ABSTRACT
Richard Wagner's emergence as a focal point for operatic innovation reflects his difficult position in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The theatrical innovations of Walter Felsenstein and Bertolt Brecht in East Berlin in the 1950s inspired a generation of opera directors whose unconventional approaches had implications far beyond the narrow confines of the GDR's borders. Arguably more influential was the sustained and penetrating drive to rethink opera performance in the German Democratic Republic during the second half of the twentieth century. Joachim Herz's Leipzig staging of the Ring and Ruth Berghaus's Frankfurt Ring. Close contemporaries– both were born in Dresden, Herz in 1924 and Berghaus in 1927– these directors embodied distinct spheres of East German theatre. The disjunctions created by the juxtaposition of artificeand realism were central to Herz's fundamental ethos of opera production. While Herz endeavoured to decode Wagner's nineteenth-century signs for a contemporary audience, Berghaus was less concerned with interpreting Wagner's authorial intent, conscious or otherwise.
