On a green hill above Bayreuth, a small university town north of Nuremberg in Bavaria, devotees of the great German composer, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) gather each summer for a festive celebration of performances of his epic music-dramas: the now legendary Bayreuther Festspiele. This year marks the bicentennial of his birth and, therefore, a very special occasion indeed.
Now known almost exclusively for his large-scale operatic music-dramas, his towering achievement is the great tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) and six other works admitted to the Bayreuth canon. Performances of these works have been widely regarded in the Western music world for over a century as the acme of the Wagnerian experience in terms of acting, singing, direction and staging but above all for the music and the famed “Bayreuth Sound”. Being the bicentennial year, a new Ring had been commissioned and was the most anxiously anticipated event at this year’s Festival.
Seven works were staged this year: a new production of the four Ring operas; Lohengrin; Tannhaüser; and Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). Touted as a 21st Century Ring on the theme of “the curse of global oil” — the “gold” of our times — as the Festival got under way, uniformly adverse reviews in the international press started pouring in, proclaiming that a disaster, of no less than Wagnerian proportions, was occurring at this year’s festival.
A place of pilgrimage for many Wagnerites, the Festival in its early days even attracted royalty: the Kaiser Wilhelm I, Dom Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil and Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s chief patron, all attended the opening of the Festival in 1876, when the complete Ring was performed for the first time. The philosopher, Nietzsche as well as great composers like Liszt, Bruckner and Tchaikovsky were also present. Albert, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII of Great Britain, was a visitor at some of the first years of the Festival. In the 1930s, its most notorious attendee and unofficial patron was Adolf Hitler. To this day, its opening night (rather, afternoon) is the foremost red carpet event of German high culture, attended this year by the German President Angela Merkel herself (an ardent Wagnerite; she reportedly left for her holiday in the Tirol in disgust three fourths of the way through the Ring), almost her entire Cabinet, and other high government officials, as well as the lady-mayor of Bayreuth, who welcomed all the dignitaries.
An hour before curtain-up the square in front of the theatre is teeming with festival-goers, enjoying the afternoon sunshine and eating and drinking at the cafés and restaurants or strolling about in the vast park. Named after the “Master”, his Nazi-era bust, placed on a mighty stone column, presides (somewhat glumly, it has to be said) over the scene. No doubt that’s why red, blue and purple fibreglass, dwarf size statues of the Master striking an indeterminate pose were studded all over the area, presumably in an effort to bring some levity to the atmosphere. Some might think it tacky and not particularly respectful but it’s quite in keeping with current attitudes and artistic values at the Festival.
The majority of festival-goers turn out in formal evening dress; a substantial minority are less formal but still dressy. About 10 percent are casually dressed (not all smartly). At 15 minutes to curtain-up before each Act, a brass fanfare is played of a well-known snatch from the imminent performance and repeated twice for 10 minutes and three times for five minutes before the start, a wonderful ritual, which builds up anticipation for the evening’s performance. Uniformed ushers check you in to the theatre by running portable scanners over the bar codes on the tickets, a bit of high-tech in an otherwise uncompromisingly 19th century ambience. Photography is strictly forbidden inside the theatre but, predictably, with smartphone cameras at the ready, this stricture was observed more in the breach.
The Festspielhaus, financed largely out of public donations and from state coffers by ardent fan, “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was built to Wagner’s exacting specifications. He personally supervised its design and construction (1872-1876). Its distinctive features are a Greek style amphitheatre with two tiers of boxes at the rear and a gallery above them. Entry to the parterre (stalls) is only from either side: there is no central aisle. The theatre is constructed almost entirely of wood, which creates the amazing acoustics, likened to “sitting inside a cello”, with the expanded Wagnerian orchestra sounding exceptionally superb as a consequence. The unique feature of this theatre is the orchestral pit; covered by a hood so that it is invisible to the audience, this prevents any distraction from the music and stage action by the conductor and the musicians. Wagner apparently decreed that the Ring, in particular, should commence in total darkness to signify the beginning of the world but, disappointingly, this is not observed any more. The stage itself is vast, with an unrivalled depth.
The seats are famously and bone-achingly uncomfortable with meagrely padded bottoms (a special hardship for those likewise endowed) and a bare wooden backrest (not very supportive for anyone above average height). Legroom is also scant, and it can become rather warm and airless by the end of each Act, as there is (Heaven forbid!) no such thing as air-conditioning. But then, what is such suffering in the cause of high art? Mercifully, cushions are available with the cloakroom attendants, for a small “donation”, and so one’s back isn’t completely broken by the end of the evening.
In addition to a core of German-speaking attendees, who constitute the vast majority of the audience, there is a very visible Japanese and Korean contingent at the Festival, supplemented by British, American, French, Antipodean and an assortment of other European and South American nationalities. The Japanese and Korean presence is reinforced by a fair proportion of oriental faces and names, both in the chorus and the orchestra, indicating the strong support that performance and teaching of Western classical music receives in both those countries.
The creator of some of the most powerful and majestic as well as tender and heart-rending music ever written and some great dramatic poetry (uniquely, he wrote all his own librettos), Wagner “was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence on his century,” George Bernard Shaw; The Complete Wagnerite; London, 1904. Wagner is also now equally (and unfortunately) notorious for his strident and unabashed anti-Semitism. His adoption as the unofficial composer of the Nazi party, the support (financial and otherwise) for the Festival by the Führer and his clique and Hitler’s friendship (relationship?), with Winifred, Wagner’s English daughter-in-law, who ran the Festival in the 1930s, eventually led to her being awarded a probationary sentence and dethroned as Queen of Bayreuth by an anti-Nazi court at the end of the War. While there is very little evidence that his music was played at the death camps, at least three highly-regarded Bayreuth artists, all Jewish, met their ends there. Performing Wagner is, to this day, taboo in Israel, despite staunch championing by conductors like Zubin Mehta (conductor for life of the Israel Philharmonic) and Daniel Barenboim (himself a Jew), who rightly argue that the composer’s anti-Semitism does not detract a whit from the magnificence of his music. While condemning the Wagner family’s anti-Semitism and their relations with the Nazi state, several prominent commentators, including some Jewish, have expressed the same views this jubilee year. No doubt, mindful of the heavy burden of its past associations, an exhibition commemorating Jewish performers at the Festival and recording their fates at the hands of the Nazis, with their photographs, has been laid out extensively through the Park.
From 1951, when the Festival reopened after the War, his two grandsons, first Wieland and then Wolfgang, were successively in charge of the Festival, which reached its post-war apogee under Wieland, with radically new, minimalist stagings and a clutch of singers and conductors, now accorded legendary status in the Bayreuth pantheon. Wolfgang called in outside reinforcements and under his stewardship, Patrice Chereau’s 1976 centennial production with the French maestro Pierre Boulez in the pit and the Kupfer-Barenboim Ring of the early ’90s have now achieved cult status. After Wolfgang’s retirement in 2008, the enterprise has been in the hands of his two daughters: half-sisters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. Heavily supported (public funding constitutes 40pc of the Festival budget) by the German and Bavarian governments, the City of Bayreuth, various commercial firms and the Society of the Friends of the Bayreuth Festival (financial contributors who get preferential allocations of seats; members sport a small gold ‘ring’ in their buttonholes), some of these stakeholders will have a say when the Sisters’ contracts are up for renewal in 2015. It will be interesting to see if the catastrophe of the universally disliked and heavily booed bicentennial Ring will have any effect on the outcome or whether it will be business as usual.
Does the Bayreuth Festival continue to uphold the Master’s objectives in creating the Festspielhaus for special performances of his music-dramas and in particular, the Ring? Wagner declared to those present when laying the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus on his 60th birthday that his objective in creating the festival theatre was so that his art: “… might be presented pure and whole to those who manifest a genuine interest in my art, despite the fact that it has hitherto made its appeal to them only in a disfigured and adulterated form.”
With no previous experience of directing opera, the Sisters, somewhat irresponsibly, chose Frank Castorf, a deconstructionist and iconoclast par excellence. His theatre productions are notorious for interpolating stage classics with other texts and for nudity, graphic sex, violence and send-up slapstick. He had to be contractually restrained not to change any of the text or music of their great-grandfather’s masterpieces but in the end he had his way with them anyway and “disfigured” and “adulterated” the Master’s work in an altogether unprecedented way. To be fair, Castorf was the Sisters’ fifth choice as the director for the new Ring; four others declined what they may have regarded as a poisoned chalice! That in itself speaks volumes: clearly, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” if no one other than the absurdly egomaniacal Castorf was willing to direct a project as prestigious as the bicentennial Ring at Bayreuth without having any previous experience of staging opera. But what does it say about the Sisters if, knowing his infamous reputation as a latter-day Dadaist, as they must have, they still entrusted him with something so precious as their great grandfather’s crowning achievement to celebrate the bicentennial of his birth before an international audience? Is there material here for a latter-day Wagnerian family music drama?
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