Terror in Munich: Munich Opera Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, Bavarian State Opera, 22 July 2016

Nationaltheater, Munich

Daland – Matti Salminen

Senta – Catherine Nagelstad
Erik – Wookyung Kim
Mary – Okka von der Damerau
Steersman – Dean Power
Dutchman – Johan Reuter

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)

Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Søren Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Asher Fisch (conductor)

Nationaltheater, Munich. Image: Felix Löchner

 

‘This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It is, perhaps, a line quoted too often; yet, even though it may not have been entirely accurate on this occasion, it came to my mind. Its accuracy might be questioned in several respects. Although the Bavarian State Opera eschewed Wagner’s Tristan-esque revision – rightly, in my view, that working better for Tannhäuser than The Flying Dutchman – this was not Götterdämmerung. Moreover, the end, as we experienced it, came more as silence and alienation than a whimper; close, then, but probably not quite the same. More important still, in retrospect – hindsight was inescapable on this particular occasion – the real catastrophe, or rather news of it, came after the end of the performance, the ‘real world’, as is far too often the case at the moment, offering the keenest of tragedy. So perhaps I should start again; I shall not, however, since I should like to start at the end, indeed feel compelled to do so, lest tales of Mrs Lincoln and her critique of the evening’s dramatic proceedings hover too close for comfort. For this was an evening – thank God – never to be repeated, one that even the most ambitious of stage directors would have struggled to envisage, let alone to create. Without in any sense wishing to minimise Peter Konwitschny’s achievement in this typically arresting, provocative, yet ultimately deeply, if not unrelievedly, sympathetic production, only Karlheinz Stockhausen, and before him Richard Wagner himself, might have come anywhere near this – and even then, not so very near.

 

The music stopped, then, just before the final bars; the lights fell. Silence fell too, the singers looking uneasily at each other: splendidly acted, I remember thinking. Then, following that caesura – inevitable memories of Konwitschny’s celebrated Meistersinger, even for those of us who only heard tell – we heard the final bars, albeit from what sounded like a distant, wind-up gramphone. I even wondered whether it might have been Konwitschny père’s recording, rendered more ancient, not that that matters. Redemption, then, was undercut not only by Wagner’s Tristan-less ending. (I am skating over the more complex issues of earlier versions, but that is not really the point here.) It was ironised – few directors manage to ironise Wagner successfully; Konwitschny does – by hearing it as something we all knew, all expected, were more or less hearing in our heads anyway, and yet then did not hear as we should. It was a little like King Marke’s appearance in Die Meistersinger: meaningful, consequential, a modernist rather than a post-modernist quotation.

 

Then we spilled out onto the Max-Joseph-Platz, quite unaware of Munich’s terrorist lockdown. My telephone had no reception; I could not contact a friend, to see whether he had been there or not. (It later transpired that he had not.) Many of my fellow opera-leavers seemed puzzled. We could not, for instance, enter a restaurant on the other side of the square; although a few people in there were eating, the doors were locked. Whilst trying to find out what was going on, I eventually received a call from my father, to check that I was safe; he began to explain, and armed police came into view. I learned after that those who were less quick on their feet than I had been were unable to leave the Nationaltheater for quite some time. I, however, had little choice but to try to walk back to where I was staying, armed police and other advisors pointing me and others first in one direction, then in another, often seeming to disagree with each other. Meanwhile, so far as I was aware – this was not the case, but it was what everyone seemed to think at the time – the U-Bahn was closed, since one of several gunmen (there was, of course, only one) had gone down there, armed. Walking past Odeonsplatz station was a little frightening, then; but it was the eeriness of the evacuated beer festival in the square – when I had walked to the opera, it had been full of beer, music, Dirndls, Lederhosen – that, if anything, chilled more. Having spoken to my brother too, I made it back to my host’s, who filled me in on events unfolded and unfolding – and immediately poured me a much-needed drink.

 

I learned much later that what I ‘should’ have seen and heard – Barry Millington had sent me his review of the production, but I had not read it at the time – was Senta, clearly furious with the Dutchman for not having trusted enough, setting one of the quayside barrels ablaze and mount her own act of terror. The explosion I ‘should’ have heard – unlike Wagner’s music, I did not know it – never came; darkness and alienation, nevertheless curiously, chillingly effective, did. No wonder so many onstage ‘acted’ confused; they had not, it seems, been acting at all. Presumably many had suspected a technical problem. The Bavarian State Opera had, it seems, decided to pull the explosion. For those in the know, was this perhaps a bit like ‘hearing’ Mahler’s missing third hammer-blow in the Sixth Symphony? (Thank goodness this was not a Mahler evening: that really would have been too much.) And so, the business of interpreting, reinterpreting, a particularised version of Konwitschny’s staging – never, let us hope, to be repeated – truly got under way; or at least it did in the odd couple of seconds between replying to anxious Facebook and Twitter messages from friends. (Why, they wondered, had I not replied? Most of them had no idea, of course, that I had been in the theatre for nearly two-and-a-half hours, without an interval.) I shall never forget the non-bang and the gramophone whimper, nor the further step our wretched world made towards Götterdämmerung.

 

Let me turn, though, to what I had seen and heard before. My memory and my experience are doubtless coloured by the ‘other’ events of that night. Nevertheless, what I saw and heard was impressive indeed, on its own terms. Our friends at Against Modern Opera Productions – how chilling it was to see, that very night, them railing, as if Hitler had never fallen, against ‘degenerate’ artists – might even have liked, had they not seen the word ‘Konwitschny’, the realistic designs from Johannes Leiacker, with which the mise-en-scène opens. For it is a (German) Romantic, even Gothic landscape that provides the backdrop. Apart from anything else, this is a ghost story: every one of us, every society, is overwhelmed by ghosts from our pasts. So too, of course, is opera. Nevertheless, ships are definitely ships; the sea and sky are definitely the sea and sky. The Dutchman’s crew, moreover, are most definitely Golden Age Dutchmen. The painterliness is, in one sense at least, ironic. AMOP would not have ‘got’ that; representations and their deconstruction would have gone unnoticed, uncomprehended. They would surely, though, have noticed the heightened venality not only of Daland, but his crew too (modern Norwegians, but as yet, not with an overwhelming Wagnerian clash between ghostly visitors and the ‘present’). Daland’s pockets of a few golden chains; the Steersman crowns himself with a golden crown; the other lads eagerly join in the bonanza: there is much jewellery to be had from the new ship’s Cardillac-like cargo, unless, as one of Wagner’s less-eagerly acknowledged forebears might have advised him, ‘L’or est une chimère’. A chimera of another variety haunts the Dutchman: the Angel in white who visits the stage. This Dutchman is a man, with sexual fantasies of his own; they distract him, pave the way for tragedy; they lead us to the second act.

 

Our opera-as-Pegida acquaintances would certainly have started screaming degeneracy, at the deliberate scenic contrast when the curtain rose upon that act. This is a swish health club, in which the wheels that spin are those on the exercise bicycles. Mary leads the class, the girls engaged in the uneasy camaraderie and rivalry of the mindless heteronormative pursuit for an ‘ideal’ physical form to please ‘the’ men they have either hooked or would like to hook. (Or is it the other way round?) Spinning, one might say, takes more than one guise: old visiting new, new visiting old; connections abound. Senta does not fit in; she arrives late for the class, and is far more interested in her Romantic painting. Erik is a creepy yet impatient voyeur: no mere innocent he. Yet it is Senta’s disruptive presence, encouraged by the reappearing Angel, that ultimately, prophetically, proves the turning point. It sets in process the Brechtian – house lights on – lecture to the audience she and the Dutchman give at the close of the act. ‘Romantic love? Yeah, right…’ Everything, then, is set up to fail, as it increasingly does during the third act, modernity and caricatured Old Dutchmen engaging in violent combat, the past, as it so often is, victorious – not least because the present refuses to learn from it. And then – well, you have heard the rest. Explosion there comes – on this occasion, came there not.

 

The cast was distinguished. Catherine Naglestad trod to powerful, even searing effect the line between, on the one hand, twin incitement to Verfremdung and terror, and on the other, heartfelt, Romantic or neo-Romantic ‘feminine’ suffering. Her top notes – and not just her top notes – thrilled; we were reminded that the female redemption problematized by Konwitschny, by us more generally, is, not only in Wagner but in so much opera, often effected through vocal presence. Johan Reuter traced this complex Dutchman’s mood swings with great skill; we sympathised with, even followed, his distractions and his demons. Matti Salminen’s final Daland – so, at any rate, I was informed – was a bluff yet knowing performance, a fine tribute to a great artist. Wookyung Kim came close to stealing the show with his sensitively sung, far-from-pushover Erik. Okka von der Damerau imparted dramatic as well as ‘merely’ musical meaning to the role of Mary, and Dean Power proved as appealing and as intriguing a Steersman as I can recall having heard. Choral singing was wonderfully full-blooded too. All, then, engaged with Wagner’s work as living drama.

 

The Bavarian State Orchestra was, unsurprisingly, in its element here. Its playing encompassed all manner of shades from darkest, grimmest of musical tragedy to echoes of Mendelssohn and Weber, apparently – if only apparently – more blithe, even fairy-like. This was orchestral Wagner as outstanding as one might hear from Daniel Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin. Asher Fisch might have benefited from a more Barenboim-like sense of the work’s melos; or at least he would have done for me, my preference being very much for a more ‘musico-dramatic’, less ‘number-opera’ approach to the work. The latter is, of course, perfectly justifiable in theory, but it tends, unless more strongly incorporated into a sense of an unbroken whole, to make parts of the work drag – especially when, as here, numbers such as Senta’s Ballad, are taken so slowly. Fisch undoubtedly knew what he was doing, though; he had me, on more than one occasion, rethink, rehear. The waltzing at the end of the first act – perfectly in keeping with fantasies venal and sexual, visually as well as musically realised – pointed far into the musico-dramatic future, to Strauss as well as to the integrative tendencies of later Wagner. The Flying Dutchman is in some ways the most difficult Wagner drama of all to bring off musically; no one would have been seriously disappointed, if at all, by this performance.

The rest was silence; until, that is, it became the noise of chaos.

For the Anniversary of the Paris Commune (18 March 1871): Women's Revolutionary Experience in Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore

A male-dominated picture if ever there were one...

From my After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from 'Parsifal' to Nono:

Al gran sole [carico d’amore], composed between 1972 and 1974, and premiered in Milan in 1975, was first directed by Yuri Lyubimov, head of Moscow’s Taganka Theatre. Lyubimov was already a specialist from stagings of repertoire works in many of the techniques he and Nono, as joint librettists, drawing upon a vast assemblage of other writers, would employ in Al gran sole: montage: simultaneity, representation of one character – insofar as ‘character’ does not mislead – by several actors or singers. Those ‘laterna magika’ techniques familiar from Intolleranza [1960] may thereby be understood to have been rejuvenated and extended. The historical scenes presented in this azione scenica – Nono by now rejected entirely the term ‘opera’, though so of course had Wagner – are told from different perspectives, albeit with a privileged place, allotted to women and their often unspoken, let alone unsung, histories, inverting the ‘normal’ order of things. (In a sense, though not necessarily in the same sense, [Olga] Neuwirth would attempt something similar in American Lulu.) Differing perspectives all serve to focus attention back upon the present, always a construct rather than a given, a state of affairs dramatically heightened by the productive tension between Nono’s present and our own. Texts originate – in alphabetical order, so as not to imply priority – with Brecht, Tania Bunke (the Argentine-East German ‘Tania the Guerilla’, who fought in the Bolivian insurgency alongside Che Guevara), Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, Gorki, Gramsci, Lenin, Marx, the Paris Communard Louise Michel (herself a ‘character’ in the action), Cesare Pavese, Rimbaud, and the Cuban revolutionaries Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaria, as well as other popular sources, such as the Internationale and two Russian revolutionary songs. Those sources are in themselves indicative; one would hardly expect that gathering of writers to be transformed into a paean to American militarism and consumer capitalism.

 

By the same token, however, the specific nature of the assemblage, just as in Berio’s Sinfonia – or, for that matter, Bach’s music for the Mass in B minor – is the thing. Three European societies are visited in the throes of revolution or would-be revolution. We observe, construct, participate in the 1871 Paris Commune, the Russia of 1905, and the industrial travails of post-Second World War Turin (‘around 1950’). Nono’s and Italy’s own Cold War(s) find themselves situated both within that broader revolutionary context and within specific conflicts of Christian Democracy against Italian Communism, and – recalling Intolleranza – the problem of migration, in this case Italian workers from the south seeking work in the richer north, more specifically those car factories to which Nono took his music and to which friends such as [Maurizio] Pollini and [Claudio] Abbado took theirs.

 

European history is for Nono now understood through the prism of recent developments such as the Chilean coup that had overthrown Salvador Allende in 1973 – a setback that had sent shockwaves through the European Left, ensuring that Allende’s government and the succeeding terror under Augusto Pinochet would retain emblematic status for decades to come – and the American invasion of Vietnam. Nono’s collage-like vision also encompasses conflicts in the Third World, as it was still called: Cuba, Bolivia, and Vietnam.[1] Revolutionary situations are thus brought into contact with each other, workers of the world uniting, that dialectic of engagement standing at the very heart of Nono’s understanding. For instance, following a prelude in which we hear words from Guevara, Michel, and Marx, the first scene has Tania Bunke question – such questioning being crucial to Nono’s and indeed to our critical framework – Brecht on the Paris Communards. The expression and expressive form of that questioning is entrusted, as the score has it, to ‘chorus and orchestra’. As in Moses und Aron, only more so, we might understand, with the composer’s warrant, the principal protagonist to be the chorus; yet behind it, there lies, consciously or otherwise, another chorus: Wagner’s Greek Chorus of the orchestra.

 

The year 2009 marked something of a red-letter day for Al gran sole, Europe witnessing two major stagings. The first was at the Salzburg Festival, directed by Katie Mitchell. Peter Konwitschny brought his production, originally seen in Hamburg, to Leipzig later that year. Konwitschny’s short-lived appointment as director of productions at Oper Leipzig was an important factor in this case, enabling him to bring to his new house an already-existing production, which would nevertheless be modified in context, as Nono would have hoped. Likewise, in Salzburg, Jürgen Flimm’s artistic directorship was crucial. He had also produced the work before, for Frankfurt in 1978, his first opera production and the premiere of Nono’s revised version of the work. Although, on this occasion, Flimm ceded that role to Katie Mitchell, the role of individual champions should not be underestimated.

Despite the obvious attractions and relevance to the work of Mitchell’s overtly metatheatrical approach, Konwitschny’s attempt to elicit more of a conventional revolutionary narrative actually cohered better in practice. Mitchell’s framing of the artwork and its production – in the ordinary as well as the theatrical sense – seems often to work better when applied to a work that does not already contain so much of its metatheatrical apparatus to begin with. For instance, her 2009 After Dido, for the English National Opera at the Young Vic Theatre, ‘a live music and film performance inspired by Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, at whose core stood a performance of Purcell’s opera, was able to go beyond the work to tell, in the words of the publicity material, ‘three contemporary urban stories of grief, lost love, departure, and death,’ which unfolded in self-contained locations on different sections of the stage. Yet After Dido was also to be found in ‘the making of’ these stories, unfolding before our eyes and ears. That ‘making of’ was not so much a story in itself, after the manner of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos; nevertheless, it acquired a dramatic thrust of its own, not least since it was with those ‘workings’ that the piece opened, as the prologue to a radio broadcast, during which we heard recorded snatches of other theatre music by Purcell. (Dido’s own Prologue is, of course missing, the missing parts of the work having in the past offered a spur to composer-conductors such as Britten, as well as to directors such as Mitchell.[2]) Applying similar techniques to Al gran sole seemed less necessary and, for all the technical prowess involved, did not entirely silence suspicions that a ‘one size fits all’ metatheatricality was being imposed upon the work. Konwitschny’s more ‘operatic’ approach came across as the more radical, even the more interventionist, and also the more dramatically and politically fruitful.

 

It was both heartening and instructive to witness the warmth of the reception and the size of the house for the last night of Konwitschny’s Al gran sole. The immediacy of the almost ‘operatic’ experience came as quite a contrast after the familiar Mitchell onstage screening and re-screening of scenes – and not solely in terms of staging. For an interesting and commendable aspect of both productions was how closely integrated staging and musical performance seemed to be. Whereas Konwitschny, aided once again by Helmut Brade’s designs, took one very much into the heart of Nono’s revolutionary ‘provocations’ of which Nono spoke as being the origins of all his work, the Salzburg performance had tended to look back at such matters as more a thing of the past, presenting a more æstheticised experience.

 

Much doubtless depends upon how relevant today one considers the writings and experiences of the men and women involved; or, to put it another way, how ripe one considers the time for a more sober, historical, even distanced assessment of concerns, which, following the events of 1989, might no longer be considered to be our own. In addition, there is a strong ideological impetus to claim those concerns as of little relevance, not least from the standpoint of the apparent ‘victors’ of German unification, on either side of the erstwhile Iron Curtain. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, such an impetus seems at least as strong on the so-called Left as the Right; indeed, one of the more striking aspects of thoughtful right-wing commentary on the financial crisis has been its willingness to look to Marx.

 

In any case, more direct revolutionary experience, as opposed to the concerns of modern-day political economy, was granted heightened relevance by the location, Leipzig, where, as the production team pointed out, there was no need to ask whether the audience would understand the barrage of revolutionary texts presented, at least when it came to Marx, Lenin, Brecht, and Gorki.[3] Or perhaps there actually was every reason in 2009 to question that belief; old revolutionaries have a tendency to forget that the world has ‘moved on’. At any rate, the timing of the premiere on 8 October would have made its point to some at least in the specific audience: the eve of the twentieth anniversary of what was the largest protest to date in the GDR’s history, 75000 demonstrators attending the Leipzig Monday Peace Prayers, bravely defying a regime that had just congratulated its Chinese counterpart for its ‘success’ in dealing with demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.[4] In little more than a week, Erich Honecker would have resigned. The role assumed by the then Gewandhauskapellmeister, Kurt Masur, in the events of 1989 is well known. Many in the orchestra would have played under him; some of the audience would have heard him conduct at the Gewandhaus, just on the other side of the the Karl-Marx-Platz – now, once again, the Augustusplatz – from the Opera.

There were concrete settings: the Paris Commune for the first part and Turin for the second part’s industrial unrest, although that did not prevent additional voices – and faces – from participating. Lenin as chorus leader was a witty touch, likewise the Punch and Judy politicians’ act of Adolphe Thiers and Bismarck. The latter pair, even in the original ‘text’, if one can speak of such a thing, veered still more closely to the ‘operatic’ or even to the commedia dell’arte. But it was with the Gorki-Brecht tale of the Mother – did Nono here have an echo of the Prigioniero Mother in his mind? – and Pavese’s prostitute Deola, that Konwitschny went for the jugular, particularly with respect to the factory strike. Malevolence was brought to vivid theatrical life, not only on the part of the factory owner – though there was something splendidly agitprop about him and about the worker who betrayed his comrades – but also, more crucially, with respect to the entire mode of production upon which such structures were based. Nevertheless, an almost traditional evocation of theatrical or Parsifal-like compassion, true in spirit to Nono’s own responses, won out with respect to the workers hemmed in by the walls of Brade’s designs. There was anger, of course, but the human spirit came first, recalling Dallapiccola, especially in the defiance of the Mother’s son, Pavel, a martyr and true hero to the socialist cause.

Every member of the cast contributed wholeheartedly and it would be more than typically invidious to single out anyone in particular. Iris Vermillion’s mother provoked, however, perhaps the most powerful emotional response, through the human dignity of a lonely yet true contralto voice: quintessential Nono, one might say, in thought and in practice. Tuomas Pursio’s Pavel was just as impressive: an angry young man who could so easily have gone off the rails, he was in a sense saved by the desperation of the situation: his finest hour. Pursio exhibited a sense of dangerous attraction, which could finally be focused rather than dissipated. Perhaps though there was also a warning (from Konwitschny, if not from Nono), of how revolutionaries might go astray, the erstwhile GDR proffering an obvious example. Moreover, in the context of the relationships explored above of both Henze and Nono with their home and quasi-adoptive countries, the intervention of an Italian composer in a ‘German’ matter offers another standpoint from which one might consider such questions.

Neither librettist nor composer left any stage directions – an interesting case from our standpoint. Were the vigilantes of ‘fidelity’ to the work to come across this, who knows what they might make of it? It is unlikely, however, given that their energies appear concentrated more or less entirely upon ‘standard repertoire’, a telling point in itself.

And here, from La Scala, are Abbado and Lyubimov bringing Al gran sole into existence. (I am afraid I cannot embed it here, but the link should work.)

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[1] Nono would most likely have rejected the term ‘collage’. He certainly spoke unfavourably of it in his 1959 Darmstadt lecture, ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart der Musik von Heute’, though it is not entirely clear whether he intended this as a general critique or in specific reference to Cage: ‘The collage-method has its origin in colonialist thought, and there is no functional difference between a hollow Indian incantation drum, which serves in a European household as a dustbin, and the orientalisms which are used by an occidental culture to make its aesthetical tinkering with material more attractive.’

[2] Britten did not go so far as to compose new music for Dido and Aeneas. However, in the edition he made with Imogen Holst – less far-reaching in its interventions than for the more problematical semi-opera, The Fairy Queen – he added at the end of the second act a trio for the Sorceress and witches, borrowing music from The Indian Queen, a chorus from the 1687 Welcome Song, Z.335, and a dance from the Overture to the play, Sir Anthony Love or, The Rambling Lady. He also went beyond additions of dynamic markings, phrasing, and articulation, to realise the harpsichord continuo part. The Britten version, conducted by the (new) composer, may be heard on in a 1959 BBC studio recording on CD (BBC Legends BBCB 8003-2).

[3] Alexander von Maravić, ‘Post scriptum Leipzig 2009,’ to ‘Die Liebe – vom Leben beladen . Zu Stück und Aufführung. Helmut Brade, Johannes Harneit und Peter Konwitschny im Gespräch mit Albrecht Puhlmann in Hannover 2004,’ in Oper Leipzig programme to Luigi Nono, Unter der großen Sonne von Liebe beladen/Al gran sole carico d’amore (2009), p.37.

[4] Dirk Philipsen, We Were the People: Voices from East Germany’s Revolutionary Autumn of 1989 (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1993), p.200.

Wishing Waltraud Meier a Very Happy 60th Birthday!

I heard the first of her two farewell performances to this, perhaps her most celebrated role, in Munich last July, in the very same Peter Konwitschny production (which, apparently, she did  not like very much, not that one could tell!) I reproduce my review below, (with apologies for formatting lapses, which I seem unable to disentangle):


What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question. Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem – though do they only seem? – to recognise, of that celebrated ‘und’. Yes, Tristan is just a shortened title, so we should not necessarily read anything into the disappearance of Isolde, but, whilst we clearly value both lovers and both singers portraying those lovers more or less equally – great Tristans perhaps more so, given their ridiculous rarity – it struck me as perhaps particularly perverse to have been referring to my seeing Tristan at the Munich Opera Festival, when, like so many in the theatre, I had been going especially to hear and, yes, to see Waltraud Meier. For these two performances in Munich, of which the one I heard was the first, have been announced as her farewell to the role. ‘Waltrauds Abschied’, then, I sentimentally called my visit, in dubious Mahlerian homage to a last performance that was actually to be a penultimate performance. I could, after all, hardly say I was off to hear Isolde – or maybe I could, even should, have done.

Of course, when I asked, ‘what do we call Tristan und Isolde’, I was not necessarily just referring to the title. There is no need to frown upon those calling it an opera; I am sure we have all done so at some point, or ought to have done so. But, as with all of Wagner’s dramas, it distances itself from the norms of opera and, perhaps still more so, the opera house. I am perhaps over fond of deploying this quotation from Boulez, but it so often seems to hit the nail upon the head. Whilst at work on the Ring at Bayreuth, Wagner’s great conductor-composer successor observed: ‘Opera houses are often rather like cafés where, if you sit near enough to the counter, you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!’ What was needed, Boulez noted approvingly, ‘was an entirely new musical and theatrical structure, and it was this that he [Wagner] gradually created’. It might then, not be entirely wrong to suggest that Wagner’s works deserve shielding form the opera house, at least as it currently exists. (Let us leave Bayreuth and its never-ending travails to one side for the moment.) However, by the same token, Wagner’s Handlung –his own term, ‘action’, a Teuton’s rendering of ‘drama’, admirably supersedes debates concerning nomenclature – is surely at home in Munich, if anywhere at all. For ‘Waltrauds Abschied’, then, and what I calculated must be at least my twentieth ‘live’ Tristan – sorry, I cannot yet bring myself to call it Isolde – there was something fitting to experiencing it for the first time in the house in which it had received its premiere, 150 years previously (10 June 1865).

Moving on a little from what we call Tristan und Isolde, what do we think it is ‘about’? Wagner was pretty clear, and I have tended to take him at his word, or at least some of his words. In 1859, summarising the work’s concerns for Mathilde Wesendonck, he omitted not only King Marke’s forgiveness, but also Tristan’s agonies at Kareol. True action, Handlung, had been irreversibly transferred to the noumenal world: ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ But as Peter Konwitschny, in a brilliant programme note, argues, quoting Heiner Müller, himself director of a renowned Tristan, ‘Ein Werk ist immer klüger als sein Autor.’ (‘A work is always cleverer than its author.’) Such, one might have thought, was a truism, and for many of us it is, although not for those strange people who seem to think it not only no cleverer but actually more limited, referring to the tedious mantra of a ‘composer’s intentions’ , whilst actually having no more interest in them than their most wild-eyed caricature of so-called Regietheater would. For them, the questionable taste of a questionable memory of their first exposure to a work seems to suffice. Handlung? Madame Tussauds, more like. (‘Museum’ would be too generous, given its connotations of learning, culture, and stewardship.)

Back, however, to Konwitschny. He makes the somewhat startling claim – at least to me – that Tristan is ‘ein sehr hoffnungsvolles Stück’ (‘a very hopeful piece’). As ever, it depends what one means – and it depends what one means by love, death, and so many other things. But Konwitschny, arguably taking his cue from the score, from Isoldes Verklärung, declines to see desolation, although, certainly not taking his cue from Wagner, he seems to tend more to Liszt’s conception of a Liebestod. And so, following our heroic couple’s shuffling off their mortal coils, sombrely dressed in black at the foot of the stage, below the other Handlung – if indeed that qualifies as such – we return to the raised level of that other Handlung, and see Marke and Brangäne visiting their graves. Love, ‘whatever that means’ – and we may understand that as part of Wagner’s ongoing internal battle between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer – may partly have won out, which sounds pat, but does not feel so. Perhaps we have experienced Wagner’s Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes (‘emotionalisation of the intellect’). More optimistically still – and it is surely a useful corrective at least to consider the non-pessimistic aspects or possibilities of the work – we might consider the words of Wagner’s fellow radical 48er, Arnold Ruge, writing of an envisaged religion of freedom, ‘the entire world of humanistic ideals, the entire Spirit of our times, must enter the crucible of feeling, out of which it must again come forth as a glowing stream and build a new world.’

Perhaps the most striking thing about Konwitschny’s production, first seen in 1998, is how it creeps up upon one; indeed, how its owl of Minerva truly only seems to take flight at dusk. The first act takes place, relatively conventionally, on a ship, doing pretty much what Wagner asks, and doing it rather well, although the colourful curtain, presaging aspects of the second act, has perhaps called into question our preconceptions before we are aware of their status as preconceptions . The realms of light and day, phenomenon and noumenon, make their presence felt after the taking of the potion through Michael Bauer’s excellent lighting: a distinction that continues, greatly to the enhancement of the drama. One certainly feels the tragedy in Tristan’s death upon Melot’s sword, but equally, one feels, knows that that is not the only story. The world of Tristan’s past, played to him on old video reels, complements what he tells us, without – this is crucial – overpowering it, as too many overtly psychological, even psychoanalytical readings do. Tristan is not ultimately about the hero’s childhood; it remains concerned with metaphysics, in one way or another. And the release provided by Isolde’s last song is married, not in an easy way but certainly in a fruitful way, to those final scenic aspects mentioned.

We came, of course, at least most of us did, above all for Meier. It is a tribute to the performance and production alike that she did not overshadow but indeed flourished. It would be unduly perverse, though, to overlook her contribution. Over the years in which she has sung Isolde, she has offered many, developing virtues, whether related to production, musical performance, or even the stage of her career. Here, everything seemed in more or less perfect balance – or, better, fruitful dialectic. Attention to words was second to none, likewise stage presence. Sustaining of a vocal line, however, was equally impressive. Suffice it to say, she did not play Isolde; she was Isolde.

Robert Dean Smith also gave the finest performance I can recall from him, and not just as Tristan. It was as tireless a performance as I can recall from anyone, without the disadvantages that often entails of sheer persistence trumping vocalism. The sheer refulgence of René Pape’s King Marke had to be heard to be believed; Markes rarely disappoint, but Pape achieved far more than not disappointing. Alan Held was a thoughtful, dramatic, even at times impetuous Kurwenal: all in character, impressive indeed. Michelle Breedt’s Brangäne was just the right foil for Meier’s Isolde; this was a confidant, beautifully sung, in whom one could – confide. Dean Power’s Young Seaman at the start was as sensitively sung as any I can recall. Kevin Conners offered a powerful embodiment of the Shepherd – Konwitschny’s two English horn players on stage an unforgettable image – and even the Steersman, Christian Rieger, made a fine impression with his all-too-brief line. Francesco Petrozzi presented ultimately inconsequential malevolence, as he should, in the role of Melot.

As Wagner wrote to Eduard Devrient of his ‘most musical score,’ Tristan has, and in performance should have, ‘the most vivid dramatic allusions totally at one with the dynamic of its musical texture’. That is asking a great deal of any conductor, orchestra, and cast. (And that is before we even consider that this is emphatically not a concert work, whatever dark hopes we might entertain upon seeing an unsatisfactory staging.) Philippe Jordan presented Wagner far more impressively than I have heard from him before, whether in Bayreuth or in Paris. The Handlung was as much in the orchestra as on stage, arguably more so, which is just as it should be. Pacing rarely, if ever, faltered, and details were presented without overwhelming (crucial woodwind lines in particular). The splendid Bavarian State Orchestra, whose praises I have been singing all week, excelled itself here. Dark of tone, yet clear and transparent where necessary, it was, in the pit that so much of Tristan und Isolde was truly brought to that life which its director argued so forcefully was of its essence.

Salzburg Festival (2): Die Eroberung von Mexico, 10 August 2015

Cortez (Bo Skovhus) and Montezuma (Angela Denoke)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Felsenreitschule

Montezuma – Angela Denoke

Cortez – Bo Skovhus
Soprano – Susanna Andersson
Contralto – Marie-Ange Todorovitch
First Speaker – Stephan Rehm
Second Speaker – Peter Pruchniewitz

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Manfred Voss (lighting)
fettFilm (video)
Peter Böhm, Florian Bogner (sound direction)
Bettina Bartz (dramaturgy)

Mixed Choir (on tape)

Movement Choir

ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

This was a magnificent evening in the theatre, to which my immediate reaction was to wish to see – and to hear – it all again. Partly, that was of course a matter of a rich work, experienced for the first time, in a rich staging, experienced for the first time, in rich performances, experienced for the first and last time. I am sure that I missed a great deal. I will do so in a staging of Parsifal, which I flatter myself I know reasonably well; how much more so will that be the case in a work hitherto unfamiliar? But I hope here to give a taste of my vivid theatrical experience of Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico).

 

 

Director Peter Konwitschny is at pains, in a programme interview, to dissociate the work from the merely ‘Mexican’. ‘We saw,’ he claims, ‘the sign warning us not to turn off into the dead-end marked “Mexico”’. Before that, we read Konwitschny: ‘It’s not about Europe/America or Mexico/Spain, but Man/Woman.’ Such might be the case for Konwitschny’s staging, though not, I think entirely, but I am less sure that it is the case for the Musiktheater (an interesting, not-quite-Wagnerism) itself. It is certainly not to be reduced to any one particular polarity, as the oft-repeated, Antonin Artaud-derived, ‘Neutral, Weiblich, Männlich’ (‘Masculine, Neuter, Feminine’ – not always, notably in that order) seems to remind us. And the space available for the mediating – or original? – ‘Neutral’ is not always clear, perhaps does not even survive, or at least survive in its initial form. Is it perhaps – and this might be a Wagnerism of sorts – in the orchestra? In Rihm’s own libretto, which, taking Artaud’s Le Théâtre du Séraphin as one of its building blocks, would thus both suggest and reject some form of verbal (perhaps even colonial?) supremacy?

 

With such an enterprise, it is, of course, difficult to know where to start, and I have probably stepped ahead of myself on one strand already. I shall attempt no clear division between work and staging, since such was not my experience – and indeed would not be possible on the basis of an initial encounter. (Frustrating, yet inevitable and indeed in some sense fruitful?) There is a perhaps predictable, yet already surprising, identification of Montezuma with the feminine – and not only in voice – and Cortez with the masculine. Rape occurs early on; does it not always? But before that, and returning at long last to my initial point concerning Mexico, we have had a long, introductory, introduction, or perhaps immersion, into the landscape. The first of three parts, ‘Die Vorzeichen’/’Omens’; ‘Bekenntnis’/’Confession’; ‘Die Umwälzungen’/’Upheavals’) has drummers surrounding the audience lead us in for a few minutes before the conductor has even arrived, and indeed before the audience has received the signal to sit and to be quiet. The drum melodies, Rihm writes, are ‘the melody “of a landscape that senses the approach of a thunderstorm”’. They do not – or at least, did not to me – feel ‘Orientalist’, or better ‘Occidentalist’; yet, at the same time, it is difficult, upon reflection, not to think that in some sense they must be, and, as the action unfolds, that they have, perhaps knowingly, been presented, even constructed as such. Oppositions, then, not entirely straightforward, continue to frame, to participate, to incite.

 

 

 

Rihm’s score, as often with this composer, covers a broad canvas in any number of respects. Yet, doubtless partly as a matter of the excellence of staging and all performances, though not only, I think, as a matter of that, it offers the composer at his integrative as well as his discursive best. Schoenbergian Sprechstimme – can we not but think of Moses at times? – vies or collaborates with choral writing and vocal amplification that bring to mind Nono and Lachenmann. Something far more Romantic, the ghost of Mahler perhaps, or of Strauss, swells up in the orchestral strings (fewer than one perhaps realises). Lyricism – whether vocal, or solo instrumental – that would surely have brought a smile to the face any of those composers has one melt, and at the same time has one suspect, has one question, not least in light of what we see and do not see on stage.

 

Konwitschny makes a strong case for his conception of male-female incomprehension. Not just in the violence, whether it be of Cortez towards Montezuma, of the movement choir (which, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, stands up and reveals itself as initially having been seated in the audience) towards the golden (yes, gold again brings us back to Moses and, of course, to the idea of the New World) female, danced portrayals of Malinche, ‘who speaks with her body’. The living room in which most of the action takes place – the rest surrounding that space – has at its centre Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer: both image and knowledge of Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera contribute to our understanding. In perhaps the most arresting image of all, still more so than the movement choir’s gang-rape of Malinche, Montezuma gives birth, we presume to Cortez’s child: the offspring is the offspring of Apple. fettFilm’s video images plunge us into a world of projected ‘apps’ and video games: Cortez’s war is virtual – remember those television images of Baghdad, and so many other victims of Western imperialism – but the virtual appears to be real and, of course is. Both sides suffer; both sides die, kill each other, and yet appear still to be in some sense alive. What is going on? What has gone on? The information age threatens to disclose all, yet leaves us all the more alienated. Montezuma’s transformation into a statue – here, a marrying, apparently pacified doll – does nothing to resolve, everything disquietingly to disturb, as does the further violence that ensues. And yet opera, the primæval and/or modern cry, reassert themselves at the end of each part, with verse from Octavio Paz, a striking, harrowing duet for Montezuma and Cortez at the very close. Or is it? Rihm’s libretto ends: ‘Ende (?) der Oper’. Images from the (Spanish/Mexican) past have fleetingly passed before our eyes: are they a clarification, or a ‘dead end’? Log in, to find out? Or should we turn away from our screens? Perhaps to listen?

 

 

Performances, as I suggested, were uniformly excellent. Angela Denoke and Bo Skovhus offered near-superhuman efforts as Montezuma and Cortez, range as impressive in dynamic terms as in pitch, in stage presence and conviction as in musical and verbal delivery. Cortez, backed up by speakers, never elicited sympathy, but suggested a broadening of our experience and understanding. Montezuma, shadowed by spectacular high soprano and deep contralto (Susanna Andersson and Marie-Ange Todorovitch) was anything but a sentimentally conceived victim. We did not – and surely should not – know what to do with him/her, and in some sense (s)he survived. I should probably add: in another sense, sadly, not at all. The contrast with the trendy banalities of Peter Sellars’s The Indian Queen, loudly proclaiming itself post-colonial, whilst all the time forgetting the ‘post’ bit, could hardly have been greater. This approached Wagnerian music drama, not on Wagner’s terms, but not opposed to them either. And, as with Wagner, the orchestra was perhaps most crucial of all. There could certainly no be gainsaying the outstanding contribution made by the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna, wisely, viscerally, reflectively directed by Ingo Metzmacher. Yes, this work needs to be seen – and heard – again.

 

 

 

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Tristan und Isolde, Bavarian State Opera, 8 July 2015

Nationaltheater

Tristan – Robert Dean Smith

King Marke – René Pape
Isolde – Waltraud Meier
Kurwenal – Alan Held
Melot – Francesco Petrozzi
Brangäne – Michelle Breedt
Shepherd – Kevin Conners
Steersman – Christian Rieger
Young Sailor – Dean Power

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)


Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Bavarian State Orchestra

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

 

 

What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question. Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem – though do they only seem? – to recognise, of that celebrated ‘und’. Yes, Tristan is just a shortened title, so we should not necessarily read anything into the disappearance of Isolde, but, whilst we clearly value both lovers and both singers portraying those lovers more or less equally – great Tristans perhaps more so, given their ridiculous rarity – it struck me as perhaps particularly perverse to have been referring to my seeing Tristan at the Munich Opera Festival, when, like so many in the theatre, I had been going especially to hear and, yes, to see Waltraud Meier. For these two performances in Munich, of which the one I heard was the first, have been announced as her farewell to the role. ‘Waltrauds Abschied’, then, I sentimentally called my visit, in dubious Mahlerian homage to a last performance that was actually to be a penultimate performance. I could, after all, hardly say I was off to hear Isolde – or maybe I could, even should, have done.

 

Of course, when I asked, ‘what do we call Tristan und Isolde’, I was not necessarily just referring to the title. There is no need to frown upon those calling it an opera; I am sure we have all done so at some point, or ought to have done so. But, as with all of Wagner’s dramas, it distances itself from the norms of opera and, perhaps still more so, the opera house. I am perhaps over fond of deploying this quotation from Boulez, but it so often seems to hit the nail upon the head. Whilst at work on the Ring at Bayreuth, Wagner’s great conductor-composer successor observed: ‘Opera houses are often rather like cafés where, if you sit near enough to the counter, you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!’ What was needed, Boulez noted approvingly, ‘was an entirely new musical and theatrical structure, and it was this that he [Wagner] gradually created’. It might then, not be entirely wrong to suggest that Wagner’s works deserve shielding form the opera house, at least as it currently exists. (Let us leave Bayreuth and its never-ending travails to one side for the moment.) However, by the same token, Wagner’s Handlung –his own term, ‘action’, a Teuton’s rendering of ‘drama’, admirably supersedes debates concerning nomenclature – is surely at home in Munich, if anywhere at all. For ‘Waltrauds Abschied’, then, and what I calculated must be at least my twentieth ‘live’ Tristan – sorry, I cannot yet bring myself to call it Isolde – there was something fitting to experiencing it for the first time in the house in which it had received its premiere, 150 years previously (10 June 1865).

 

Moving on a little from what we call Tristan und Isolde, what do we think it is ‘about’? Wagner was pretty clear, and I have tended to take him at his word, or at least some of his words. In 1859, summarising the work’s concerns for Mathilde Wesendonck, he omitted not only King Marke’s forgiveness, but also Tristan’s agonies at Kareol. True action, Handlung, had been irreversibly transferred to the noumenal world: ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ But as Peter Konwitschny, in a brilliant programme note, argues, quoting Heiner Müller, himself director of a renowned Tristan, ‘Ein Werk ist immer klüger als sein Autor.’ (‘A work is always cleverer than its author.’) Such, one might have thought, was a truism, and for many of us it is, although not for those strange people who seem to think it not only no cleverer but actually more limited, referring to the tedious mantra of a ‘composer’s intentions’ , whilst actually having no more interest in them than their most wild-eyed caricature of so-called Regietheater would. For them, the questionable taste of a questionable memory of their first exposure to a work seems to suffice. Handlung? Madame Tussauds, more like. (‘Museum’ would be too generous, given its connotations of learning, culture, and stewardship.)

 

Back, however, to Konwitschny. He makes the somewhat startling claim – at least to me – that Tristan is ‘ein sehr hoffnungsvolles Stück’ (‘a very hopeful piece’). As ever, it depends what one means – and it depends what one means by love, death, and so many other things. But Konwitschny, arguably taking his cue from the score, from Isoldes Verklärung, declines to see desolation, although, certainly not taking his cue from Wagner, he seems to tend more to Liszt’s conception of a Liebestod. And so, following our heroic couple’s shuffling off their mortal coils, sombrely dressed in black at the foot of the stage, below the other Handlung – if indeed that qualifies as such – we return to the raised level of that other Handlung, and see Marke and Brangäne visiting their graves. Love, ‘whatever that means’ – and we may understand that as part of Wagner’s ongoing internal battle between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer – may partly have won out, which sounds pat, but does not feel so. Perhaps we have experienced Wagner’s Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes (‘emotionalisation of the intellect’). More optimistically still – and it is surely a useful corrective at least to consider the non-pessimistic aspects or possibilities of the work – we might consider the words of Wagner’s fellow radical 48er, Arnold Ruge, writing of an envisaged religion of freedom, ‘the entire world of humanistic ideals, the entire Spirit of our times, must enter the crucible of feeling, out of which it must again come forth as a glowing stream and build a new world.’

 

Perhaps the most striking thing about Konwitschny’s production, first seen in 1998, is how it creeps up upon one; indeed, how its owl of Minerva truly only seems to take flight at dusk. The first act takes place, relatively conventionally, on a ship, doing pretty much what Wagner asks, and doing it rather well, although the colourful curtain, presaging aspects of the second act, has perhaps called into question our preconceptions before we are aware of their status as preconceptions . The realms of light and day, phenomenon and noumenon, make their presence felt after the taking of the potion through Michael Bauer’s excellent lighting: a distinction that continues, greatly to the enhancement of the drama. One certainly feels the tragedy in Tristan’s death upon Melot’s sword, but equally, one feels, knows that that is not the only story. The world of Tristan’s past, played to him on old video reels, complements what he tells us, without – this is crucial – overpowering it, as too many overtly psychological, even psychoanalytical readings do. Tristan is not ultimately about the hero’s childhood; it remains concerned with metaphysics, in one way or another. And the release provided by Isolde’s last song is married, not in an easy way but certainly in a fruitful way, to those final scenic aspects mentioned.

 

We came, of course, at least most of us did, above all for Meier. It is a tribute to the performance and production alike that she did not overshadow but indeed flourished. It would be unduly perverse, though, to overlook her contribution. Over the years in which she has sung Isolde, she has offered many, developing virtues, whether related to production, musical performance, or even the stage of her career. Here, everything seemed in more or less perfect balance – or, better, fruitful dialectic. Attention to words was second to none, likewise stage presence. Sustaining of a vocal line, however, was equally impressive. Suffice it to say, she did not play Isolde; she was Isolde.

 

Robert Dean Smith also gave the finest performance I can recall from him, and not just as Tristan. It was as tireless a performance as I can recall from anyone, without the disadvantages that often entails of sheer persistence trumping vocalism. The sheer refulgence of René Pape’s King Marke had to be heard to be believed; Markes rarely disappoint, but Pape achieved far more than not disappointing. Alan Held was a thoughtful, dramatic, even at times impetuous Kurwenal: all in character, impressive indeed. Michelle Breedt’s Brangäne was just the right foil for Meier’s Isolde; this was a confidant, beautifully sung, in whom one could – confide. Dean Power’s Young Seaman at the start was as sensitively sung as any I can recall. Kevin Conners offered a powerful embodiment of the Shepherd – Konwitschny’s two English horn players on stage an unforgettable image – and even the Steersman, Christian Rieger, made a fine impression with his all-too-brief line. Francesco Petrozzi presented ultimately inconsequential malevolence, as he should, in the role of Melot.

 

As Wagner wrote to Eduard Devrient of his ‘most musical score,’ Tristan has, and in performance should have, ‘the most vivid dramatic allusions totally at one with the dynamic of its musical texture’. That is asking a great deal of any conductor, orchestra, and cast. (And that is before we even consider that this is emphatically not a concert work, whatever dark hopes we might entertain upon seeing an unsatisfactory staging.) Philippe Jordan presented Wagner far more impressively than I have heard from him before, whether in Bayreuth or in Paris. The Handlung was as much in the orchestra as on stage, arguably more so, which is just as it should be. Pacing rarely, if ever, faltered, and details were presented without overwhelming (crucial woodwind lines in particular). The splendid Bavarian State Orchestra, whose praises I have been singing all week, excelled itself here. Dark of tone, yet clear and transparent where necessary, it was, in the pit that so much of Tristan und Isolde was truly brought to that life which its director argued so forcefully was of its essence.

 

Bayreuth, Parsifal, and the Artwork of the Future

(I was delighted to be invited to speak in late November at the Internationaal Wagner Congres Amsterdam 2013. Below is the text of my paper. A considerably longer, fully-referenced version will be published as an essay in a 2014 issue of the German journal, wagnerspectrum. However, it will not have the pretty pictures...)

 

In the beginning was Bayreuth. Except, of course, for Wagner, it was not the beginning: it was the end, at least an end, and in many respects a misleading one. Bayreuth, or perhaps better, the idea and ideal which have come down to us, mostly from the period following Wagner’s death, presents a gathered congregation as opposed to the freer assembly apparently envisaged by the younger Wagner. That leads us to ask: can one, should one, do more than smile at the utopian idea of a wooden theatre to be torn down at the same time as the score of Siegfried went up in flames, after but three performances – ‘Entrée: gratis!’ – given within the course of a week? Was the ‘artwork of the future’, outward looking, ‘universal’ as opposed to merely ‘national’, just as much a progressive pipe-dream, then, as the ‘springtime of peoples’ of the 1848-9 revolutions? As AJP Taylor’s ‘turning point’ whose ‘fateful essence’ was that Germany ‘failed to turn,’ or, still worse, Sir Lewis Namier’s sneering epitaph, the ‘revolution of the intellectuals’? Wagner’s part in the Dresden uprising is well known. It is nevertheless worth reiterating that, whatever the disillusionment of the 1850s and beyond, revolutionary hopes found themselves instantiated both in the subsequent course of much of European politics – liberals and sometimes even socialists found that they could accomplish a great deal by cooperation with a reinstated old order, whose reaction was in any case more military than aristocratic – and in Wagner’s later musico-dramatic deeds. The ‘artwork of the future’ remained, endured, even strengthened itself, for all the transformations, both pragmatic and principled, required by what we might call, in dubious homage to the former people’s democracies, the ‘actually existing Bayreuth Festival’.

 

Anniversary years naturally prompt us to look back, to take stock, yet also to look to the present and indeed to the future. After all, we find ourselves celebrating and considering ‘Wagner in 2013’ as much as we do ‘Wagner in 1813’. I shall consider Wagner principally through the lens of performance, through a lens focused upon a Bayreuth that looks forward and back. It is to one particular production that I shall specifically turn, to Stefan Herheim’s well-nigh ‘classic’ 2008-12 staging of the Bayreuth work par excellence, Parsifal, a production that explicitly engages with the work’s reception history, in order to turn in informed fashion to the twenty-first-century present and future of Wagner’s artwork. But before that, and with Herheim’s staging in mind, a broader consideration of the relationship between staging of a work from the operatic or at least musico-dramatic ‘museum’, and the historical process, may be in order.

 

Herheim opens with Parsifal at the time of its first, Bayreuth staging, in 1882. He 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’, we might all have become historians: a challenge already to the ‘gathered congregation’ of Bayreuth orthodoxy, whether that be Wagner’s own or not. 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 entertainment – purveyor of the diversions opponents of interpretative stage direction more often than not wish to see enacted. ‘Our theatrical public,’ he complained in Oper und Drama, ‘has no need for the artwork; it desires diversion from the stage, … well-crafted details, rather than the necessity of artistic unity.’

 

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. (We should be surprised if a director of Æschylus in the original did not read Greek, yet treat non-musical directors of Wagner with equanimity.) The issue of staging the Prelude to the first act was resolved more amicably, more fruitfully, than it would be with Barenboim in Lohengrin. Initially, the conductor, Daniele Gatti was sceptical, concerned that the audience might be distracted from the music. But Herheim made the excellent point in an interview 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.’ That, in a sense, is a perfect restatement of the echt-Wagnerian dialectic of music drama; the various elements – if indeed they may be considered separate elements at all, Wagner having taken great pains to stress, in Hegelian fashion, their initial unity in the ancient world – gain in intensity by mutual interaction. Greater emphasis upon the staging heightens rather than lessens the effect of the orchestra, and so forth.

 

Crucially, that symbiosis enabled, even provoked, the emergence of an idea of the score as redeemer. 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 ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ 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 to rejoice or rather to wallow.

For the conservative caricature of modern Regietheater, which in certain cases has an element of truth to it, a caricature in which, for the sake of argument, Monsalvat is arbitrarily relocated to a multi-storey car-park in Essen, and references to the automobile industry become determining features, bears no relation to the exploration of music, words, reception, and so much more offered by Herheim and other probing directors. Still less does it respond to Wagner’s strenuous challenge. Interestingly, Peter Konwitschny has, for very similar reasons, avowedly dissociated himself from the Regietheater label, it perhaps being no coincidence that Konwitschny, the son of a celebrated conductor, Felix, is himself a musician: 

I do not consider myself a representative of the Regietheater. Often, these directors present one single idea, such as for example staging Rigoletto in an empty swimming pool or in a slaughterhouse. These ideas are not consequentially followed through and explored, and in most cases, the singers stand next to each other on stage just as unconnected as in conventional productions.

My stagings, on the other hand, aim to return to the roots: to get to the core of the pieces, through the jungle of interpretative traditions, which, in most cases, have distorted the pieces. The accusation that this is ‘too intellectual for the average viewer’ is absurd and exposes the enemies of such theatre as opposing new insights.

Indeed, the pernicious anti-intellectualism of such attacks as such, as opposed to perfectly justified criticisms of particular productions, reveals itself to be a strange sort of intellectual condescension. No one reading Hegel or listening to Wagner for the first time expects to ‘understand’ everything; nor does he mind when he ‘fails’ to do so. Were there a final, achievable, destination, we should then give up, having ‘mastered’ Parsifal or the Phänomenologie des Geistes, and then move on to something else. Re-enactment of the sort envisaged by the decriers of interpretation makes no more sense here than it does in performance. 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, or ‘stage-festival-consecration-play’, employed for Parsifal. 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), ridiculous (Debussy, albeit continuing to honour the score alone as ‘one of the loveliest monuments ever raised to the serene glory of music’), 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 with, 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.

 

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’. 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!’ 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 ne plus ultra.

 

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 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 anti-Semitism might be expressed in Wagner’s drama. (It notably does not propose answers.) Amfortas now 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 is Cabaret Master of Ceremonies; for now, we behold Weimar Germany, our Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and fishnets. 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, ‘new’ video technology included – 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.

 

Then, the final act opens in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried. Parsifal’s coming 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 post-war population crosses the stage, victims of what has gone before and, prospectively at least, of the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder 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 Verwandlungsmusik. 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?

 

If anything, politics stand still more starkly at the heart of the final scene. Amfortas’s trial – in every sense – takes us from post-war Nuremberg to the present-day Bundestag. The problematical nature of charismatic leadership is here for all to see. Parsifal is not one of the trio seen at the close, presumably hastening us to an uncertain future; instead, we find ourselves in the hands of Gurnemanz, Kundry – she does not expire – and a young boy. Or is he Parsifal, and has the whole drama been a dream or, rather, the ultimate nightmare? Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’, the purported Sonderweg of German history? There is certainly no solace to be had from the bickering politicians of the Bundestag, the flag of the Federal Republic draping Titurel’s coffin, yet Parsifal seems to have offered at best a dead-end, a touch of snake oil: a modern politician? Amfortas, like Siegfried, seems to have gained in dignity through death. Nihilism, as Nietzsche would doubtless have had it? Or Wagner’s lifelong anarchism? Again, questions are dramatically suggested rather than dogmatically answered.

 

What of Herheim’s aforementioned turning 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’, the work, is also ‘educating us’ – not in merely didactic but dramatic fashion. As Horace put it many years earlier, ‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’. 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. For, in the words of Carl Dahlhaus, ‘It is precisely in order to radicalise conflicts – so that “resolutions” are ruled out – that dramas are written; if not, they would be treatises.’ It is for precisely that reason that we perform rather than re-enact, that we study as well as perform, that we think rather than wallow, that history enlivens rather than deadens, that the artwork is of past, present, and future. Indeed, it is also for those reasons that music, as Daniel Barenboim has pointed out in his work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, has the potential, the extraordinary power, if not to resolve political conflicts, then to bring people together, to have them work together – and that includes the audience. 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 have suggested, then, some ways in which Wagner, viewed in performative terms, might use the past, often highly controversial, to look to the future. The idea of an ‘artwork of the future’ remains in many respects as burningly relevant as it did during the years of Wagner’s Zurich exile. An artwork that engages critically with the concerns of humanity and yet strenuously declares the (transcendental?) value of art as extending beyond mere pamphleteering, and which in form and content dramatises, problematises that tension is not simply saying something about art and its reception. As Ludwig Hevesi’s words, inscribed upon the Vienna Secession Building, have it, ‘To every age its art, to art its freedom’. That need not, indeed cannot, be accomplished by all-too-easy evasion, by distancing oneself from the musical works. Herheim’s dramaturgy, as discussed, enabled the music – not in a now discredited sense of ‘absolute music’, with the reactionary, neo-Romantic connotations that has acquired, but in a critical sense more suited to our time, which will doubtless thereafter be subject to criticism – to emerge as its own redeemer, the immanent theology of Parsifal thereby renewing and reinvigorating itself

 

Bayreuth and Wagner’s artwork of the future might yet, then, prove further beginnings, in a sense that both honours, in Meistersinger-fashion, the claims of art as time-honoured tradition and, as Wagner always insisted, reaches beyond the restricting limits of art merely for its own sake. Moreover, a Franconian festival theatre and its surroundings might prove just the place, out of season, for the first intégrale of Stockhausen’s neo-Wagnerian Licht cycle, indeed for a host of new works. Without falling prey to the ‘operatic’ danger we saw Boulez sketch above, custodians of the Wagnerian repertory would have nothing to fear – and everything to gain.