Bernd Weikl, Swastikas
on Stage: Trends in the Productions of Richard Wagner’s Operas in German
Theaters Today, tr. Susan Salms-Moss (Berlin: Pro-Business, 2015). 221 pp.
€15.00. ISBN: 978-3-86460-305-1.
 |
A scene from Burkhard C. Kosminski’s Düsseldorf production of Tannhäuser. Photo: Hans Jörg Michel/ Deutsche Oper am Rhein |
The far-right
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has recently made cultural as well as
political headlines in Germany. In late 2015, it obtained a preliminary injunction
against Berlin’s Schaubühne using images of its members in Falk Richter’s FEAR.
The party’s 2016 manifesto for Saxony-Anhalt, where it came second in regional
elections, spoke of obliging museums, theatres and orchestras to offer a
‘positive’ view of their ‘homeland’. Cultural organisations should not only
stage more classical German drama but do so in productions that ‘inspire
identification with our country’. Cheered
on by Facebook’s ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’ (AMOP) page, which
chillingly declares that it is not a forum for discussion but for mobilisation
and conceals its mysterious administrators under the cloak of anonymity, this
Kulturkampf receives implicit support in this equally chilling book by Bernd
Weikl. Weikl certainly seeks no anonymity. Whether his politics in more general
terms resemble those of AfD and AMOP, I have no idea; I have no reason to think
so. However, his wish to prohibit Wagner stagings that do not conform to his
conception of their ‘pure form’ (a slightly odd, yet not entirely unreasonable,
translation of his original, ‘bloße Form’), urging criminal action against
those engaging in presumably ‘impure’ productions, marks a sad coda indeed to a
highly distinguished musical career. For
alas, if one of Weikl’s most celebrated Wagner roles were as Hans Sachs in
Wolfgang Wagner’s almost incredibly banal Bayreuth Meistersinger, he
seems to have taken Wolfgang the director as his model, rather than Wolfgang
the daring recruiter of external directors from Patrice Chéreau to Stefan
Herheim.
Weikl’s book is
presented – not uninterestingly, yet with hopeless lopsidedness – as a trial
of the facts. First, we have the evidence against Wagner, largely drawn from a
few journalists, few of them truly informed on the range and depth of
scholarship on Wagner and anti-Semitism. Weikl’s uncorroborated claim is that
the German productions of which he disapproves are a response to and
endorsement of claims of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s work. ‘Objectively speaking’,
he writes, ‘opera directors have been trying for years to effect a necessary
performance ban for Richard Wagner’s antisemitic music dramas, for their
directorial concepts and sets repeatedly point out the composer’s hatred of the
Jews and his link to the extermination mania of the Third Reich.’ Such,
apparently was the ‘objective’ intention of David Alden’s Munich Tannhäuser
and Wolfgang Mehring’s Nuremberg Meistersinger (pp. 82–3). Weikl gathers
all such stagings – essentially, anything more probing than his beloved Otto
Schenk – under the unhelpful umbrella-name of Regietheater, to which
Anglo-Saxon theatres are apparently immune. The reasoning for such lies in a
quick reference to the German Sonderweg, without naming it (p. 93) as
such, and an approving reference to the USA, praised for ‘private donors who enable
productions at the Metropolitan Opera that do not insert political scandals in Hänsel
und Gretel, and thus remain true to the works themselves’ (p. 97). Ah, the
works ‘themselves’. A whole generation or two of musicological, literary, other
questioning goes unmentioned, unconsidered; we return to the comfortable realm
of Werktreue, without so much as a mention of its ideological
provenance, assumptions and consequences. No matter: Weikl-Spengler knows that
our hallowed concept, allegedly ‘the recreation of a work that exists and is
cohesive, and thus has already been created’ (p. 79), has been jettisoned
during a period of ‘definite decadence in German theaters, […] already visible
in the practice of the arts during the decline of the Roman Empire’ (p. 80).
Susanne
Kopp-Sievers, of Saxony-Anhalt’s Museumsverband, responded to the AfD manifesto
in no uncertain terms; theirs was anti-pluralistic, frankly Nazi rhetoric. As
Kopp-Seivers asked, echoing, consciously or otherwise, one Richard Wagner:
‘Aber was ist deutsch?’ Various participants at the conference at which she
spoke interpreted the manifesto in terms of a wholesale rightist assault on the
German cultural sector and public subsidy. Like its
UKIP counterpart, the populist AfD seems not to prize consistency; whereas
other regional branches wish to eliminate public funding altogether, the
Saxon-Anhalt manifesto spoke of increasing cultural subsidy, albeit only to
approved, ‘positive’ causes. Goebbels, as we do not read in Weikl’s book,
wanted entertainment, Unterhaltung, rather than Wagnerian challenge. (Parsifal,
we may recall, was not performed at Bayreuth during the Second World War.) He
likewise wanted newspaper arts criticism to be factual, not critical;
discussion or even contemplation of ideas was not desirable. Indeed, he wanted,
onstage and off, precisely what is longed for by many 21st-century
‘conservatives’, aghast at our own Cultural Bolshevism.
Weikl has, credit
where credit is due, put his money where his mouth is. As he outlines in Part
V, he has taken ‘real legal steps against those responsible for the especially
onerous production of Tannhäuser in Düsseldorf’ (p. 99). He reproduces
documentation, with reference to the German criminal code, which he sent to the
public prosecutor in his ‘case’ that ‘on May 4 2013, the accused persons,
[Christoph] Meyer as General Director’ of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and
Burkhard C. ‘Kosminski as Stage Director, working together in conscious and
wilful collusion, produced Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, in which
various serious offences were committed concurrently through its performance’
(p. 100). A correspondence with the poor public prosecutor ensues.
‘Unfortunately, these efforts’, writes Weikl, non-ironic lovechild to Stalin
and Mary Whitehouse, ‘did not have any positive results. Similar steps by the
wider public would, of course, be more than welcome’ (p. 99).
In this
particular case, even Against Modern Opera Productions seems only to have
wanted the production discontinued, which, after a carefully orchestrated
campaign of online bullying, it was. Nevertheless, resort to legal methods,
civil and criminal, is persistently urged on its page too. Weikl and AMOP share
the trait of not even having seen a production, yet considering it entartet
on the basis of a few pictures of the designs and manufactured outrage from a
noisy section of the (alleged) first-night audience. Covent Garden-goers may
recall recent stagings of Rusalka and Guillaume Tell. But this
is, of course, a more serious matter. Because of Auschwitz, ‘the state
educational mandate must be adhered to and freedom of expression and freedom of
the press must have certain limitations’ (p. 11). Limitations, it seems, that
go so far as to prohibit performances of Tannhäuser one has not seen,
but which someone with whom one has made an online connection did not like.
Some might think we already stand not so very far from burning – and certainly
not in the modern sense – DVDs on the Bebelplatz/Opernplatz. Or, as Goebbels,
in his 1933 Feuerrede, one of his earliest acts as Propaganda Minister,
put it: 'German students: we have directed our actions
against the un-German spirit; consign everything un-German to the fire. Against
class struggle and materialism, for Volksgemeinschaft and idealistic living, I
consign to the fire the writings of Karl Marx and Kautsky. Against decadence
and moral decay […] I consign to the fire writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst
Glaeser, and Erich Kästner.'
The Staatsoper
Unter den Linden, on the western corner of that square, reopened in 1955 with a
performance of Die Meistersinger (as it had indeed also reopened in
1942, under Furtwängler). A fabled Scots fundamentalist response to Our Lord
having changed water into wine at Cana is: ‘Aye, but he shouldn’a hae.’ Our
celebrated Sachs seems to think, by contrast, that the East Berlin house should
have skipped straight to his final peroration, shorn entirely of context and
somehow thus registering as an act of anti-Nazism. Perhaps he should read Richard
J. Evans’s tale of the David Irving trial and consider the dangers of not doing
one’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung properly.
Doubtless Weikl sincerely believes the following, whatever it may mean, or may
have meant prior to translation: ‘Cultural edification, including a
differentiation of their [the audience’s] emotions, would be the basis for an
altruistic image of humanity, and thus best suited as a contraceptive against
new “beginnings”’ (p. 87). It seems, in context, to mean that ‘edification’ via
ultra-reactionary, Met-like stagings, enabling ultra-reactionary (or worse)
audiences to feel better about themselves are more likely to prevent a return
of Nazism than ‘seeing swastikas and the gassing of Jews on the stage, which
will more likely insult and anger them’ (p. 86). Perhaps, though, people need
to be insulted and angered; perhaps it is one of the tasks of art to do so; and
perhaps the censorship Weikl demands is more prophylactic than ‘contraceptive’.
Following a lengthy, almost unreadably tedious series of allegedly satirical
concepts for contemporary productions, we come to Weikl’s second, laudable
ambition: performance of Wagner’s dramas in the State of Israel. Alas, the idea
that we proceed to that via fulfilment of his principal, prohibitive ambition
straightforwardly beggars belief.
Clichés
concerning how much has been written on Wagner may or may not be true; one can
safely say, however, that no composer has had such a high quantity of arrant
nonsense – and sometimes worse than mere nonsense – published concerning him.
Weikl is not one in any sense to stand in the way of tradition. I was no fan of
Katharina Wagner’s Meistersinger when I saw it at Bayreuth. While
finding many of the underlying ideas interesting, their execution on stage
seemed to me so inept as to undo any good that might have been done – save,
perhaps for the old, arguably still-necessary, chestnut of épater les
bourgeois. At least Katharina, though, in succeeding her father’s – and
Weikl’s – production, acknowledged onstage that Wagner had been and could be
again what Thomas Mann ironically yet truthfully called a Kulturbolshewist;
in that, her staging offered hope for Wagner and for Bayreuth. The man who once
sang Sachs in houses across the world, telling us that the art of old German
masters would flourish, no matter what the political situation, now places
himself firmly in the activistic camp of Mann’s Munich
assailants. Or, as they
now style themselves online, ‘Gegen Regietheater in der Oper’.
(This review was first published in
The Wagner Journal, 10/2 (2016), 78-82. Please click
here for subscription details.)
