After Dortmund, I spent more than a week in Bamberg, hovering around the Bamberg Symphony while they presented two Wagnerish concerts: a multimedia presentation titled Die Welt mit Wagner, produced by Clemens and Nick Prokop; and Der Ring ohne Worte, a version of Lorin Maazel's symphonic condensation of the Ring with supplemental Wagnerian texts recited by the great German actor Jens Harzer. In advance of the latter, which incorporated writings of Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Charlotte Teller, Alexander Blok, Elfriede Jelinek, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walther Rathenau, and Wagner himself, I presented my first and quite possibly my last lecture in German. I am deeply grateful to the Bamberg Symphony for having invited me to participate in these endeavors. I was able to make several side trips to see opera in neighboring cities; a report will be forthcoming in The New Yorker.
