Dress rehearsal

We got through the dress rehearsal. Die Walküre is not quite as tight as Das Rheingold. A greater part of the set design has emerged at the last moment and parts of the lighting aren’t quite in place yet. But all things considered it went well. The first act was a bit shaky: Partly because Eva Johansson hasn’t had a single rehearsal on “the field of poppies”, and partly because the spotlight, which illuminates “the field” with moonlight had a wrong “shutter” and therefore lit up and dimmed too fast.

But the second act went just fine. Randi and Christian were both in good shape, and the third act was really breathtaking. Irene, Eva and James were fantastic in the third act.

In the final scene the pigeon flew into the prompter's box - and our poor prompter Karen is terribly afraid of birds. She has often talked about the risk of the pigeon flying into her box, but we have always made a joke of it telling her: What’s the chance of this happening? But it happened. As a result she screamed out loudly at the most emotional part of the scene. Everybody – besides Karen - laughed a lot. She was pretty shocked. But it REALLY WAS a funny experience…

This is really a hard week. There is work to be done every single day and every night. Well, from 8 a.m. tomorrow there will be meetings, so off to bed I go. We got a good start today with the introduction and the first rehearsals for Götterdämmerung. Really promising. Lovely to get started with some new material.