When guest editing The Wagner Journal this time last year, I contributed a brief
editorial, entitled ‘Wagner Rescued from the Opera House?’ I tried to suggest
the incompatibility, as recognised by Wagner and his more discerning
interpreters and successors, between Wagner’s works and the everyday life of a
typical opera house. As Pierre Boulez, whilst at work on the Ring at Bayreuth, put it: ‘Opera houses
are often rather like cafés where, if you sit near enough to the counter, you
can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre!
And one Rigoletto!”’ What was needed,
Boulez noted approvingly, ‘was an entirely new musical and theatrical
structure, and it was this that he [Wagner] gradually created’. Whilst
deliberately leaving matters open-ended, I was hinting at the need for more
opera houses to become like Bayreuth, or rather to consider a modern version of
Wagner’s principles. Interestingly, however, some readers thought I was urging
a transfer of Wagner performances from opera house to concert hall. Indeed, upon
considering the matter further, I realised the uncomfortable truth that my two
greatest live Ring performances had
been, if not quite in ‘concert’, minimally staged. It is surely indicative that
I immediately think of them with reference to their conductors, Bernard Haitink
and Daniel Barenboim, and not, as now tends to be the case with theatrical
performances, to their stage directors.
I returned to such thoughts several times during
this year’s Bayreuth Ring. A
more fundamental disquiet than Frank Castorf’s manifold dramaturgical
inconsistencies arose. In a number of ways, Bayreuth actually seems – without,
admittedly, having taken the step of expanding its repertoire – to have
travelled in the opposite direction, towards other houses. That is certainly
not all to be regretted. Progress has been made with respect to accessibility,
wresting a good number of tickets from the Fafner-like clutches of the various
Wagner Societies, so as to enable attendance from something a little, if only a
little, more akin to the broader public the revolutionary Wagner always
desired, even demanded, even though free admission remains elusive. But musical
values seem, with the magnificent exception of Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal, to have slipped further and
further down the pecking order. Once, Bayreuth audiences would have expected
respective roles’ greatest exponents to be largely present on the Green Hill.
Now much of the cast, with some highly distinguished exceptions, would be well
enough received in a second-ranking house, whilst falling considerably short of
what Barenboim assembled for his Proms performances.
A more fundamental problem with respect to this
particular Ring, however, was the
apparent total lack of interest Castorf showed in the work as a music drama. At his best, and there are
some good ideas amongst the debris, Castorf seems to have treated Wagner’s poem
alone as the ‘text’. I do not propose a Debussyan ‘calling-card’ parody of
Wagner’s method, making visual reference to an object every time its leitmotif
appears, although Wagner’s particular brand of realism may sometimes invite such
practice. Yet,
if one remains wilfully deaf to the voice of Wagner’s orchestra as Greek
chorus, how can one possibly emerge with anything other than a partial
understanding of Wagner’s drama and its countless possibilities and implications?
How could one make any sense whatsoever – in one’s own mind, let alone on stage
– of the Funeral March, the close of the Immolation Scene, or any of those
numerous cases when the music intensifies, questions, even contradicts, the
poem, reminds us of something, crucial to its understanding, which happened
several hours previously or suggests something which will happen several hours
hence? Just as Aleksander Denić’s set
designs – magnificent, considered simply as sculptures – often seemed reduced
to backdrops, so was the score reduced at best to the level of a soundtrack and,
one suspected, a tiresome one at that for Castorf. He would surely have been
happier, and the results preferable, had he followed his usual practice of
cutting, interspersing other texts, and so forth, maybe presenting a new Ring in spoken form, at a venue such as
the Berlin Volksbühne. Ironically, those passages in which he seemed to have
lost all directorial interest – for instance large, often ‘Romantic’, swathes
of Die Walküre – resembled the ‘bad
old days’ of ‘park and bark’, highlighting from the other side the dangers of
letting one musico-dramatic element predominate – especially when, as in
Wotan’s seemingly interminable monologue, the singing proved less than convincing.
By contrast, Patrice Chéreau, although similarly
new to opera, strove to learn as much as he could about score and meaning(s)
from Boulez. The increasing strength of their partnership still asserts itself,
in one of the few opera DVDs to which I regularly return. In the year of their
first revival, Chéreau, writing of the end of the Immolation Scene, expressed
his desire:
that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a
crevice uttering oracles – the Funeral March and the concluding redemption
motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but
like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in
which one might interpret its message. […] Should one not hear it with mistrust
and anxiety?
To enlist the services of a director who might
think in such terms should not be the least priority for Bayreuth, or any other
house, when forging a new Ring.
(This piece originally appeared in The Wagner Journal (8/3, November 2014), alongside a review of the cycle by Tash Siddiqui and another opinion piece by Peter Bloom. My full reviews of the Castorf 'Ring' may be found here, here, here, and here.)
