(This essay was first published in The Wagner Journal, 11/2, (2017), pp.44-53, and is based on a paper I gave at a Freud Museum conference, 'Wagner's Parsifal and the Challenge to Psychoanalysis')
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| Images from Dmitri Tcherniakov's Staatsoper Berlin staging: Ruth Walz Parsifal (Andreas Schager) and the Flowermaidens |
Parsifal, like all of Wagner’s dramas, is
particularly revealing at the intersection of authorial intention and latent
content. What is revealed and what is repressed? Dreams were certainly of great
importance to Wagner, perhaps most famously in his claim that the Prelude to Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring
dramas, had come to him in ‘a kind of somnambulistic state […] the feeling of
being immersed in rapidly flowing water’, and indeed in the dramatic material
of a number of his works. Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg is explicitly concerned with the formation of an
artwork initially revealed in a dream world. That offers an interesting way to
consider stagings of his works too, and their claims to fidelity or otherwise
at a textual or allegedly ‘deeper’ level. I shall consider the claim of the
work ‘itself’ to stand apart from the operatic repertoire as a Bühnenweihfestspiel (stage festival
consecration play) to be confined to his artistic temple at Bayreuth. However,
my principal focus will be upon two particular productions: those of Stefan
Herheim (Bayreuth, 2008–12) and of Dmitri Tcherniakov (Berlin, 2015–). A
broader, implicit question would be: how do directors and performers navigate
the historical, social, cultural and psychological distances and conflicts
between Wagner’s intentions, his ability and inability to fulfil and perhaps
even to transcend those intentions, and the needs of contemporary theatres and
audiences? What is gained and what is lost? What, again, is revealed and what
is repressed?
Herheim’s production opens with
Parsifal at the time of its first,
Bayreuth staging, in 1882. It proceeds to tell a history that leads to
somewhere approaching the present day, even turning a mirror upon the audience
at one point, a moment with considerably greater theatrical power than a mere
retelling might suggest. The audience is not simply accused, deservedly or
otherwise; it is also reminded that it belongs to a drama that remains
unfinished, whatever Wagner’s Hegelian aspirations towards totality, and that
it, the audience, interprets, shapes, even writes the history suggested. Far
from having reached a Fukuyama-like ‘end of history’ – how hollow such claims
have seemed ever since 1989, but certainly since the UK’s decision to leave the
EU[1]
– we might all have become historians, or indeed analysts: a challenge already
to the ‘gathered congregation’ of Bayreuth orthodoxy, whether that be Wagner’s
own or not.[2]
That position stands superficially close, perhaps, to post-modernism, yet,
given the persistence of the ‘work concept’, that is, in this case, of drama
existing in the work ‘itself’ and not just or even principally in its
realisation and/or interpretation, it perhaps remains more grounded in some
form of object, some form of reality, than critics of history, the musical work
and the connections between them, might wish. Intelligent productions will
strengthen the work, and vice versa, to which we should also add intelligent
audiences, ready to think, to be challenged; this is quite the opposite of a zero-sum
game. Wagner, though he might sometimes come close to positing a false
immediacy of audience response, was no proponent of art as non-reflective,
non-reflexive, Rossini-like entertainment; he had no desire to be a mere
purveyor of the scenic and vocal diversions that opponents of interpretative
stage direction more often than not wish to see (and hear) ritually enacted.
‘Our theatrical public’, he complained in ‘Opera and Drama’, ‘has no need for
the artwork; it desires diversion from the stage, […] well-crafted details,
rather than the necessity of artistic unity.’[3]
The enemy here was miniaturism, the inability to construct a greater whole,
which can be extended to all aspects of Wagnerian music drama, whether in
theory or in practice – and, in his essay, ‘On Conducting’, lavishly praised by
conductors from Furtwängler to Boulez, most certainly was.[4]
Likewise in Parsifal. An attempt,
even if forlorn, to achieve some form of unity of vision remained the
modernistic goal.
Let us, though, keep our sights
upon Herheim’s Parsifal for the
moment. That matter of conducting is not irrelevant here, for whereas some
aspects of individual vocal performance may ultimately prove to be of ephemeral
interest, the question of coherence between ‘music’ and ‘drama’, itself a false
antithesis, is avowedly not. Under the musical leadership of Daniele Gatti, the
‘work’ strained towards that unity which in some sense it must present. Gatti’s
reading proved controversial, some writers finding it lethargic and uninspired.
That, however, was not Herheim’s opinion. In a fascinating interview, he
averred that, whilst he admitted to retaining reservations concerning some
choices of tempi – consider quite how unusual it is for a stage director even
to think about such matters – the experience of working together with Gatti had
been fruitful for both and had made the collaboration far more than the sum of
its parts:
When I heard him conducting his first Parsifal in Rome (concert performance), I was somewhat surprised and startled: he was even slower than Toscanini – the first act alone lasted for well over two hours. Daniele was equally suspicious of my ideas, and for a while I was afraid that our different approaches wouldn’t be productive and that the collaboration wouldn’t work. But during the rehearsals in Bayreuth, we immediately began to communicate. Daniele saw that I felt the musical gestures totally intuitively, and that my direction corresponded with his interpretation of the score. And during the rehearsal process, I learned to understand his tempo choices and musical perspectives much better. Our collaboration turned out to be very productive, creative and we have great respect for each other.[5]
Herheim, it should be added,
began his career as a cellist, and is a more unusual example than one might
expect, or at least desire, of a director who reads the score. The issue of staging
the Prelude to the first act was resolved more amicably, more fruitfully, than
it would be with Daniel Barenboim in Lohengrin.
Initially Gatti was sceptical, concerned that the audience might be distracted
from the music. But Herheim made the excellent point in the interview cited
above that that would suggest that once the curtain rose, the audience need no
longer concern itself with the music, continuing, ‘I’m not saying that in
principle the Prelude should always be staged. But if you have good reasons to
portray the music in the prelude, it’s just the way that it’s done that you can
argue against. Gatti acknowledged this and was excited about the symbiosis the
staging entered into with the music.’[6]
Crucially, that symbiosis
enabled, even provoked, the emergence of an idea of the score as redeemer,
contra the superficial FAZ criticism
cited above. It was subtle rather than thrust in one’s face, unlike the
provocative second-act Nazi imagery, which I shall address later. Yet, for that
reason, and it might well take more than one encounter fully to appreciate
this, Herheim’s candidate for an answer to Wagner’s riddle of ‘Redemption to
the Redeemer’ – that is, the music, in all its contradictions as well as all
its emotional and psychological immediacy – emerged all the more convincingly.
Again, that was a possibility rather than a definitive ‘solution’, but
successful dramas, like successful performances, do not trade in the latter.
The tale of German history, of Parsifal
as a work developing through that history, could thereby be seen and heard as
requiring and receiving some form of transcendental, or at least beneficial,
intervention, not so much ‘grace’, but something more immanent, arising from
within, the attempted negation of the litany of negative dialectics to which
history and work have been subjected. There was no false mediated unity in which
h to rejoice or rather to wallow. Ritual is in Parsifal and through Parsifal
dynamically, dialectically challenged from within as well as from without; that
indeed is the very stuff of Wagner’s drama.
For Parsifal was intended to be and remains different. Wagner’s various
attempts to avoid the pejorative – to him – ‘opera’ as a description of his
later works may nowadays elicit as much scepticism as blind adoration, though
in simply calling Tristan und Isolde
‘drama’ (Handlung), he certainly
captured a quality of that singular work. However, it would take a Wagnerian of
extreme, unhealthy devotion not to raise at least a hint of a smile at the
cumbersome Bühnenweihfestspiel. And
what that term might mean has brought all manner of consequences for the work’s
reception, even indeed, given the determination of Cosima and other Bayreuth
loyalists that it should remain confined to the stage it allegedly consecrated,
for the possibility of staging it at all. The surrounding aura of sanctity may
seem to many repellent (‘an unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as
religion and the theatre as a temple’ – Stravinsky)[7],
ridiculous (Debussy, albeit continuing to honour the score alone as ‘one of the
loveliest monuments ever raised to the serene glory of music’)[8],
or both, as in Nietzsche’s case. Moreover, the claim that Parsifal is in any
straightforward sense a ‘Christian work’, as opposed to a work that treats,
amongst other things, Christianity, would find few takers today. Even if the
end of the first act were an invitation to receive Holy Communion, the Grail Knights’
words – ‘Partake of the bread, valiantly transform it into corporeal strength and
power’ – suggest a church or theology whose heterodoxy extended beyond the merely
Gnostic. Deeds as well as secret knowledge transgress; indeed, the boundary between
the two for Wagner, as an inheritor to Fichte’s and Young Hegelianism’s Philosophie der Tat (philosophy of the
act) often comes close to dissolution.[9]
That said, this tale of a ‘pure
fool’, so ignorant that he knows neither whence he has come, nor even his name,
who, through the offices of divine grace rather than by his own deeds,
enlightened through compassion (Schopenhauer’s Mitleid, ‘suffering with’), rejuvenates a dying community, remains
quite different from the operatic essays of any of Wagner’s contemporaries and
many of his successors. Parsifal resists assimilation to the opera house; it is
out of place amongst champagne, canapés and diva-worshippers. Wagner wrote to
Ludwig II that he wished to protect it from ‘a common operatic career’.[10]
Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic as well as
compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly wrote of
Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are […] like cafés where […]
you can hear waiters calling out their orders: ‘One Carmen! And one Walküre!
And one Rigoletto!’[11]
Wagner’s works declare their incompatibility with existing theatrical
conventions and norms – even today, arguably still more so. And of those works,
Parsifal remains the ultimate.
The signal strength of Herheim’s production is that it engages
with these problems: with the fraught associations, both with Bayreuth – which,
for better and for worse, is also quite different from anywhere else –
and with broader historical themes, associations the work has gathered from at
least the time of its premiere in 1882. So intensely dialectical and
multi-layered is Herheim’s direction that we tread successfully a tightrope
between presentation of his guiding Konzept – the history of Parsifal
as a work and of the world in which it has developed from the time of its
first performance to that of its most recent – and recounting of the immanent story
of Parsifal. Two stories run not so much in parallel as with mutual
influence, yet without inflicting harm upon each other and with no sense of
contrivance.
In the first act, we therefore witness the early days of
post-Wagner Wahnfried, the sickly, incestuous goings-on of an impeccably haut
bourgeois family and its nursery (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks comes
to mind), in the era of an oft-present Imperial Eagle. As Christianity enters
an especially peculiar phase, dreams and childhood come to the fore, likewise
the psychopathology of religious experience (which both Nietzsche and Mann saw
as fundamental to the work). A priest, incense – Nietzsche’s accusation of
Wagner sinking to his knees before the Cross re-examined – and, most
shockingly, circumcision of the infant who may or may not ‘be’ a young
Parsifal, offer almost as much food for thought as Wagner’s own inversion,
echoing the philosophy of Feuerbach, of the elements. The violence of the deed
could hardly have been more topical during the 2012 legal controversy over infant
genital mutilation in Germany; and yet, it also points to something older,
deep-seated, and of course very much part of the work’s reception history: the
question of whether antisemitism might be expressed in Wagner’s drama. (It
notably does not propose answers to such questions, old yet unquestionably
alive; rather, it suggests to what further interpretative work they might
fruitfully be put.) Amfortas in this production seems far more central to the
drama. His cry of pain jolts us from complacent ‘knowledge’ of the work, and
also points forward – or backward! – to Kundry’s scream of laughter at Christ,
who, whatever Wagner may have hoped, must also have undergone the procedure, on
the road to Calvary.
The second act opens in a field
hospital. For once – and this is typical of Herheim’s attention to Wagner’s
detail – we actually see the renegade Knights, Sir Ferris and all. Klingsor
resembles the master of ceremonies from the film Cabaret; for now we
behold Weimar Germany, our Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and
fishnets.[12] The delicious
representation of the Flowermaidens as orderlies and flappers – is that not
just what they are? – gains dramatic attention, as well as firmly placing us in
the inter-war period. (I say ‘firmly’, but historical time passes as its
performative cousin does.) And yet, a reminder that various levels of
interpretation are anything but distinct is offered by a greater keenness of
manipulation when it comes to Kundry’s acts: above all, what she tells Parsifal. She is in turn being
manipulated by Klingsor; yet perhaps so many of us are understandably now influenced
by feminist readings that we feel uncomplicatedly sympathetic. It is salutary
to be reminded that this Rose of Hell – the rose very much part of Herheim’s
imagery, deploying ‘new’ video technology – has, despite her plight, agency of
her own. That is more properly feminist than to consider her purely as victim.
And the similarity of costume between her and Klingsor, both in Weimar
cross-dressing travesty, reinforces the need both have for each other, an Hegelian
master–slave dialectic re-imagined. Wagner’s artwork is permitting of answers,
or better, further questions, which he may or may not have been able to
conceive himself. Historical understanding enables it to become of the present,
even of the future.
The final scene of the second act is electric: the coming of Bayreuth’s
and Germany’s darkest years truly shocking. Indeed, the phrase coup de
théâtre might have been invented for this advent of the Third Reich,
signalled by the ‘Weimar’ castle’s destruction, the arrival of stormtroopers
and a brown-shirted, tomorrow-belonging-to-him little boy and the unfurling of
swastikas. Overdue yet nevertheless courageous, the festival seemed at last
ready to begin to come to terms with its history. Judging by the disgruntled
noises from some members of the audience – it should hardly surprise that ‘conservative’
critics of searching productions would feel discomfited by a reminder of their
ideological kinship – it remains an absolute necessity too.[13]
Then, the final act opens in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried.
Parsifal’s arrival and Good Friday offer the possibility – illusory? – of rejuvenation.
In a tribute to the Bayreuth Tannhäuser
of Götz Friedrich, with whom Herheim studied, a procession of the starved
postwar population crosses the stage, victims of what has gone before and, prospectively
at least, of the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder
(postwar ‘economic miracle’) and its culture industry. The point of ultimate
hope comes when a star briefly appears in the sky: wonderfully touching, yet what
does it signify? A (false) messiah’s advent? A simple, childlike pleasure? It
certainly rings truer than the gaudy coloured lights signalling Parsifal’s
descent into the realm of the (lifestyle?) guru. Another brave coup de théâtre – Herheim never forgets
that Parsifal, amongst other things, is
theatre; nor should we – comes with a projection during the Transformation
Music. A request is displayed from the young Wagner brothers, Wieland and
Wolfgang, at the 1951 re-opening of ‘New Bayreuth’, that political discussion
be banished from the Green Hill. An image of Wagner is bricked up behind
Parsifal’s childhood wall, the composer remaining too hot to handle. Might we
also recall that Wahnfried wall built by Wolfgang, on whose other side Winifred
remained until her death, a standing, tenacious reminder that politics could
not so easily be banished?
Again, questions are dramatically suggested rather than dogmatically answered. What of Herheim’s aforementioned turning of the mirror upon the audience? It comes across as an invitation, indeed an incitement, to question everything we have thought. ‘Educating Parsifal’, the character, is also ‘educating Parsifal’ (or more accurately ‘Parsifal educating us’) – and not in merely didactic but in dramatic fashion. As Horace put it many years earlier, ‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’.[15] It is perhaps only what Wagner had been doing all along, although, in the emotional context both Wagner and Herheim have developed, as opposed to the abstraction of a mere act of reporting, it would be an unimaginative soul indeed who did not relish the mirror’s ambiguous invitation. The communal, religious and political role of Attic tragedy Wagner wished to recreate is just as relevant, to a revolutionary artwork of our future as to one of his.
I should now, however, turn to Tcherniakov’s Berlin production, which I saw both at its 2015 premiere, and again, in 2016, on Good Friday.[16] The outer acts, in their different yet similar ways, suggest a Russian thinker approaching Wagner. Like Herheim and indeed many of the most interesting contemporary opera directors, Tcherniakov seems more concerned to open up possibilities than to present definitive verdicts. Modern, relatively indistinct dress does not distract, but suggests sameness and indeed an ossified dedication to something that no longer pertains: a lesson for ‘traditional’ staging fetishists, among others. Crucially, however, Tcherniakov does not disregard religion as religion; it is not a proxy for political or aesthetic concerns. As in Wagner’s work ‘itself’, the relationship is complex, indeed provocative.
There is here a (once)
Christian theology gone wrong, as Wagner’s conception of Monsalvat demands.
Just as in the second act of Götterdämmerung,
when increasingly desperate pleas are made to gods who have already departed
the stage, so in Parsifal, the crowd
continues to believe and to act out of desperation in accordance with that
belief, or at least to act as if it still believed. Men act to protect a ritual
which has long lost its justification, if ever it had one. (What Wagner
presents, after all, is heretical in the extreme, as much a Feuerbachian
inversion, even a black mass, as anything else. And it is a representation, a
dramatisation, not the thing itself.) A world of Russian holy men, perhaps
allied to the anti-Wagnerian challenges of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, reacts with that
of Wagner’s still-live (and later, Tcherniakov’s still-life) contest between
Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. These are old believers and, perhaps, Old
Believers; certainly the final outward turn of the community on stage,
magnificently presented as if a revivification of an Old Master painting,
suggests Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina
with a Goya-like twist. Will the new rule, political or monastic, of Parsifal
bring more of the same – Gurnemanz, after his shocking stabbing in the back of
Kundry, seems effortlessly to have transferred his loyalty to the new regime,
although at what cost has he been concealing whatever it is he has done in the
past? Or will that new rule bring something different? We do not know; nor do
they. Who or what, if anything, has been redeemed? What we do know is that
Gurnemanz has swiftly put paid to the ‘purely human’ – as the younger,
Feuerbachian Wagner would have put it – rekindling of sexual relations between
Kundry, or Woman, and Amfortas, or Christ, or at least Jesus of Nazareth.
There are certainly clues.
Amfortas is identified more with Christ than I can previously recall. He is
carried by the knights so as to make him, however unhappily and unwillingly, a
visual if perhaps not spiritual reincarnation. More disturbingly still, we see
during the final scene of the first act, a re-enactment not only of Amfortas’s
wounding but also of some form of transubstantiation, or perhaps mere
vampirism, of his own blood. The sustenance drawn may well be nothing – a
negative reading of Feuerbach – or it may even be primarily vengeful. There is
no doubt, however, that this sick community requires it, and, most intriguingly
of all, it is commanded by Titurel, whom we see walk onstage and enter his coffin.
Titurel’s ritualistic staging of his own death in the first act and
re-emergence from the coffin once ‘it’ is all over stand at the very heart of
the drama. He is a sinister, charismatic dictator: the cult leader we all know
and fear. Moreover, his sadism in insisting, for whatever reasons, that his
son, Amfortas, go through what he must time and time again, chills to the bone.
Is Titurel a fraud or a thaumaturge? The knights are desperate for him to touch
them. He certainly appears to be pulling the theological strings of a cult that
has become nasty indeed.
The sameness of the first act –
the scene does not shift during the Transformation Music, and indeed the
production here burns as slowly and yet as brightly as the work – receives its
response in what to begin with seems the unconnected action of the second.
Here, Tcherniakov offers a brave, challenging exploration of sexuality, above
all of those paedophiliac tendencies our society would desperately wish away as
aberration, as the misdeeds of individual ‘monsters’. Klingsor, the very image
of a tabloid newspaper’s ‘paedophile monster’, has built a home with his
daughters, the Flowermaidens. Some are young; some are older; all are dressed
as ‘pretty girls’. Such is clearly what has proved the undoing of Monsalvat’s
knights. He clearly repels Kundry, not least when he paws her, but she of
course remains in his power. (Perhaps because he has put himself beyond the
‘moral’ pale? Very Nietzschean. Or perhaps we might think of Crime and Punishment.)
When in Klingsor’s power,
Kundry is certainly willing to learn from his example, or from what it might
suggest. Her kissing him already suggests an inconvenient truth concerning the
complexity of abuse. Wagner’s path of realisation, which I am tempted to call
psychoanalytical, is given shocking realisation in Kundry’s education of
Parsifal, partly visualised in the
staging of his memories. Andreas Schager as Parsifal cemented his reputation as
the finest Heldentenor alive, indeed
the finest I have heard in the flesh. Moreover, his movements on stage offered
a well-nigh perfect portrayal of the awkwardness of an adolescent discovering
his sexuality. His reluctance to show himself, hiding under his hood, pulled
down by Herzeleide and Kundry alike, finds its counterpart in his persistent
changing of clothes: seemingly a desire to be clean that can never be
fulfilled. This Parsifal and his mother, Herzeleide, were close, perhaps too
close. She is furious when she sees his adolescent first exploration with a
girl-next-door, or perhaps even his sister. The emotional fall-out kills her,
just as Kundry tells him – and us. Kundry, however, attempts to play upon those
complex feelings, to reignite them, reintroducing him to the miniature rocking
horse with which once, under Herzeleide’s spell, he had played. Quite what
happens remains unclear, since the moment of the ‘kiss’ – is it perhaps more
than that? – takes place offstage. The transformation it effects, when the
undressed Parsifal, followed by Kundry, runs back onstage, is, however, never in
doubt. The would-be sign of the Cross in this dark world is Parsifal’s piercing
of Klingsor with the spear.
A crucial feature of the
production that has tied both acts together is the circular seating and action
of the respective crowds: Knights and Flowermaidens. Sickness pervades both;
they may well be more closely connected. The third act continues the work of
drawing the two together, though again, suggestively rather than didactically.
Ritual to drama – to ritual aufgehoben
by drama. But was it the wrong drama? When, in the third act, Amfortas opens
his father’s tomb and has the body fall to the ground, is that simply revenge for the inhuman treatment – the abuse – our
Christ-like, yet ultimately not-so-very-Christ-like, victim has suffered? Or is
it also perhaps a hint at the death of God, Titurel being his father? Nietzsche
as well as those Russian writers seems to be hinted at, or at least available.
Nihilism or theological rescue mission? As when one reads Nietzsche,
perspectivism demands and yet obscures the answers.
One signal strength of both productions, I think, is their
willingness to deal with that particularity of the work mentioned earlier – its
insistence upon its difference, its opposition to general operatic culture –
as well as such a myriad of connections, correspondences and so forth, some
intrinsic, some developed along the way of the work in the world since its premiere
in 1882. (I have barely begun to scratch the surface but have devoted a chapter
of a recent book to Herheim’s staging.)[17] What David J.
Levin analysed as the operatic conservative’s – in this case, James Levine’s –
dread of the ‘hectic stage’, of ‘discursive overload’, has turned out actually
to harness such overload to fidelity in a sense all manner of operagoers could
and eventually did appreciate.[18]
That is certainly also highly relevant to the Syberberg film discussed elsewhere
in this issue.
We perform, then, rather than re-enact; similarly, we study as
well as perform, so that we think rather than wallow. History, musical or
otherwise, is something we write as well as make, something we think; we might,
perhaps, say the same about dreams, Wagner’s and our own. Herheim’s and
Tcherniakov’s dramaturgies have enabled Wagner’s music, perhaps still more so
than his words, to emerge as redeemer: not in a discredited sense of ‘absolute music’,
with the reactionary, neo-Romantic connotations that has acquired, but in a
critical sense suited to our own time and its concerns.
[1] The referendum on the UK’s
membership of the EU was held on 23 June 2016, nine days before the conference
at which this paper was originally given.
[2] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and
the Last Man (Harmondsworth, 1993).
[3] Richard Wagner, Oper und
Drama, ed. Klaus Kropfinger (Stuttgart, 1994), 388. ‘Das Publikum unsrer
Theater hat kein Bedürfnis nach dem Kunstwerke; es will sich vor der
Bühne zerstreuen, […] künstlich Einzelnheiten, nicht aber die
künstleriche Einheit Bedürfnis.’
[4] Richard Wagner, ‘Über das
Dirigieren’, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th edn, 10 vols.
(Leipzig, 1907), viii.261–337.
[5] Erling E. Gulbrandsen and Per-Erik
Skramstad, ‘Stefan Herheim on Working with Daniele Gatti, the Choice of Tempi
and the Staging of Preludes’, tr. Jonathan Scott-Kiddie, http://www.wagneropera.net/Interviews/Stefan-Herheim-Gatti-Preludes.htm
(accessed 18 Mar. 2017).
[6] Ibid.
[7] An
Autobiography (New York, 1956), 59.
[8] ‘Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater’,
tr. B. N. Langdon Davies, in Three
Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York, 1962), 46–9.
[9] On Wagner and the Philosophie der Tat, see Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s
‘Ring’ (Aldershot and Burlington, 2006), 28–9, 175–81.
[10] Letter of 28 Sep. 1880; Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr.
and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), 903.
[11] ‘Time re-explored’, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, tr.
Martin Cooper (London and Boston, MA, 1986), 262.
[12] It has recently been suggested, although I
think this may be over-egging the pudding, that Klingsor here might represent
Siegfried Wagner. (Exhibition, ‘Siegfried Wagner: Bayreuths Erbe aus
andersfarbiger Kiste’, at Schwules Museum, Berlin, 17 Feb. to 26 Jun. 2017.)
The exhibition, curated by Peter P. Pachl, Achim Bahr and Kevin Clarke, has
some fascinating material on display, but some of the commentary suffers either
from factual inaccuracy or wild conjecture, as well as the repetition of
bizarrely outdated psychological tropes, such as the ‘responsibility’ of an
‘overbearing’ mother (Cosima) for a son’s homosexuality.
[13] Tash Siddiqui reports ‘a
kind of audible shudder, a repressed Mexican wave, surging through the Bayreuth
audience at this point’ (personal communication).
[14] Horace, ‘Satires,’ I, I, 69-70, in Satires,
Epistles, and Ars Poetica, tr. H Rushton Fairclough, revised edn (Harvard
and London, 1929).
[15] Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche
Katastrophe; Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden, 1946).
[16] (Additional note: I would see it in 2017.
Reviews of all three performances may be found on this blog.)
[17] ‘Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal’,
After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (Woodbridge,
2014), 210–33.
[18] David J. Levin, ‘Reading a Staging/Staging
a Reading’, Cambridge Opera Journal, ix (1997), 57.
