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Watch Now, Full Documentary: The Colón Ring: Wagner in Buenos Aires

Written By The Wagnerian on Sunday 14 February 2021 | 4:31:00 pm

It was an ambitious project: staging Richard Wagner's powerful music drama, the Ring Cycle, in a single day. To honor Richard Wagner's 200th birthday in 2012, Latin America's famous opera house, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, hosted this one-of-a-kind production with abridged versions of the individual operas cut down to seven hours. 

The documentary film "The Colón Ring - Wagner in Buenos Aires," directed by Hans Christoph von Bock, follows each step of this challenging project. Those steps include considerable behind-the-scenes drama - itself worthy of a Wagnerian opera - that accompanied the production. Original director Katharina Wagner quit, as well as the original conductor and some of the cast, and it looked as if the production was doomed. But the film shows how the new director, Valentina Carrasco, got things back on track, allowing Wagner's vision of "The Ring of the Nibelung" to emerge as a Gesamtkunstwerk and an all-encompassing live theatre experience.