an empty hall. Nonetheless, it is a landmark recording, even though there are extensive cuts throughout the work. The cast includes two of the great Wagnerians of the 1920's: Nanny Larsen-Todsen and Gunnar Graarud as the immortal lovers.

For many years, Italian was a second language to Wagner's operas, as scores of Italian singers performed the composer's music in their native tongue. Based on his Italian performances, tenor Giuseppe Borgatti became the first Italian heldentenor to be invited to perform at Bayreuth. Although, after the war, most Italian opera houses presented Wagner in German, great post-war artists such as Mario Del Monaco, Renata Tebaldi, and Maria Callas became the last generation to sing Wagner's music in Italian.

In the conclusion of this three-part series, we look back at the work of American baritone Clarence Whitehill, who excelled in Wagnerian roles around the world, and first performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 1904. The program also features the work of some of the best Wagner conductors on the scene today. We highlight musical excerpts from Donald Runnicles at the Vienna State Opera, Valery Gergiev at the MET, and Pierre Boulez leading the 2004 controversial staging of Parsifal from the enfant terrible of German art, Christoph Schlingensief.

The second part of the show brings us past the Bayreuth Nazi Era, and all the way up to the 1951 re-opening of the Festival after the war. This podcast features a recording from the early 1920's where the original Bayreuth Parsifal bells can be heard (they were destroyed during World War II), a recording of the Good Friday Spell conducted by Siegfried Wagner, the composer's son, and an excerpt from the landmark 1951 Wieland Wagner Bayreuth production of this opera, featuring baritone George London and tenor Wolfgang Windgassen.

In our premiere Podcast, we will explore the various ways in which Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, has been performed since it first saw the light of day at the Bayreuth Festival of 1882. In this program we will focus on the way that conductors have approached this musical score. It is our hope that you will enjoy the musical numbers that we have selected for you.  My sincere thanks goes out to my friend Keith Barnes who provided me with the rare musical excerpts that you will hear in this program.  This program could not have been done without his help. Enjoy the show!