Bayreuth Festival (3) - Der fliegende Holländer, 29 July 2026

Festspielhaus

Daland – Mika Kares
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Benjamin Bruns
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Kieran Carrel
The Dutchman – Nicholas Brownlee

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov

Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint),
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

Images: (c) Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrather

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Dutchman and Dutchman return, still ship-less, to their small town of still smaller horizons for what may or may not be the last time. They have had a good run by recent Bayreuth standards, rightly so, and are not scheduled for next season. (Minus Tristan, all dramas from Rienzi onwards are scheduled either for this season or next.) Whilst there was naturally immense relief all round at an actual theatrical experience amidst the torture-debris of the ‘AI’-Ring debacle, things were looking a little tired, at least until a third act that continues to pack quite a punch. I doubt this was really the fault of anyone concerned, although Tcherniakov presumably did not return to direct this revival, since there was no production team present for curtain calls. Indeed, what we saw had very much the air of a repertory house revival, somewhat at odds with what is held to be the ethos of ‘Werkstatt Bayreuth’, if infinitesimally so when compared to the horrors that had unfolded the previous two nights. (I shall deal with Die Walküre in a single ‘rest of the Ring’ review following its much-awaited Götterdämmerung.)

Providing, as ever, his own set designs, Tcherniakov presents in the Prelude a pantomime in which the young ‘H.’ (Holländer, we presume) sees his mother hanging lifeless from a house window, shamed by a hypocritical, Peter Grimes-like community that had her yield – perhaps as sex worker – to Daland’s advances, only to be cast aside when no longer of use. His adult return is no seven-year ritual in search of an impossible love, but rather pursuit of revenge against the man and more broadly the community that did this. His whole life, one senses, has explicitly led up to this, as he is welcomed by the venal Daland – maybe he continues to run up such expenses? – and later his wife Mary, acted with palpable compassion by Nadine Weismann, as well as by Senta. Invited to dinner, his plan falls into place when, following interesting initial reluctance that has her decline even to come inside, Senta falls for him. The third act shows the community at large, in mirthless corporate celebration for which the Dutchman’s crew (or whatever they be) notably fail to participate. Shots are fired, Daland falling before his daughter, who nonetheless continues to hold faith in H., to be cruelly tossed aside—as surplus to his requirements as his mother had to Senta’s father’s. Daland’s house and wealth ablaze, the entire claustrophobic Nordic townscape at risk, Mary returns to kill the Dutchman. Senta’s highly disconcerting, hysterical turn between grief and celebration is ultimately transformed into compassion for the woman who has long cared for her. Perhaps, then, as we hear the 1860 post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ ending, there is a form of feminist redemption after all. Men have created and perpetuated this world and its revenge saga; if women survive, they can hardly do worse and might, just might, do better.

Oksana Liniv’s conducting remained the weakest link in the evening’s proceedings (from when I last heard it in 2024). It is a pity she could not have been replaced with someone more able and willing to respond to such a dramatic conception, or indeed any other, of the work. If the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played well enough, it rarely sounded inspired, and one could hardly blame it. Lyniv’s alternation between pressing too hard and listlessly meandering, the latter especially apparent in a second act that seemed much longer than it was, offered a reversion to number opera seemingly not from aesthetic conviction, but because a more music-drama-focused performance could not be sustained. A sudden change of gear to breakneck speed at the close of the spinning chorus had pit and stage fall apart for several bars, the chorus compelled to find its own way back into sync, quite unaided by the conductor. 

A further sadness lay in the sound offered by a now reduced chorus,  especially at the beginning of the third act. The Festival’s decision to take an axe to what should be one of its crown jewels has regrettably had consequences, notwithstanding the musicianship of those remaining and their new director. In the title role, Nicholas Brownlee had an awkward beginning, intonation surprisingly, repeatedly awry in the first act. He grew into his own, though, to offer a compelling performance later on. Having sung two other challenging roles (Fasolt and Hunding) on two immediately preceding evenings, Mika Kares was undaunted by prospect or reality of Daland, outsinging the Dutchman in the first act and continuing to impress thereafter. Benjamin Bruns and Elisabeth Teige offered an aural, if not necessarily dramatic, glimpse of what a future Siegfried and Brünnhilde might sound like, Bruns impassioned and vocally fearless as Erik, Teige taking all in her musicodramatic stride in a role notorious for its demands. It was heartening too to welcome a fresh-voiced Kieran Carrel from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper to the Green Hill as the Steersman; let us hope this intelligent portrayal will prove neither his last visit nor role here. If I had certain reservations, then, this revival nonetheless proved quite a tonic after the anti-human production horrors of the two preceding evenings.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, 1 August 2024

Festspielhaus

Images copyright: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

Daland – Georg Zeppenfeld
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Eric Cutler
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Matthew Newlin
The Dutchman – Michael Volle

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

  
Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

The Dutchman sets sail every seven years, though more often at the Bayreuth Fetival. Like all of Wagner’s operas and dramas staged there, The Flying Dutchman will run for several years, then take a few years off prior to a new staging. I first saw Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production here last year and welcomed it with enthusiasm: a return to form for a director who had seemed in danger of falling into a therapeutic rut. Despite a few, largely unvoiced misgivings over Oksana Lyniv’s conducting, I put them to one side, knowing what a challenge it can be to conduct in the covered pit and trying to remain open to approaches that would not necessarily be mine. This year, Tcherniakov’s staging continued to impress, though I could not help but feel a little had been lost in tightness of presentation (or lack of Werkstatt development in the meantime). The major problem, though, was Lyniv’s direction of the score, loudly acclaimed by the audience, yet which for me fell seriously short, resulting in the strange, unwelcome achievement of making Wagner’s score sound incoherent, arbitrary, and for long stretches – which, sadly, seemed even longer – simply dull, mostly excellent vocal performances notwithstanding. 

Back to Tcherniakov first, though. Here ‘H’ – presumably ‘Holländer’, someone to whom even hardline Line of Duty fans seem not to have given due consideration – returns to his home town, as usual with Tcherniakov, brilliantly evoked scenically through his own set designs. The horrific deeds he recalls from his childhood are played out during the Overture, a small town closing ranks against his mother, perhaps a prostitute or at least in receipt of financial aid from Daland, leading to her death by hanging from a window. This is something, understandably, of which he can never let go; traumatised, he is clearly bent on vengeance against Daland and family (which now includes Mary as his wife), and more broadly against the entire community. Whether his feelings for Senta are ‘real’, whatever that might mean, or not, seems beside the point. He clearly has his own trajectory and she has hers, determined (as in so many stagings, as in Wagner) to escape a world of stifling conformity—and, in a sense, does so. 

Yet at what cost? When the inevitable conflagration occurs, perhaps hinted at earlier by Mary’s placing of candles at the impeccably bourgeois dinner table that proves only a source of misery and misunderstanding, the Dutchman, having shot others, is himself shot by Mary (as you will have gathered by now, a considerably extended part) to whom a now clearly traumatised Senta turns for comfort. The surplus wealth our ever-venal Daland has achieved in the meantime has gone up literally in flames, leaving the women once again both to suffer the consequences and to attempt to pick up the pieces. Dreams can readily turn into nightmares—although someone seated near me appeared, unaccountably as well as distractingly, to find the whole thing a comedy, merrily chortling throughout. 

Michael Volle gave another fine performance as the Dutchman. Every word counted, at least as much as, arguably still more so than, every note. Though this was undoubtedly an opera performance, it drew on his deep experience of Lieder and other concert singing. Moreover, he dealt extremely well with what I assume was a serious injury, appearing with a crutch, though wielding it so well in the course of his portrayal that I initially thought it must be a new feature of the production. Only when he retained it for curtain calls, was I reasonably sure this was not the case (though I shall happily be corrected.) Elisabeth Teige’s vocal strength, accuracy, and dramatic commitment were second to none throughout. Hers was a haunted, haunting portrayal that drew on a wide-ranging palette of vocal colour whilst remaining absolutely centred throughout. Nadine Weissmann as Mary once again impressed as a fine singing actor, whilst Georg Zeppenfeld showed for the nth time that he can apparently do no wrong in any role, including one that requires unattractive traits of personal weakness. This was mostly the same cast as in 2023, the exceptions being Eric Cutler’s Erik and Matthew Newlin’s Steersman. Cutler truly made Erik into a character of his own; what a luxury it was to hear a Heldentenor hold his imploring own in this role. Newlin likewise impressed greatly in his smaller role, clearly relishing the Festspielhaus acoustic and what he could accomplish, verbally and musically, within it. 

Lyniv’s conducting had its moments. It retained a sense of urgency to begin with, from last year, though all too often that dissipated into a strangely meandering tour through the music. A tendency, already pronounced in 2023, to overemphasise the number-opera aspects to the score, as if ashamed of the seeds of something more ‘progressive’, had now become an apparent determination to make it sound as if it were little more than Das Liebesverbot. Yes, of course one can hear varied roots in the score; of course, highlighting them on occasion can be revealing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Erik benefited most from such emphasis, though it is worth recalling that the opera does not fall so neatly into ‘backward-looking’ Erik and Daland, and ‘forward-looking’ Dutchman and Senta. Indeed, the way in which Cutler brought that to the fore through gesture as well as voice was not the least of his achievements. 

Yet so heterogeneous an approach required some sense of direction, whereas what we heard, especially in the second act, promised less redemption than interminable day-to-day tedium. I can only wish I believed that to have been evidence of a musicodramaturgical point of view. The third act fared better, not least since problems with the chorus, or rather with coordination between it and the orchestra, which Lyniv failed for too long to address, had now been fully resolved. Even here, though, an apparent determination to rob the orchestra of its depth and, more seriously still, Wagner of harmonic meaning suggested more an abdication of musical dramaturgy than an alternative. I can only assume the production’s use of Wagner’s post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ revisions to the score was intended to evoke irony; to an extent it did, more at the close than in the revised Overture. Yet it made little sense given such an approach to the score, other than to suggest it was a bit of a mess. My sentiments, however, seemed to place me in a minority; I do not think I have heard a more enthusiastic reaction to any performance at Bayreuth.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, 14 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Daland – Georg Zeppenfeld

Senta – Elisabeth Teige

Erik – Tomislav Mužek

Mary – Nadine Weissmann 

Steersman – Tansel Akzeybek

Dutchman – Michael Volle

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Tatiana Werestchagina (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

It had been six, not seven, years since I last saw The Flying Dutchman, but it was time. So it was for ‘H’: Holländer, rather than a friend from Line of Duty, though there was certainly something of the allied Nordic Noir genre to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging, first seen in 2021. The Dutchman revisits his home town following an horrific crime, resulting in a woman, perhaps a prostitute, left hanging from a window, seen (or dreamed) during the Overture. He plays his cards close to his chest, but is bent ultimately on justice, revenge, or both, insofar as they may be separated. Is that what he achieves? He seems to think so, maniacal in a burning triumph to match Götterdämmerung, windows of Tcherniakov’s own small-town, Norwegian set, its church a focal yet distant point of alternative judgement; or, for Nietzscheans, alternative death, ablaze. Until, that is, Mary, the ‘normal’ yet apparently decent animating future of community singing (rather than spinning), desperate to escape from that world, shockingly shoots him dead at the close, the ironic strains of Wagner’s 1859 ‘redemptive’ ending telling their own tale from the pit. 

Mary, it seems in this retelling, is Senta’s mother or stepmother. She is certainly resented earlier by Senta, who in crazed fashion – is she high, a not uncommon reaction to smalltown life? – supplants her in front of the choir, waving her arms around to little apparent musical effect. The Dutchman’s picture, however, still causes a stir. To have Nadine Weissmann, Frank Castorf’s unforgettable Erda, in this newly important, and sympathetic role, added intriguing, intertextual possibilities to this mind, although that is perhaps for the most part a private matter. Weissmann’s performance was as musically endearing as it was dramatically powerful, its silences and quiet looks as potent as the final shot.

This is, among other things, a tale of storytelling. The Steersman, Daland, the Dutchman, Senta, most likely everyone has a story to tell. The past, especially as understood by the present, is like that. For the woman hanged was the Dutchman’s mother, and it would seem, Daland’s lover. (I think it was a little more than a transactional arrangement, though I am not entirely sure. Perhaps they were not either.) The town bar is a dangerous, masculine place of storytelling; the Dutchman has money, and thus can buy men and time. The choir is most probably the bar’s feminine equivalent. At any rate stories are told and heard, decisions are made, and steps are taken towards the final tragedy.

For Senta, it has been a tale cleverly poised between Nordics Noir and Beige (the latter literally in Elena Zaytseva’s costumes for her and the womenfolk). And it is emblematic of the success of the whole, almost whatever one may think of parts of it, that this is seen and heard at all levels. When Tansel Akzeybek’s Steersman sang his song, eliciting derisory laughter, the number of different tones and expressions used, without sacrifice to the whole, transformed it into a mini-cantata or indeed an encapsulation or anticipation, of the whole drama. The tragedy of having to live in the circumstances given and which cannot be altered is not of course, uncommon. It seems, however, unusually apparent and immediate on this occasion. That thought may be politicised; it may be internalised; it may even be transmuted into geography. What is this Norway, we might ask, for Wagner, for Tcherniakov, for the performers, for us? To say it is, the imagination is too easy, although there is surely an element of that. We all create it before our eyes and ears, although certainly not with free will. Always the grey, the beige, the community, and likewise our dreams, fantasies, and plans to escape beckon, thwart and are thwarted, impart life and death. 

Michael Volle’s complete portrayal, as visceral as it was detailed, as rooted in Schubert ballads and even Bach as it was echt-Wagnerian, was a rare prize, fundamental to our experience, as was Georg Zeppenfeld’s luxury casting as Daland. I say ‘luxury’, but in fact a signal virtue of this performance and this production was to have one realise quite how important and complex the role should be. Elisabeth Teige’s Senta was fully the equal of the portrayals of her illustrious peers. A fittingly Nordic heroine, as steely as Nilsson when required, yet probably more variegated in response to very particular stage requirements, she understandably received thunderous applause. Erik is a difficult role; one cannot (usually) be unduly heroic or assertive. Tomislav Mužek nevertheless impressed in another excellent performance.

Eberhard Friedrich’s Bayreuth Festival Chorus was likewise on first-rate form, as it must be. A rooted community that can yet be swayed, it offered an almost Bach Passion-like combination of participation and observation. That goes for Tcherniakov as well as Wagner. Much the same may be said of what Wagner would soon designate his Greek chorus, the orchestra. If Oksana Lyniv drove hard times, not least during the Overture, and sometimes seemed more inclined to look back toward the number-opera past than forward to the music-drama future, hers was always a musically and dramatically motivated reading, strongly in sympathy with the production. The orchestra itself was incisive, decisive and full of telling colour, such as Wagner had learned in Paris. My ears may still tend, say, towards Wolfgang Sawallisch in 1959, but this was – and is – a Dutchman for here and now. After all, the past, constantly retold and reinvented, is always with us, terrifyingly so as the house from which that terrible deed was done burns. 

Pelléas et Mélisande, Komische Oper, 15 October 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Mélisande (Nadja Mchantaf)

Arkel – Jens Larsen

Golaud – Günter Papendell

Pelléas – Domink Köninger

Geneviève – Nadine Weissmann

Yniold – Gregor-Michael Hoffmann

Mélisande – Nadja Mchanthaf

Doctor, Shepherd – Samuli Taskinen

Barrie Kosky (director)

Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)

Anne Kuhn (set designs)

Dinah Ehm (costumes)

Johanna Wall (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Jordan de Souza (conductor)

Mélisande

And still they come. I went a good few years, a good few too many years, without seeing Pelléas et Mélisande in the theatre. More recently, I have seen several productions, every one of which has had something different to tell me, some different way of moving me – whilst all remaining very much faithful to what, in idealist metaphysical mode, I might term the inviolate spirit of the work. I might not, of course, but perhaps the temptation to do so tells us something about Pelléas and not just about me. Like Tristan und Isolde – another of the relatively small number of works Barrie Kosky said he was determined to direct, and has also ticked off – there seems to be no point in trying to turn Pelléas into something that it is not; like Tristan, there seems relatively little to do; like Tristan, it seems quite resistant to many typical directorial interventions. None of those is necessarily a categorical statement; such would be bizarre. (Indeed, such might make me something akin to a fevered writer for the Revue wagnérienne. Whatever my failings and/or eccentricities, I am not sure that I am quite there yet.) If something works, it works; and, like many, I can hardly wait to see what Stefan Herheim, present in the audience last night, will do with Debussy’s sole completed opera next year at Glyndebourne.

I shall have to, though, as shall we all. Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Komische Oper certainly proved plenty to keep us going in the meantime. Not, of course, that we should view it in anything other than its estimable own right. At its heart stands Arkel’s Allemonde castle. It is evoked clearly, claustrophobically, chillingly, and perhaps above all, simply. At the centre of the stage, concentric circles turn to reveal something that is always the same, moving yet not moving, just like the characters it transports. There is no way out; nor does anyone, save of course for Mélisande, seek one. (Whether Pelléas does in the opera is a moot point; I do not think he does here. Indeed he remains in the gallery of frozen souls, not unlike a Bluebeard collection, at the close: dead, yes, but was he, were they, always so? What on earth, or beyond, might it mean to be alive here?) Characters move simply, repetitively, if not quite so repetitively, certainly not with such meaninglessness, as in Christiane Pohle’s Munich production (roundly dismissed, I am tempted to suggest misogynistically, by ignorant journalists and audiences alike, but an unforgettable piece of post-Beckettian theatre). Parallels are drawn, easily discerned, given the essential simplicity of the pared-down action; for instance, Mélisande’s arms, her form as yet unseen, encircle – irony here, ‘Ne me touchez pas!’, doubled when it becomes clear quite how fearful she is of being touched – Pelléas at the opening of their final scene together just as they had Golaud at the start. She touches both, though barely. What is she doing? Finding her way? Through fear? Through the forest? Through a miserable, impossible life?

Mélisande's arms encircling Golaud ((Günter Papendell)

And there is no doubting her abuse. The fear is palpable, great tribute to the extraordinary performance given by Nadja Mchantaf, a worthy successor to her Rusalka for the same company and director. In context, many similar themes emerged, for that too had proved a highly concentrated piece of musical drama on Kosky’s – and everyone else’s – part. The fear is well-founded too, for in this world of highly damaged, highly damaging people, Mélisande will suffer horrendous violence. She has done before: you can see it in her eyes. Indeed, Mchantaf’s acting alone would be worthy of any stage: not, of course, that it really makes sense here to speak of ‘acting alone’. When she and Pelléas finally have their moment of sexual congress, she shows her ‘enjoyment’; but is that just what she has learned? Is that, in a sense, what many women have learned? What does it mean to be penetrated by the male gaze, as well as otherwise, on stage? Golaud’s quite shocking violence towards this heavily pregnant woman, his wife, the mother of ‘his’ child, having discovered her with his brother, now dead, is all the more shocking for taking its leave within a general increase of violence – which here seems to mean much the same as ‘action’ – following the interval. The gears of ‘fate’ grind, following relative nothingness. Yet what does it mean for us to label them as ‘fate’? Are we not thereby abdicating responsibility? Blood tells its own story, not just, or even principally, of childbirth, although it certainly includes that. We remember that disturbing moment, earlier on, when Mélisande had laughed childishly with Pelléas, at throwing away – here swallowing – her ring. Again, we both fall upon ideas of fate, and know that we should not. The final turning of the set’s concentric circles, the final display of things just as they always were, yet worse, brings the curtain down. The curtain, having been there all along, reminds us that our aestheticisation of such deeds is at least part of the problem; or at least, it is in itself unlikely to prove to be a solution. Does a performance of Pelléas make us in the audience better people? Who knows? Probably not, however. Things carry on as they always did.

Golaud, Pelléas (Dominik Köninger), Mélisande

If Mchantaf were, perhaps necessarily, first among equals, then that should be taken in its fullest, dialectical sense. Yet again, the Komische Oper under Kosky’s Intendanz – this certainly includes the work of other directors – showed itself to be a true company. Günther Paperdell and Dominik Köninger showed a near ideal blend of similar physicality – deliriously so at one point, the one almost assuming the role, or rather the behaviour of the other – and of difference, Dinah Ehm’s splendid, simple costumes very much contributing to that dramatic end. Theirs was a dialectical relationship, more strongly so than I can otherwise recall. Jens Larsen’s Arkel proved frighteningly creepy: finely sung, and repellent in his assault of Mélisande, all the more so for his grandfatherly concern. We knew whose rules, doubtless inherited, prevailed in this hopeless patriarchy. Nadine Weissmann’s Geneviève proved deeply compassionate yet – quite rightly – powerless. What could she do? Samuli Taskinen, a member of the Opera Studio, impressed in his small roles. And Gregor-Michael Hoffmann offered a sensational performance as Yniold: crystal clear of tone and words, effortlessly at home, or so it seemed, in a fiendishly difficult role both in work and in performance. It was an extraordinary thing indeed to learn afterwards that this was that outstanding treble’s first role on stage; it will surely not be his last.

Golaud and Yniold (Gregor-Michael Hoffmann)

Of course, so much of the drama, just as in Tristan, in whose waves Pelléas is soaked almost as much as it is as those of Parsifal, lies in the orchestra. It was on splendid form throughout, textures admirably clear yet never too clear. I always find myself in performances of this opera asking myself whether it is a more or less Wagnerian performance; I seem unable not to. The strange thing, however, is that, however different the path taken, the balance between Wagner and not-Wagner seems to end up being about the same; or at least that is so, in a performance worth its salt. This performance certainly was, wisely led by Kapellmeister, Jordan de Souza. There was no doubting his knowledge and understanding of Debussy’s tantalising, treacherous score, nor of his ability to communicate to both orchestra and audience. Again, I look forward to hearing more from him. For ultimately, as always, it is the music of those interludes that lingers longest, most insidiously in my mind. There is something almost evil about it; for it is the music of fate, of Allemonde, perhaps even, at one remove, of the Revue wagnérienne.

Bayreuth Festival (4) - Siegfried, 26 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Mime – Andreas Conrad
Wanderer – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Ana Durlovski

Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video) 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)

Siegfried is now for me the highpoint in Frank Castorf’s Ring. It is surely the most difficult of all four parts to bring off, but Castorf’s – and his performers’ – grasp of the work’s epic quality may well be unsurpassed. One would at least have to go back – from productions I know – to Harry Kupfer, perhaps even to Patrice Chéreau. In Wagner’s drama, as in Castorf’s staging, so many of the Ring’s strands come together here – and how!

A crucial idea to the drama, to its realisation, and indeed to the epic tradition in which it so triumphantly yet challengingly stands is liminality. At a basic, or perhaps better immediate, level, the revolving stage does its work here. Forest or station? Both are quintessential liminal zones. The German Romantic forest has a long history, of course, extending back long before German Romanticism. Think of the invention of ‘Hermann’, a Teutonisation of Arminius: ‘Assuredly he was the deliverer of Germany,’ wrote the admiring Tacitus in his Annals. Arminius ‘had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory.’ And for Romans, Germans such as Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813, could substitute the French. Caspar David Friedrich contributed two paintings to an exhibition held in Dresden in March 1814 to celebrate the liberation of Germany from the French yoke, one depicting the imaginary grave of Arminius/Hermann. Wagner too rejoiced in the memory of those events in the Teutoburger Wald, even when he told Cosima in rather gloomy terms: ‘So far, we have been great in defence, dispelling alien elements which we could not assimilate; the Teutoburger Wald was a rejection of the Roman influence, the Reformation also a rejection, our great literature a rejection of the influence of the French; the only positive thing so far has been our music — Beethoven.’ The implication was, of course, that now things might change, although by then the strong, Schopenhauerian element in his world-view was already suggesting they might not. And so, enter the resigned Wanderer, more a hero than the rebel without a consciousness, Siegfried, born in that forest, and ignorant of anything beyond it, might ever prove in reality.

Castorf may be understood both to play on that characterisation and to question it. How, after all, could one not, concerned where – indeed knowing where – such Romanticism, even nationalism, might lead, or perhaps better, be understood by some to have led. And so, the fabled alternative Mount Rushmore presents a world in which socialism might appear to have won the day: Marx (great) – Lenin (good) – and then we on the Left do not quite know where to look when it comes to Stalin and Mao. Could we not have Adorno instead? The negative dialectic says no. Aleksandar Denić’s set design for the other side, Bayreuth (Al)exanderplatz station – S-Bahn, U-Bahn, post office, station restaurant, fountain, clock – is too real to be real. It is an astonishing sculpture and again an astonishingly apt liminal foil to the forest. What is more full of transience, more full of possibility, more full of the potential for foiling possibility, than a station? East Berlin seems to be going pretty well, or does it? Or is it East Berlin at all? It is what it is, just as those celebrated crocodiles are what they are. That does not stop us continually asking how, why, what, though. Like Mime, however, do we ask the questions whose answers we really need? Political leaders come and go above on the screens: is that Siegfried; is it Wotan; is it Mime? Or are they just faces of no one in particular, on to whom we (literally) project what we expect, what we want, what we have been led to believe? It is a question as much, perhaps for Honecker as for Merkel, for Lenin as for Stalin. And when actual projections of characters’ faces appear on Mount Rushmore again, what are we to make of them? Does it ‘mean’ anything that we see, or think we see, Siegfried’s face not on revolutionary Lenin or Mao but on ‘establishment’ Stalin, and Wotan (his eye damaged, yet playfully winking) on Stalin’s? Why do we insist on meaning at all? Have we not learned? Is Beckettian gloom perhaps all there is?

Maybe, yet there are other possibilities here we might grasp. Whether they are better or worse is for us to decide; perhaps Schopenhaurian renunciation would be better after all, but there is no short-circuiting of the question. Our supposed revolutionary hero, Siegfried, is a brutal figure by any standards. His Kalashnikov, heard to terrifyingly loud effect, should give us all pause for thought. Do we think of late Soviet, Brezhnev-era imperialism perhaps (Afghanistan?) or of our own, more fashionable heroes? We still all believe in Castro and Guevara, do we not? Meanwhile, oil continues to do its work; it always has, in West and in East. Patric Seibert, initially Siegfried’s chained bear, is literally covered in it. Alberich is still at large, watching and mocking – like the Wanderer and also like Mime. We draw connections between them; or perhaps we do not. It is up to us. And all the while, those awe-inspiring landscapes and cityscapes, with their wealth of associations, form our thinking, whether we like it or no.

Erda initially does not. But she must put on a show. The misogyny here of a newly revivified Wanderer – I am genuinely unsure as to whether the production participates in it, which is perhaps as it is uneasily should be – truly shocks. As soon as the tables turn – for Wagner, as soon as Wotan finally rejects Fate, but what does that mean here? – Wotan can treat the earth goddess as despicably as any other woman. There is no redemption for him here in the halting of a wheel’s turning; perhaps instead he transmutes it into post-Russian roulette. Desperate to have a piece of him, Erda debases herself in the now celebrated insistence on fellating the god. His response is to run after Siegfried and to leave her to pay the bill. She has even turned herself into one of his ‘favourite’ blondes, but to no avail. Nadine Weismann, giving a towering dramatic portrayal, quite unafraid to sound hurt, damaged, and cowed, cuts a movingly pathetic figure under the restaurant table at her last.

Will things go better for her daughter? Probably not. We fear the worst when she dons her wedding dress, sure that Siegfried will betray her. Our old friend, the Brazilian carnival Woodbird is still around, after all. But in an inversion of what we have seen in previous years, Siegfried returns to her and they embrace. Is Castorf reconciling himself somewhat with Wagner, with Romanticism? I admit that I felt a little disappointed – how much more powerful I found it for Brünnhilde to be left on her own, whilst Siegfried fucked the Woodbird. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps we now stand at the point at which we need to deconstruct the ‘Castorf Ring’, which, like Wagner’s, we know too well. At any rate, Catherine Foster proved herself in glorious voice, movingly eloquent as events around her coincided with, commentated on her – or did not. She has unquestionably gone from strength to strength.

Stefan Vinke, in the title role, proved tireless, if not necessarily ingratiating. But then, how ingratiating should a Siegfried be? When one hears so many singers who are simply incapable of getting through the evening, one cannot but be grateful for one who can, and who continues to be heard. He was certainly unafraid to repel us dramatically; no fairy-tale Romanticism here. Andreas Conrad’s Mime was very much a plausible opponent, heightening the dramatic stakes. This was a tenor, as well as a character, who demanded to be heard – and was. Thomas Johannes Mayer was perhaps on occasion a little verbally bluff as the Wanderer, but acted the role to a tee. His callous dismissal of Erda, mentioned above, chilled more, I think, than any of his predecessors’. Other singers all impressed in their different ways, very much part of the company.

And if Marek Janowski’s conducting of the score was not so alive to its epic quality as, say, that of Daniel Barenboim, or to the great conductors of the past, there was, at its best, a quicksilver dramatic quality to be heard and, yes, to be experienced that had been lacking in swathes of Die Walküre. Was the scene between Alberich and Mime simply too fast, almost glib? Perhaps, but it is not difficult to come up with a reading, in this context, to justify such a portrayal of what Hans Mayer brilliantly dubbed an ‘evil stockjobbers’ satire’. If Karl-Heinz Lehner’s darkly dangerous, still alluring Fafner represented, to quote Mayer once again, ‘the world of shameless wealth, the concentration of capital as a sign of the rise of the middle classes … under which Wagner had to suffer so much,’ then there is again something to be said for a lack of majesty to his prowling around the station. So long, that is, as it retained musico-dramatic coherence, which it did; Janowski certainly knew where the score was going, even when he seemed a little impatient with it. Perhaps, then, that will prove the most intriguing dialectical legacy of all from Castorf’s Siegfried: seemingly having held the work to sometimes extreme account, it vouchsafed the possibility, even the plausibility, of new musical readings too.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 23 August 2017

Festspielhaus

 

Wotan – Iain Paterson

Donner – Markus Eiche
Froh – Daniel Behle
Loge – Roberto Saccà
Fricka – Tanja Ariana Baumgartner
Freia – Caroline Wenborne
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Mime – Andreas Conrad
Fasolt – Günther Groissböck
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner
Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director and dramaturgical collaboration)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

And so, the time came for final check-in to Frank Castorf’s Golden Motel. It has been quite a ride, full of unexpected twists and turns: not entire unlike the history of our benighted late capitalist world since Wagner-Jahr in 2013 – although thank God, nothing like so far-fetched. I did not see the 2013 Ring; Per-Erik Skramstad reviewed it for wagneropera.net that year. I did, however, see it in 2014 and 2016. As with last year, I shall not re-read my earlier reviews until after having written those for the present year. That is not because I believe in some unsullied, unmediated experience in the Festspielhaus, quite the contrary. Such is an experience entirely foreign to Wagner, whatever (very) occasional nods he might have offered to the contrary. What I see, hear, and write will undoubtedly be informed by prior memories, thoughts, and interpretations – and so it should be. The same will certainly be true of the performances themselves, and of Castorf’s – and his collaborator, Patric Seibert’s – understanding and critical vision. By the same token, however, I – like they, I presume – hope that I shall be open to new understandings and do not wish to be unduly weighed down by ‘tradition’. Tradition is present any case; how can it not be in this of all houses and festivals? There is no need for it to become, in Mahler’s celebrated phrase, Schlamperei.

 

Perhaps more to the point, this is a production concerned with, or at least unusually amenable to, ideas and criticisms of narration, of the construction, criticism, and disavowal of memory. For good and for ill, we are all, to a certain extent, postmodernists now. The rejection of totality, of grand narrative, was understandable, even laudable, for so many artists and thinkers in the wake of the Second World War. It certainly was for Castorf. Just as Romanticism inescapably changed us – no one any more, at least in the Western world, really finds unrequited love intrinsically amusing, no matter what – so has the awareness of writing and deconstructing narratives. One might say it was already there anyway, even in this, one of the grandest of all artistic narratives. Like the Bible, Wagner presents two myths of creation: one here, one in the Norns’ Scene of Götterdämmerung; he arguably offers scope for a good few more too. That despite his own, post-Hegelian insistence on, pursuit of, totality. One might say the same of Hegel too – or indeed Marx. Come Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Castorf does too, with his alternative Mount Rushmore. But let us not get too far ahead, whatever that quintessential Wagnerian temptation.

 

Narration and its unreliability come to the fore from the outset, both from Wagner and Castorf. We make the distinction, but should we, in performance, in the bringing of a work and far more than work into, as it were, dynamic form? Filming and reproduction, ‘live’ or otherwise, are at the heart of many a contemporary theatrical piece, not least Castorf’s own; I recently saw his Faust-ian Volksbühne farewell in Berlin. In lesser hands, such might merely be a gimmick, but we are no more concerned with lesser hands here than we are with Wagner, who is emphatically not responsible for bland, overblown, or merely offensive successors. We see things, via the cameras and the screen relay, that we would otherwise not see. But should we? There is the question of surveillance, of nowhere to hide, of course, not least in a society such as ours. (Theresa May, are you watching, courtesy of your Snooper’s Charter?) But should we, in another sense? Are we seeing things that are not even ‘there’, whatever that might mean? Some of the time, unquestionably yes, although it is often difficult to know. Just how many narratives or standpoints on narratives can we watch at the same time? It is no good just to throw up our hands in despair, and say we just want the one. The world does not work like that. Nor does being a ‘citizen of the world’ – which returns us to… Sometimes, then, we are certain concerning discrepancies. People are there who are otherwise ‘not’. What to make of Fricka’s brief, mediatised reinvention as ‘a blonde’ as Wotan (or another fun-loving, megalomaniacal, School of Playboy world ‘leader’) might call her. Gentlemen might not be the issue here, but power is; and being a ‘gentleman’, like all ‘manners’, is in large part a matter of power, of class and other conflict, however much we may feel the need to persuade ourselves otherwise. ‘No, you pinkoes are “constructing a narrative”; I am “telling it as it is”.’ Right…

 

Texas is where it all kicks off: on Route 66. The motel is a staging post, as motels are. So is wherever the gods ‘are’, before Valhalla. (So too will Valhalla/the new Golden Motel too, of course, for the gods are not, cannot be, immortal; we are all Feuerbachians now – or Wagner is, at least. We have even – most of us – now come to terms with the impermanence of capitalism, a few years ago a claim regarded as absurd by all save for a few of us ‘extremists’ who needed to recognise the Berlin Wall had fallen. Marx is back, as Derrida always insisted. But is it a postmodernist Marx we want? Who cares what we want, for is truth not anti-consumerist? And so on…

 

But back to Texas. The Confederate flag elicits more immediate resonances now; as does its ultimate replacement by the rainbow flag. Froh is pretty, after all, as Wagner seems to have intended in his creation of cipher gods and goddesses: Donner and Freia too, not really ‘characters’… A trashier Dallas remake seems in the offing: there is doubtless a closer reference to draw; but reader, I am afraid I am not the one to do so. There is certainly something of JR to our Wotan, perhaps still more Sue Ellen (of later years) to Fricka; in this narrative (whose?) there is, anyway. Some audience members – perhaps there is those whose mobile telephones do not go off en route to Nibelheim: an updating too far? – merely laugh whenever there is something a little post-watershed content to view. If Carry On be your narrative, carry on, I suppose; but Wagner and Castorf are deeper – yes, how Teutonic! – than that. (The scornful reaction from a man seated somewhere behind me to the appearance of the rainbow flag told its own story. Keep it in the family by all means: but please, between members of the opposite sex! What, as it were, would be the alternative for Deutschland? Fricka will offer him help in the next instalment.)

 

There has been no golden age. It is one of the most pernicious, yet perhaps also one of the most necessary, or at any rate, tenacious of myths. Wagner presents it and immediately undermines it. He had, he once said, every sympathy with Alberich, cruelly provoked as he was by the hedonistic Rhinemaidens. An ugly man in a ‘beautiful’ world: politics, as we quaintly used to say, is showbusiness for ugly people. (Are you there, Donald? Is this Götterdämmerung already?) There is delight to be had in the ‘Rhine’ waters, but they are really just a paddling pool. The ‘girls’ might almost be waiting for Melania to take her leave. Except not: they may not be moral – anything pre-culture, or post-culture, is not – but nor do they behave. Perhaps that affords us a little hope, illusory or otherwise. But we watch them, much as cameramen ourselves: sous-pornographers, perhaps. Wotan cannot do it all himself, nor can Wagner – or Castorf. The ‘girls’ do not depart the scene, not entirely. Indeed, they avail themselves of as much fun as they can in their room. They may no longer have a beach ball and water, but cocktails in bed may prove an upgrade. Our Everyman waiter/host, Patric Seibert would like to be part of their narrative, or rather would like to welcome them into his, but they banish him once he has brought them (yet more) drinks. ‘Do not Disturb’: the sign is thrust in his face. They seem even less troubled than usual by what happens in the world(s) of gods, giants, and dwarves. Do they know that they will, more or less, be all right? (What they tell Siegfried later on suggests so, at least at some stage.) But is that not to forget about oil? If theirs is the ‘natural’ world, their lot is rape. Alberich would like to, certainly. The petrol pumps suggest that in some sense he did. He renounces love, of course, and wins, if not the world, then at least a caravan competitor next door. The struggle between new and old money, even a sacerdotal order and capital, continues: perhaps not quite the main thing, as in Wagner or at least in many of our readings, but an important thing. Narratives are never tidy, neither here nor there. Let us no more be vulgar Wagnerians than vulgar Marxists.

 

Everyman looks ahead. We see him (on camera) reading a Sigurd comic-script. That is not Wagner’s narrative, though, is it? At more or less the same time, in Nibelheim, an earlier difficulty (deliberate or imposed?) more or less resolves itself; or is it that we understand better now than once we might have done? Alberich retreats into his van, and may partly be seen through the window all along. But a snake and toad appear on screen; they seem to be a reality in our Everyman’s world – presuming what we see of his reactions on screen is ‘real’, whatever that might mean. Do we identify with him? Should we? Is that all too easy, and if so, why might someone wish us to do so? And what did it mean earlier, for Alberich and Mime to be led into Nibelheim as hostages (paper bags and all, very much in ‘war on terror’ manner) by Wotan and Loge? We have not really left the motel at all; do those events have ‘meaning’, or are they a cynical divertissement in a world of ‘entertainment’? What, likewise, did it mean, shortly afterwards, for Everyman to have be presented with the ring and Tarnhelm? Why does Loge have the latter a little later, and what is his intention with it? Tenses conflict, depending where one is, or where one thinks one is. Do objects from the hoard have actual operative force, or is that just what some people wish us to think? Why always the either-or? The ring’s agency is, of course, a matter of obscurity throughout Wagner’s drama; whatever powers it may hold are rarely those its owners thinks it does. Wellgunde’s ‘measureless might’: well, one may not be able to measure it, but that is not quite what we usually understand by the phrase.

 

The final scene does not resolve, not really; nor should it. Wagner’s Entry of the Gods certainly does nothing of the kind, words and harmonies alike deconstructing not just this particular triumph, but the very notion and possibility thereof. Inclusivity seems to us and our ilk a definite improvement: in the pool and in the bar, Rhineboys (-boyz?) join our fun-loving ‘girls’. (Remember those tweets? There is one for every occasion, in any case; we hardly need remember them.) Whatever it is that Froh – or whoever is running ‘the show’ – accomplishes is clearly mind-altering, whether one had a mind before or no. Eye close-ups from the bar leave us in no doubt that something stronger than alcohol is being served, is in the air. They all claim to see a rainbow, after all – even walk upon it, to reach somewhere they probably were already. Freia’s ransom sort of happened, but everyone – even she – seemed to have lost interest: too many other narratives to write. The giants – undoubted sexual objects themselves, for a change – have left the scene; their deal has been concluded; and if Fasolt has paid with his life, it is all part of the game, the ‘show’. Our showstopping, fur-coated, deep-of-tone Nadine Weissmann as Erda has left the scene too: her ‘deal’ with Wotan brutally accomplished – yet only partly seen, however much we voyeurs may have strained to see more. (The man behind laughed once more.) There will be other acts to come.

 

Things have changed, though. Questioning history, questioning stories, does not mean they have not taken place. One thing I should be reasonably sure of in my own narrative is that the performances have mostly become more accomplished, more sharply focused over the years I have seen the production. I shall offer no comparisons as such here, but perhaps they are implicit; they will doubtless fall some way short, too, of even a less naïve conception of ‘objectivity’. After all, I am not the same watcher and listener, spectator and interpreter, that I was. Marek Janowski certainly seemed more at home in Bayreuth than last year. What sometimes had come across as uncertain – that acoustic? – and at times unduly peremptory now seemed much more grounded. It was still a relatively, though not excessively, swift traversal of the score; or so it seemed. (I never trust the narrative of the clock; or, to put it another way, I have no interest in it.) The proportions sounded ‘right’, though, and there was dynamism to the form: sometimes in tandem with the stage action, more often questioning and being questioned, constructing a properly critical relationship. (It is almost impossible not to ask, given earlier remarks Janowski is on record as having made concerning contemporary opera stagings, what on earth he is doing here conducting a Ring with Castorf. But that is not necessarily the point.) The orchestra was responsive, capable of depth, within a largely lighter, earlier Romantic framework. Those great natural world frescoes might have registered more immediately, or catastrophically, but then, they do not necessarily do so on stage either. Barring the occasional corner, Janowski offered developmental fluidity and continuity, which is more than one often hears.

 

The Rheingold Wotan is a tricky one: we lose something – probably – should he seem no different from the character we see and hear in Die Walküre, let alone from the Wanderer. There will be no such problem here, I suspect, for Iain Paterson’s thoughtfully sleazy portrayal staked out a claim for the chief of the gods in the all too familiar here and now. Paterson’s way with the text – for the nth time, that does not simply mean the words – was shared by his estimable consort, newcomer Tanja Ariana Baumgartner. Her facial expressions on screen, suffering as she does, yet possessed of strength and a far from negligible Trump card (sorry!), were almost worth the price of admission alone. Daniel Behle was another new addition to the cast, and much the same might be said of the beauty of tone and intelligence of delivery he offered. Albert Dohmen was faced with an unusually tricky task, given the uncertain status of Alberich vis-à-vis Wotan; he navigated his particular demands impressively, even if his tone were not so black as ‘tradition’ might prescribe. Roberto Saccà’s wheeling and dealing as Loge had him very much the incarnation of instrumental reason – or perhaps a bargain, Route 66 approximation thereto. If I have seen and heard a more rounded portrayal of Fasolt in the theatre than Günther Groissböck’s, then I cannot recall it. Torn between the darker, perhaps simpler impulses of his brother, Karl-Heinz Lehner’s Fafner, and something not so very far, perhaps, from the genuine goodness Wagner divines in him, he brought all aspects of the text to memorable and – unusually, for this frigid, showy world – moving life. The splendidly un-pigeonholed Rhinemaidens and all other members of the cast brought intelligence, individuality, and – just as important – common company purpose to a truly collaborative piece of theatre.

 

Postmodernist modernists, then, as historians, interpreters, musicians, dramatists, participants? Yes, of course. We always were, were we not? Or were we? Is the Ring more cyclical, more Schopenhauerian, than we sometime allow? Yes, no, and maybe – or maybe not; for the struggle between Hegel(ianism) and Schopenhauer remains as strong, as real (wirklich?), at any rate as dramatically all-consuming as ever. But then, having constructed the narrative of my first book in just such terms, perhaps I would say that…