Anthony Ernst, exceptional presenter

Anthony Ernst was a good speaker when I saw him 10 years ago but he has become an exceptional speaker since then.  This weekend he spent two days presenting his ideas about Wagner's Ring Cycle to a gathering of 150 Sydney music lovers and at the end he got a well-deserved standing ovation.

Anthony Ernst at the Sydney Weekend workshop.

He is not only a good speaker (he spoke for one and a half days without notes), he is a thinker and a lateral thinker at that. His wide musical experience (he currently works with the Strasbourg Orchestra) enables him to make connections in the music that elude many and it certainly also helps that he started his career as a student of voice.


I had always thought of the Ring Cycle as a story about the demise of the aristocracy, which it is at one level, but it is also a story about the rape of the environment and how we can rescue our world. This is the story at a deeper level which I had only recently begum to appreciate.

Anthony started by taking us on a historical journey through the time from when Wagner was 20 up to the time when he started writing the Ring Cycle when he was 40 years old;  from bucolic landscapes to the industrial revolution, a change that deeply affected Wagner.  It is a change that is still working through the system today which makes the Ring Cycle as pertinent today as it was in his century, perhaps even more so.

Not many operas address current issues and present a philosophy for dealing with them.