Eyes and Ears on Budapest

„All views on this blog represent the opinions of the author, and not Papageno.hu. Alexandra Ivanoff is an American music journalist who has degrees and musical training from the Eastman School of Music (NY) and Yale University (CT). She has contributed to the New York Times, Bachtrack.com, Hungarytoday.hu, the English edition of TimeOutIstanbul, and was a music and art journalist for seven years for Today’s Zaman in Istanbul. Ms. Ivanoff is grateful to Papageno for hosting this column.”

Not long ago, I found a little pink rosebud sitting in a small sealed glass container in a Budapest antique store. I presumed it was designed to be hanging on a necklace. I thought, why should I wear something that was crudely extracted from its natural habitat, put into an airless prison, and probably decaying?

During the mid-June “Ring of the Nibelungen” produced in Müpa Budapest’s Wagner Days Festival, this visceral reaction phenomenon happened to me repeatedly throughout my four nights of attending this masterpiece of musical mythology.