Bard Balances Wagner Fest With Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer

This year’s Bard Music Festival “will turn its attention to Richard Wagner, whose towering music dramas are among the most influential and popular works in the operatic literature” — but who, as festival co-artistic director Leon Botstein notes, “was arguably … the most persuasive and evil figure of the Western cultural pantheon.” So Bard is also presenting “major rarities by the two composers whom Wagner singled out for his most vicious shafts of anti-Semitism.”