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Met Live season continues: Wagner’s ‘Die Fliegende Hollander’

Submitted Photo Live at the Met continues its 2019-20 season at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House on Saturday at 1 p.m., with Richard Wagner’s Die Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman).

Live at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera’s award-winning series of live, high definition (HD) opera transmissions to theaters around the world, continues its 2019-20 season at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House Performing Arts Center on Saturday, March 14, at 1 p.m., with Richard Wagner’s Die Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman).

Evgeny Nikitin is the mysterious seafarer searching for salvation in this compelling production. Director Francois Girard, whose mesmerizing staging of Parsifal recently wowed Met audiences, returns to stage Wagner’s eerie early masterwork. Valery Gergiev conducts.

With sweeping sets by John Macfarlane, Girard’s new production turns the Met stage into a rich, layered tableau reminiscent of a vast oil painting. The gifted German soprano Anja Kampe, in her Met debut, is the devoted Senta, whose selfless love is what the Dutchman seeks, with bass Franz-Josef Selig as her father, Daland, and tenor Sergey Skorokhodov as her deserted former lover, Erik.

Wagner was the controversial creator of music-drama masterpieces that stand at the center of today’s operatic repertory. An artistic revolutionary who reimagined every supposition about theater, Wagner insisted that words and music were equals in his works. This approach led to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” combining music, poetry, architecture, painting, and other disciplines, a notion that has had an impact on creative fields far beyond opera.

The opera runs two hours, 25 minutes with no intermission.

Live at the Met telecasts are now shown in more than 2,000 theaters in 73 countries across six continents, making the Met the only arts institution with an ongoing global art series of this scale. The Met was the first arts company to experiment with this type of broadcast, beginning on a modest scale in 2006 and growing every season since then, with more than 27 million tickets sold to date.

Met Opera stars serve as hosts for the series, conducting live interviews with cast members, crew and production teams, and introducing the popular behind-the-scenes features; altogether, the worldwide audience is given an unprecedented look at what goes into the staging of an opera at one of the world’s great houses.

Individual tickets to each of the operas in the season are $20, ($18 Opera House members, $10 students). A flexible subscription of eight tickets which can be used however you want — one at a time to eight different operas, all at once for eight people, or anything in between — is available for $142. Tickets may be purchased in person at the Opera House Box Office or by phone at 716-679-1891, Tuesday-Friday, 1-5 p.m. Tickets may be purchased online anytime at www.fredopera.org.

The Live at the Met Series is underwritten with support from Daniel S. Kaufman and Timothy W. Beaver.

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House Performing Arts Center is a member-supported not-for-profit performing arts center located in Village Hall in downtown Fredonia. For a complete schedule of events, visit www.fredopera.org.

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