Images: Bernd Uhlig (from 2021 premiere, with a considerably different cast) Hagen (Albert Pesendorfer)
Siegfried - Clay Hilley
Brünnhilde – Ricarda Merbeth Hagen – Albert Pesendorfer Gunther – Thomas Lehman Gutrune, Third Norn – Felicia Moore Alberich – Jordan Shanahan Waltraute – Annika Schlicht First Norn, Floßhilde – Lindsay Ammann Second Norn, Wellgunde – Karis Tucker Woglinde – Lee-ann Dunbar
Director – Stefan Herheim Revival directors – Eva-Maria Abelein, Silke Sense Set designs – Stefan Herheim, Silke Bauer Costumes – Uta Heiseke Video – Torge Møller Lighting – Ulrich Niepel Dramaturgy – Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, Jörg Königsdorf
Chorus and Additional Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (chorus director: Jeremy Bines)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Nicholas Carter (conductor)
All things, good, bad, and indifferent,
must come to an end; or must they? The idea that Wagner’s Ring is cyclical
is widespread – many routinely refer to attending a ‘cycle’ – but it is at
least open to criticism. More on that later, but this Deutsche Oper Ring
has certainly come to an end with performances of great distinction, perhaps
the most uniformly well cast I have ever seen, and with astonishing conducting
from Nicholas Carter, certainly the best I have heard since Daniel
Barenboim in 2013. Not, of course, to forget the superlative playing given
throughout by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, showing itself once again to
be the match of any (Wagner) orchestra in the world, the Staatskapelle across town
included. No Ring would be anything at all without Wagner’s reimagined Greek
Chorus, leading, commenting, questioning, seducing, thrilling, and chilling;
this one, as translucent as it was darkly malevolent, as weighty as it was
agile, did all that and more. Only now, in the final instalment, it was joined
by Wagner’s actual chorus, those of the Deutsche Oper as seemingly always
excelling not only vocally but as dramatic participants onstage.
A Ring in the theatre is, of course,
its production too; this marked the end of Stefan Herheim’s memorable staging.
No Ring is perfect: it is not, should never be, that sort of work. It is
too big, too unmanageable, too much a ‘world’ for that. This has contributed
much, though, not least from its insistence on Wagner’s ‘three days with
preliminary evening’ as a musically driven drama that navigates between the
concerns of an ongoing rite and something explicitly contemporary. In that, at
its best, it has penetrated to Wagner’s own mythological practice, doing what
it has shown and what it has suggested to us. If the final scene of Siegfried
proved for me a rare disappointment, it also gained from what happened next—though
I still think it would have benefited from heightened attention to the drama of
Siegfried and Brünnhilde and less to the crowd of copulating extras around them.
Here, though, at the onset of the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, the
generational shift (which has already, strictly, been accomplished) is accompanied
by a scenic one; or rather, the action passes between two basic settings
throughout, the old one of the rehearsal room and piano, and the new one of the
Deutsche Oper itself.
We probably should not make too much of a
distinction, or maybe we should, between actors and chorus. Perhaps some have
gone on to be audience members, whilst some continue in their movement and ‘extra’
roles. The more important thing, I think, is that two related worlds less
collide than interact. There is, after all, little point in telling a story if
no one is there to listen. In any case, the actors surround blindfolded Norns
(echoing the state at one point of the treble Woodbird), choreographically
heightening the drama just as they did to form the Rhine in the first scene of Das
Rheingold—and just as they will in the final scene of Götterdämmerung
to form the fire, aided by striking red lighting. Again, some of the most
powerful effects are the simplest and, as Wagner put it, the most ‘purely human’.
Meyerbeer’s ‘effects without cause’ are neither his business nor ours, whatever
the (exaggerated) claims that have been made for the elder composer’s influence
on this drama. A degree of grand opéra, yes, but other composers in that
genre, the creator of Rienzi included, loom larger, which is not to say
that a blazing account of the second act trio – courtesy of the orchestra,
Carter, Ricarda Merbeth, Albert Pesendorfer, and Thomas Lehman did not thrill –
for it very much did.
Back for now, though, to Herheim. (In a
sense, the distinction is false, albeit necessary to say anything at all.) The
theatrical ‘business’ of dressing up continues to loom large, enabling
characters to become – perhaps even to leave behind – ‘themselves’, as well as
actors to become characters. White sheets become improbably large wedding
dresses for Brünnhilde and Gutrune, their entanglements, their allure, and
their physical dangers offering visual metaphors aplenty. Rhinemaidens, in
losing their external trappings, become Norn-like, hieratic, in their warnings
to Siegfried, Carter’s quasi-liturgical handling of the score both reflecting
and leading that. Hagen assumes Siegfried’s heroic costume, whereas Siegfried
fatally loses his. Gunther is likewise transformed from initial silliness (not
a criticism, but rather a commendation of Lehman’s alert performance) into
something more. The white tie of an ‘artist’ is the key, or at least it seems
to be, as it is for Siegfried’s transformation (as well, undoubtedly, as
whatever it is Hagen slips into his drink). Their scene on Brünnhilde’s rock is
very well handled, both initially equals, sharing the lines, before Gunther
fails and Siegfried must take over ‘as’ Gunther—before, of course, returning to
the Gibichung Hall, where the sleep into which he keeps falling (Hagen’s
doing?) overcomes him. It seems also to overwhelm during his final scene,
staggering about, not ‘himself’—until he can finally become himself at his
death, fully in keeping with Wagner.
Gunther (Thomas Lehman), Siegfried (Clay Hilley)
In the meantime, Hagen’s departure into the
audience for his watch proves, with further Brechtian use of house lights at
critical moments, a telling and striking coup de théâtre. First he finds
Waltraute there, his intimidation a prod to the mission she undertakes to her
sister. Then he conducts the dialogue with Alberich from there, his father on
stage, Siegfried sleeping. Alberich’s presence as clown of death, spying the
action, even trying to force the ring from the sleeping Siegfried’s hand,
visually informs not only his son’s appearance but that of zombie guests to the
abortive weddings. As we hear the Nibelung and his ring musically envelop the
action, so does he colour the participants too. Not for nothing does he manically
play the piano at the end of the first act and resume his performance at the
beginning of the second. His longtime antagonist appears too, actors assembling
to show, first during Waltraute’s narration and on occasion thereafter,
Valhalla’s throng of gods and heroes, a weary Walvater finally descending to
the piano to receive Brünnhilde’s ultimate judgement.
Before (re-)turning to the close, I should add
a little about the vocal performances. Merbeth combined the headstrong virtues
of her Walküre Brünnhilde and the lyrical ones of her Siegfried performance
into a memorable assumption of her role. Clay Hilley again proved tireless – as
tireless as a Siegfried can ever really be – and committed as the doomed hero. Pesendorfer
and Jordan Shanahan’s Hagen and Alberich cast spells both dark and magical
through voice and stage presence alike. Lehman’s Gunther and Felicia Moore’s
warmly sympathetic Gutrune captured the difficult, sometimes thankless essence
of their characters, always alert to the particular demands of the staging.
Annika Schlicht’s chalumeau-like Waltraute was as much of a vocal and dramatic
joy as her Fricka. Norns and Rhinemaidens were uniformly excellent. This was, I
am delighted to reiterate, at least the equal of any Ring I have heard
in uniform excellence of casting, and perhaps more than that. There may have
been starrier casts; there may have been individual performances ‘bettered’ in
one way or another, for there always will be. Yet across the board, the
Deutsche Oper’s strong sense of company will take some beating.
Following departure of all from the stage
and a splendidly oracular image summoning up memories of Delphi, but also of Patrice
Chéreau and Pierre Boulez revelling in Wagner’s own revisiting its prophetic indeterminacy,
we return to where we began: rehearsal room with lights, emergency exit, and piano,
no sign of suitcases, refugees, or anyone/-thing else we have seen in between. A
cleaner (with a hint of Erda to her?) comes to check all is as it should be.
All has been washed away, or has it? Others will doubtless come along to stage
the work again. The question remains whether they will have learned anything.
For Wagner’s ‘watchers’, those ‘men and women moved to the very depths of their
being’ were all along intended to imply this was not entirely a return, that
consciousness had been created or raised. The Ring ends not in E-flat-major,
but in D-flat, the key of Valhalla. Over, then, to those who have made it, us
included. Only, given the achievements to date of ‘human consciousness’, who
would bet against catastrophic repetition?
Images: Bernd Uhlig (from 2021 premiere) The Wanderer (Iain Paterson) and Alberich (Jordan Shanahan)
Siegfried – Clay Hilley Mime – Ya-Chung Huang The Wanderer – Iain Paterson Alberich – Jordan Shanahan Fafner – Tobias Kehrer Woodbird – Nicolas Schröer Erda – Lindsay Ammann Brünnhilde – Ricarda Merbeth
Director – Stefan Herheim Revival director – Philine Tiezel Set designs – Stefan Herheim, Silke Bauer Costumes – Uta Heiseke Video – Torge Møller Lighting – Ulrich Niepel Dramaturgy – Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, Jörg Königsdorf
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Nicholas Carter (conductor)
Mime (Ya-Chung Huang)
Emblems of the refugees’ arrival but also perhaps
of impending departure, suitcases once again form and delimit the set, the rehearsal
piano at their centre once again omnipresent. Wagner’s life and work becomes their
own, our own. It certainly has mine since I first fell under its spell, and
despite occasional attempts to escape – or at least to take a break – it never
works. This Deutsche Oper Ring is not helping in that vain attempt, a somewhat
disappointing third act notwithstanding.
A Ring mystery is what its ring
actually does, what its powers actually are. They certainly do not tally with
what the characters tell us about it. Must one in some sense believe? Is it a
form of theology, as Wagner, keen student of Feuerbach, might understand it?
Probably. At any rate, it notably does Alberich’s bidding at the start, its yellow
light focused at the piano, opening its lid, and thus initiating the Bühnenfestspiel’s
‘second day’. He and Wotan, Schwarz-Alberich and Licht-Alberich, as Wotan-as-Wanderer
will call them, watch and wander from the start. They are not always present, yet
often they are. Tellingly, the Wanderer watches the whole first scene from above,
and Alberich appears, to Mime’s anger, during the second. (Perhaps, again, his
brother might actually have been able to help him, like Siegfried, like the
Wanderer, but the clever craftsman does not want to know.) Their final confrontation, at least onstage,
in the first scene of the second act attains a tragic magnificence and import such
as rarely, if ever, have I encountered. That again, is surely in part Nicholas
Carter’s doing, proportions of the act as a whole seemingly reconsidered, so
that, like the final act of Die Walküre, thoughts of lopsidedness – the so-called
‘Forest Murmurs’ often overstay their welcome, but not here – never
materialise. It is also surely that of Stefan Herheim’s staging; the two, along
with vocal-dramatic performances proceed together, more or less indivisible (although
for the purposes of writing, one must start somewhere). The two figures are, of
course, themselves refugees here: they have stepped forward, assumed roles; yet,
like the boys in Lord of the Flies, however changed, they must also remain
who they were, albeit within a different, often Brechtian framework of
storytelling.
Music continues to play its stage role. Where
Alberich, in a sense, founded his enterprise on an instrument he had found, or
perhaps brought with him, Mime has expanded his endeavours into a brass
workshop, where instruments hang from the ceiling. It is a slightly odd assortment
and that, presumably, is the point. Mime is not an ‘artist’, but a ‘craftsman’;
Wagner always upheld that Romantic distinction, which directly colours his creation
of Mime and Siegfried. An artist would doubtless have brought in some other instruments.
Incapable of moving beyond his narrow, technical purview, Mime continues to do the
same thing—as, of course, he does in attempts to reforge the sword. Not for
nothing in Herheim’s cunning elision of Wagner and Mime (here, for better or
worse, in striped top) is the ‘Wagner tuba’ a key exhibit. Dubious tendencies
from Wagner reception –much as we might wish, we cannot always simply ignore
them – resurface. Mime’s dwarf-like quality and large head surely offer a nod
to strange claims made concerning Wagner’s height and (worse still)
physiognomy. Nietzsche would have laughed; the Wanderer does.
The craftsman’s resourcefulness is important,
though, at least if it may be harnessed to something more. It is possible, at
least for Siegfried, to have bellows created from what is available, in a
splendid nod to the original steam technologies of Bayreuth. Fafner also emerges
from the suitcases and instruments too, brass teeth fairly gleaming, basic
sheet props and colourful lighting again working their wonders for the rest of
his maw. For lighting (Ulrich Niepel) can accomplish so much, simply yet starkly,
as in Mime’s silhouette of brief power, or its prospect, when he holds the
Wanderer’s spear. A vision of the world, which Mime, like Alberich still would ‘win’,
is unfurled, again using what has emerged from the refugees’ possessions.
Siegfried and Mime
It is a pity, perhaps, that Siegfried’s appearance
– notably, like that of his father – is so ‘historically’ bound as (to us) to
seem ridiculous, but that is surely deliberate, the flaws of ‘heroism’ present
from the beginning. A striking innovation, though, is the return of Siegmund
and Sieglinde in a Hänsel und Gretel-like ‘Dream Pantomime’. Siegmund
may have rejected the immortality of Valhalla, but there are other ways to
return, to guide (such as Mime never could). That the Woodbird, an excellent boy
treble (Nicolas Schröer) emanates from this world – a very junge Siegfried,
if you will – makes a significant contribution to the psychoanalytical
framework. So too does the dragon’s blood in which he becomes mired and the
pitching of appearance somewhere between clown (picking up from Das
Rheingold) and (from Die Walküre) zombie, a disconcerting contrast
with fresh youthfulness of voice.
Carter seemed to offer a presentiment in
the first act, which (rather than vice versa) on one occasion seemed
very much to approach Humperdinck’s score. Perhaps it was my imagination, but
it struck me at the time and before I knew what was to come on stage. His
direction of the once-again outstanding Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper remained
deeply and consistently impressive, both tied to and leading the action onstage.
So too did the cast’s performances. Iain Paterson proved a typically thoughtful
Wotan, Jordan Shanahan making a welcome return as an ambiguous clown-Alberich,
readable and ‘relatable’ on multiple levels, without forsaking the destructive
impulse at his core.
Siegfried and Mime
Ya-Chung Huang’s Mime was, quite simply,
one of the best I have seen and heard, turning the Siegfried-Mime axis into a
true battle of very different tenors, for which Clay Hilley’s tireless
Siegfried should also receive due credit. Both learn to conduct, as to play the
piano, to lead musically and seemingly according to the score, but do they
bring it to life? That requires the return of the refugees—and discarding of
the old (Walküre) score. Huang’s ability, doubtless enhanced yet only enhanced
by make-up and costume, to play his role as if Mime were a puppet-clown,
grotesque yet also human, captured so much of the role, its uncomfortable
aspects included. Above all, it reminded us of Wagner’s great achievement in
showing us, as the late, greatly lamented Michael Tanner pointed out, the sheer
misery that it is to be Mime. Tobias Kehrer continued and extended his excellent
work as Fafner, that extraordinary last gasp of recognition – ‘Siegfried!’ –
given its proper, prophetic, yet chilling worth. I assume his return to ‘life’,
or whatever it was, was as much a recognition of the underlying Brechtian ideas
as it was of his acquiring zombie-status, though perhaps it was both. The
Woodbird’s frustrated waving him away, getting in the way of the story, was a
nice touch, but I did wonder whether it might have been better all round not to
present the problem in the first place.
The Woodbird, Siegfried
What, then, of the third act? Musically,
again, there was much to admire, though even in that respect – and perhaps more
on account of inextricable connection with stage action than any actual flaws –
it held my attention less. There was certainly nothing to complain about in
Lindsay Ammann’s return as Erda, beautifully sung and enunciated, the character,
now more dishevelled, awakened from her sleep and emerging once again from the
prompter’s box. Ricarda Merbeth’s surprise return, in place of the previously
advertised Elisabeth Teige, as Brünnhilde will have disappointed no one either.
Her radiant performance, quite an achievement given its notorious demands so
late in the evening, was quite the tonic, insofar as one could avoid
distraction, from the events around her. For whilst I can rationalise Herheim’s
decisions here, for the first time I felt rather less than convinced.
The first two scenes go mostly as they ‘should’.
No harm in that, quite the contrary, and the third seems nicely set up by the
now apparently proficient Siegfried summoning Brünnhilde’s mountain and fire
from the piano. Unless, though, I was missing something – it would not be the
first time – there is not much more to it then return of the refugees, their ‘identification’,
first among straightforward traditional gender lines, with Siegfried and Brünnhilde,
then, taught by the score (whose ubiquity becomes more than a little tedious)
and, presumably, also by what the two principal characters sing, turning more
fluid in orientation and staging an orgy around them. It is all very well done,
to the extent of unfortunate distraction from the two singers, ‘parked and barking’.
Again, I assume that to be the point, yet it ultimately seemed to me misguided.
I doubt this was an attempt to hold up Wagner’s drama as insufficient, or intolerably
Romantic. Frank Castorf did so in his Walküre and it proved the weakest
part of his Ring. Yet Castorf arguably proved most compelling here in
Siegfried, when his conception found itself guided by the weight of Wagner’s
drama, even perhaps by a mediated version of its Romanticism. Is a basic Brechtian
point about storytelling, ‘enhanced’ by young people in white underwear doing
their thing, enough? There are plenty of places one might go in Berlin to see
the real thing, if that is what one is after.
It
might be tempting to see this ‘problem’, if problem it be, as mirroring Wagner’s
own in completing the Ring. After all, it was at precisely the same
place, the end of the second act, that he ceased his compositional work on it
for twelve years. Turning instead to Tristan and Die Meistersinger,
he wrote to Lisztthat he had ‘led my young Siegfried into the beautiful
forest solitude; there I have left him beneath a linden tree … he is better
there than anywhere else. – If I am ever to take up this work again, it must
either be made easier for me, or else I myself must in the meantime make it
possible to bestow this work on the
world in the fullest sense of the word.’ Yet when Wagner did return to his
Siegfried, to the linden tree, or rather to the scene that followed in which
all is both changed and resolved, it was still more under the spell of
Schopenhauer and his musical aesthetics (as well as his broader philosophy).
That, really, should have been right up Herheim’s street. I shall happily eat
my words if all becomes clear in Götterdämmerung; for now, however, I register
my first note of dissent.
Images: Bernd Uhlig (from 2020 premiere, with a different cast)
Siegmund – Daniel Frank Sieglinde – Elisabeth Teige Hunding – Tobias Kehrer Wotan –Derek Welton Fricka – Annika Schlicht Brünnhilde – Ricarda Merbeth Siegrune – Arianna Manganello Roßweiße – Karis Tucker Gerhilde – Felicia Moore Ortlinde – Maria Motolygina Waltraute – Elissa Pfaender Helmwige – Flurina Stuckl Schwertleite – Alexandra Ionis Grimgerde – Nicole Piccolomini Schwertleite – Lauren Decker Hundingling – Eric Naumann
Director – Stefan Herheim Revival director – Silke Sense Set designs – Stefan Herheim, Silke Bauer Costumes – Uta Heiseke Video – William Duke, Dan Trenchard Lighting – Ulrich Niepel Dramaturgy – Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, Jörg Königsdorf
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Nicholas Carter (conductor)
What if the Volsung twins did not engage
our sympathies so fully as they usually do? What if their actions were less
positive than we tend to think? Sometimes, recently, those questions have been posed
implicitly by what still seems to me a strange desire positively to reassess
the Fricka of Die Walküre. Not that Wagner is the only point of reference
here, but the Ring’s creator was very clear on this, both in the work ‘itself’
and in other writing. A letter to Theodor Uhlig (12 November 1851, so before he
had started work on the music) speaks of Wotan’s ‘struggle with his own
inclination and with custom (Fricka)’ and indeed Fricka herself refers to ‘the
guiding rope of custom, rent asunder,’ which she would ‘bind anew’. Latterly,
some seem to have decided to take the part of Fricka’s family-values morality. Like
every character – this is part of Wagner’s greatness – Fricka is given her due,
and should be in performance. A caricature, whilst tempting, will get us
nowhere. What I took from the first act of Stefan Herheim’s Walküre – thus
before her reappearance – was something slightly different: a willingness, refreshing
if unsettling, to challenge the dominant narrative concerning Siegmund and
Sieglinde, a challenge to which Fricka would assent, albeit for different
reasons. Sieglinde has still been deeply wronged, of course: the evening begins
with her, traumatised, unable to make the central stage piano sound. Only after
several fruitless attempts does the orchestra launch its storm. It is a
questionable pursuit in ‘real life’, of course, to cast doubt on how trauma may
manifest itself; perhaps the same should be the case here. That said, many of Siegmund
and Sieglinde’s acts seem designed to dissipate sympathy, from her insistence
on kissing him far too ‘early’ and in front of the mute Hundingling (her child
with Hunding, I presume), to her murder of him who, starved of affection from
his father seems only to wish to find a new family with his mother and her new
lover. That Siegmund too rejoices in that act underlines the predicament. His
holding Hunding earlier at knife point also reverses roles somewhat.
Ultimately, the strength both of acting and Personenregie (seen also,
for instance, in the individual treatment of the Valkyries) made a case for reassessment.
So too, arguably, did the doubt –preconceptions properly challenged – I
continued to feel. The framing is powerful and provocative; that is what matters
most.
Likewise or at least related, in the third
act, the true horror of what Wotan proposes for Brünnhilde, too readily
sentimentalised, comes across more clearly than I can previously recall. Portrayal
of male violence, especially sexual violence, against women onstage is a
controversial issue now, and rightly so. Nevertheless, Herheim’s portrayal of Valkyries
raped by a host of the undead – immortality and mortality a crucial theme for Wagner’s
deeply Feuerbachian drama – underlines what the god intends for his ‘favourite
daughter’, too often lost in final reconciliation. Hundingling, notably, has taken his place along them; what else, after all, could he have learned from his earthly sojourn? This scene seemed to alter
the dramatic, perhaps even the temporal, proportions of the third act. The
latter probably were objectively different too, conductor Nicholas Carter
working in tandem with the production. Throwing the dramatic weight forward had
the first two scenes seem considerably more substantial, the third a logical,
still deeply moving outcome to its predecessors. The emotional torrent of
Wagner’s – and the once more outstanding Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper’s –
strings still registered keenly, yet a shadow rightly hung over what we heard
and felt.
All around, refugee suitcases formed the
set, reminding us of the external world encountered in Das Rheingold. A
war zone is suggested, aptly for all that unfolds, the second as much as the external
acts. These people’s reappearance and different reactions to what they saw
reminded us we should not take ‘their’ reactions for granted, ‘othering’ them
as an undifferentiated mass. These, like the characters of the Ring many
are playing, are individual human beings, not some other species known as ‘migrants’.
Wagner was a refugee too and expressed pride in having been so; so is Siegmund,
always ‘geächtet’, as he puts it. And so too, we should remember, is Sieglinde,
returning to her Medea-like act. We always feel sympathy for Medea, so should
we not for this Sieglinde too? If not, why not? From where, we might ask, are
they refugees? The world around us has all too many possibilities, as does
history. So too does reception history: might we not understand them also as
heirs to the ‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’ at the end
of previous Ring productions. Celebrated predecessors such as Chéreau
and Kupfer spring particularly to mind. For reception, always a Herheim
speciality, continues to be so. The brilliant coup de théâtre of turning
on the house lights when Wotan wills ‘das Ende’ may be old hat: Brecht, 1924,
as a friend commented. But is that not the point here, that theatre and
reception history more broadly contribute to what we see and hear, both when it
conforms and when it does not? One could not want for alluring yet dangerous contrast in fire from lighting and video here either.
Carter’s direction continued to impress. If
I found the opening Prelude hard-driven, then I often do; it could reasonably be
replied that this is, after all, a storm. This conductor’s chemistry with the
orchestra was not the least of this performance’s virtues; nor was careful
shaping, without sounding unduly moulded, of paragraphs and scenes to form not
only a satisfying musical whole, but one that interacts tellingly, excitingly
with the action onstage. There are so many potential approaches to this music
that it is perhaps impossible, even for a Furtwängler, to keep them all in the
air. If, though, I sometimes missed the dramatic and dialectical despair
conjured from the second act – that extraordinarily difficult yet crucial
sequence – by the likes of Bernard Haitink or Daniel Barenboim, the sheer
malevolence of the darker music associated not only with Hunding, but also with
Wotan, was rendered strikingly immanent. It is a wonder, given the repeated
telephone calls taken by someone in the far left of the stalls, that the
Annunciation of Death managed to move at all, but it did. (It certainly had me devising
my own such annunciation for whomever the culprit may have been.)
Herheim’s different conceptual approach to
Siegmund and Sieglinde doubtless had consequences for perception of their
performances. So too did relatively unappealing – especially so in Siegmund’s
case – scenic presentation. That said, whilst Daniel Frank sang the role well
enough, it did not seem to me the most keenly dramatic of performances, however
considered. Elisabeth Teige engaged attention and sympathy more powerfully as
time went on as his sister-bride. Tobias Kehrer’s Hunding seemed to me
revisionist in an ultimately more convincing fashion, imparting deeper
understanding of how and why even this most unsympathetic of characters might have
turned out the way he did, without neglecting that he had. Derek Welton’s Wotan
came across as perhaps more tightly, certainly more darkly, focused than that
of Iain Paterson in Das Rheingold; that is perhaps in part a matter of
material, but surely also pays tribute to the intelligence and musicality of
this fine artist. At times, profoundly, disconcertingly other-worldly, the god
could also readily turn human, all too human. Annika Schlicht’s Fricka was again
not only beautifully sung, but verbally scrupulous, as here she must be all the
more. From a fine complement of Valkyries, Ricarda Merbeth captured an excellent
balance of waywardness – how could anyone delude himself she could for long be
kept in check? – and growing compassion.
If, initially, I felt if not underwhelmed,
then less overwhelmed than by the fizzing theatricality of Herheim’s Rheingold,
this Walküre grew on me and has continued to do so. Music drama is,
after all, not only theatre, as an increasingly Schopenhauerian Wagner would
have been first to argue.At the close, Mime-as-Wagner returns, to
deliver at the ‘right’ musical moment Siegfried from Sieglinde, collecting the
shattered pieces of Notung too. Both Mime and Wagner soon had their doubts as
to what sort of monster they had created. That here they have done so from, as
it were, the very spirit of music, the ever-present piano, will surely prove
significant. Soon we shall discover for ourselves.
Director – Stefan Herheim Revival director – Constanze Wediknecht Set designs – Stefan Herheim, Silke Bauer Costumes – Uta Heiseke Lighting – Ulrich Niepel Video – Torge Møller Dramaturgy – Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, Jörg Königsdorf
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Nicholas Carter (conductor)
We begin in the rehearsal room, piano
onstage, vast grey slab wall and fire exit behind, lights above. Below, the
orchestra tunes, actually tunes. The magic of theatre, of music theatre, of opera,
and of all concerned to bring it to our eyes and ears brings the two together:
not necessarily so we cannot tell the difference between ‘drama’ and ‘reality’,
but so that we are made aware of the ever-shifting boundaries between them, how
one brings the other into being, as is also the case for Wagner’s related yet
different trinity of drama, music, and gesture in Opera and Drama. That ‘book
of all books on music’ (Richard Strauss) is, in a sense, the fount of all we
see and hear; onstage, it is represented by the piano: the instrument around
which so many rehearsals have taken place and at which Wagner sat to compose;
from which for many, though not all composers, the miracles of the modern
orchestra first come into being. A suitcase-laden procession of refugees, the
perennial image of our times – from the vicious, racist ‘swarm’ of Cameron and
Farage’s ‘breaking point’, to Merkel’s inspirational ‘Wir schaffen das’ and the
welcoming crowds I saw at Munich Hauptbahnhof – crosses the stage and initiates
the action, one of them, Wotan or better the human being who will play that
role, plays the celebrated E-flat with which the Ring begins. This is no
‘crisis’; it is a reality and, in that reality, an opportunity. These people
are the very stuff of the drama, of our drama, and of theirs. Decisions made
and roles played will be matters of life and death. How differently this plays
now that Merkel’s Willkommenskultur has itself been assigned to history,
how all the more necessary then it is to find a new path.
Herheim and his revival successors do this,
moreover, not through dwelling on origins, but through the brazenly theatrical (and
musical) magic of opera. Reality never quite disappears, but the insight of
Schiller, Marx, and many others, Wagner included, that, left to his own devices,
given the freedom and the education to do so, man will create is not only the
starting point, but a point, if you will, of (Nietzschean, even Schopenhauerian)
eternal recurrence that yet, through (Hegelian) history, is never merely that.
The animating philosophical conflict of the Ring has begun. Likewise, animating
joy in and through theatre, of the rehearsal piano rather than the piano
composer, of Wagner’s creative life has been reignited, through Rhinemaidens’
magic tricks, Loge’s devilish flashes of fire, ever-resourceful use and reuse
of stage staples such as billowing sheets, and the whole Wagnerian
phantasmagoria of sight, sound, and sensation. Froh’s final rainbow is surely,
at some level, a successor to Götz Friedrich’s rainbow tunnel in the previous
Deutsche Oper production. History and, more specifically, reception both form
and liberate us in our response.
The first scene emerges, in typical, theatrical
twin bind and opportunity, both seamlessly and with seams openly to show from
what has gone before. The Deutsche Oper’s actors – ‘extras’ if you prefer, but
the term seems more than unduly limiting – form the Rhine from themselves: what
else do refugees have? They have their packed belongings, of course; still more
will come from them in due course, the gods’ costumes included. Inciting,
reflecting, and been incited by the Rhinemaidens’ play, their beautifully, sexily
choreographed movement suggests a Venusberg-am-Rhein, with all the occasional
awkwardness of an orgy’s need for perpetual reignition. Alberich, or the person
who becomes him, models himself on that saddest of theatrical figures, the
clown. That is how the others see him, of course; most poignantly of all, it is
how he sees himself when they hand him back his mirror. He has, as Wagner shows
us, been so sorely provoked, with so little prospect of reward in a cruel
non-golden age of aesthetic hedonism, that renunciation of ‘love’ – as someone
once said, ‘whatever that means’ – is an obvious next step. The ring he creates
seems immediately to do his bidding—until, and ay, there’s the Ring’s
rub, it does not. And we see it, as well as its consequences, throughout.
From those sheets come the Rhine, the mountains
of the gods’ realm, even the tree at the end from which, I assume, the next
instalment will spring. A premonition of Volsung twins strongly suggests so: a sparing
use of video and thereby all the more powerful. The whole Bayreuth project was
built on technology, as was the world from which it sprang. So too were they built
on choices of what to use and when, not on idiotic euphoria and fear about film
supplanting theatre or ‘artificial intelligence’ supplanting actual, human
intelligence. The hoard, perhaps the best I have seen, comes from those suitcases:
a true bric-a-brac show, including musical instruments (echoing, almost
literally, Alberich’s possession and instrumental use of a trumpet in the first
scene) and religious artefacts, cross and menorah included.
They cover Freia clumsily, brutally, yet also completely inside the piano
from which she and Fricka, in posed nineteenth-century tableau vivant-style
have risen, and through which portal she and the giants (her love for Fasolt is
movingly real, as it should be) have passed to and from Riesenheim. Donner and
Froh are splendidly caught too, stars of rock (Freddie Mercury) and disco (wig carefully
prepared with hairspray, soon lost) respectively. Loge is a true Mephisto to
two Fausts, Wotan and Alberich, with a little – in this he is not alone –
though never too much of previous Herheim creations, the Parsifal Klingsor
and the Lohengrin Herald reincarnated in something dazzlingly new. Alberich’s
Nibelungs are, for once, a true host of night, terrifying to behold, images of
death and the undead, marching to his lead. (Again, I recalled, a brief yet
telling image from the second act of that Bayreuth Parsifal.) Indeed,
throughout, the ways in which movement proceeds both in time to the music and
not, yet never heedless to it, are not the least indication that we are in the
hands of a musical stage director. Attempts at musical direction, both
from the piano and conducting from the score, of the would-be leaders of our
stage world, tell – and play – their own stories too.
Art and its tricks, then and now, are not
reality; they spring from it, yet we see, far more clearly how they are put
together, whilst wondering all the more at them. They are more than reality; again,
they form and react to it, at least potentially liberating us from it. And they
cross history, through an artwork’s reception, always a joy for and from Herheim.
Wotan’s winged helmet for once says much, not least in the boredom with which he
discards it. So does Mime as Wagner in trademark velvet beret, a cunning tribute-cum-insult,
in which the inventor of the Tarnhelm who cannot ever quite become an artist
embodies the brilliance and insecurity of his creator. Yet ultimately,
that craftsman also brings the drama, brings us, the score from which first he,
then others reads, sings, learns, and is bound by. In a duly ambiguous
representation of Werktreue, it becomes Valhalla, the sacerdotal fortress
and resting place of heroes. Meanwhile, the sword, emblem of Wotan’s ‘great
idea’, is placed through the piano lid, ready for a truer, more courageous hero
to extract it.
If Herheim surpassed my expectations, so
too did the performances. Nicholas Carter’s musical direction proved, quite
simply, a revelation. Carter has recently led performances of the Ring
in Bern; returning to the Deutsche Oper, he offered an ideal balance between thorough
musical grounding and theatrical spontaneity. This was a performance in which
everything both fell near-miraculously into place and yet also involved itself
in the dramatic here and now, as much, as it must, contributing to the drama as
reflecting it. Balances were, without exception, well judged, as were tempi.
What particularly struck me was the keenness of ear – and ability to project it
– in recognition of Wagner’s different kinds of writing. Rarely, if ever, have
I heard so clearly the roots in Gluckian accompagnato of Fricka’s contributions
to her first exchange with Wotan, also of course tribute to the astute,
rich-toned artistry of Annika Schlicht. My sole, extremely minor musical
disappointment lay with the anvils. All else fairly sprung off the page as if in
a musical Kammerspiel, mediated in the mind’s eye by the magical
mechanics of the piano.
A Kammerspiel would be nothing
without its actors, and here both individual performances and ensemble as a
whole were second to none. There may be (some) starrier assumptions elsewhere,
but none more alert to the joy, as well as to the necessity, of musicotheatrical
creation. As Schlicht’s consort, Iain Paterson offered a thoughtful
performance, typical of the cast as a whole in its alertness to verbal and
musical texts alike, as well as to their alchemic reaction as part of a new-yet-rooted
performance text. Any Loge worth his salt will steal the show, 'durch Raub', yet Blondelle’s owned it too: tricksy, fiery, manipulative, and corrosive, in words
and line as in gesture. Albert Pesendorfer and Tobias Kehrer shone as the
giants, their performances as finely differentiated as those of Ya-Chung Huang’s
intelligent Mime and Jordan Shanahan’s masterclass in the role of Alberich:
sympathetic up to a point, yet as brutal in his forming by events as he had
initially been hapless. This clown had grown up to lead troops, not a troupe, his
curse echoing in the ears until the close. An excellent trio of Rhinemaidens
underlined that too, their cries piercing any attempts there might have been to
rejoice. So too did the coup de théâtre of Erda’s appearance and finely
sung warning (Lindsay Ammann), emerging from the prompter’s box so as, well, to
prompt, ‘sensibly’ clad like a stock librarian of yore. To whom, after all, should
one turn for wisdom regarding texts?
(This essay was first published in The Wagner Journal, 11/2, (2017), pp.44-53, and is based on a paper I gave at a Freud Museum conference, 'Wagner's Parsifal and the Challenge to Psychoanalysis')
Images from Dmitri Tcherniakov's Staatsoper Berlin staging: Ruth Walz
Parsifal (Andreas Schager) and the Flowermaidens
Parsifal, like all of Wagner’s dramas, is
particularly revealing at the intersection of authorial intention and latent
content. What is revealed and what is repressed? Dreams were certainly of great
importance to Wagner, perhaps most famously in his claim that the Prelude to Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring
dramas, had come to him in ‘a kind of somnambulistic state […] the feeling of
being immersed in rapidly flowing water’, and indeed in the dramatic material
of a number of his works. Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg is explicitly concerned with the formation of an
artwork initially revealed in a dream world. That offers an interesting way to
consider stagings of his works too, and their claims to fidelity or otherwise
at a textual or allegedly ‘deeper’ level. I shall consider the claim of the
work ‘itself’ to stand apart from the operatic repertoire as a Bühnenweihfestspiel (stage festival
consecration play) to be confined to his artistic temple at Bayreuth. However,
my principal focus will be upon two particular productions: those of Stefan
Herheim (Bayreuth, 2008–12) and of Dmitri Tcherniakov (Berlin, 2015–). A
broader, implicit question would be: how do directors and performers navigate
the historical, social, cultural and psychological distances and conflicts
between Wagner’s intentions, his ability and inability to fulfil and perhaps
even to transcend those intentions, and the needs of contemporary theatres and
audiences? What is gained and what is lost? What, again, is revealed and what
is repressed?
Herheim’s production opens with
Parsifal at the time of its first,
Bayreuth staging, in 1882. It proceeds to tell a history that leads to
somewhere approaching the present day, even turning a mirror upon the audience
at one point, a moment with considerably greater theatrical power than a mere
retelling might suggest. The audience is not simply accused, deservedly or
otherwise; it is also reminded that it belongs to a drama that remains
unfinished, whatever Wagner’s Hegelian aspirations towards totality, and that
it, the audience, interprets, shapes, even writes the history suggested. Far
from having reached a Fukuyama-like ‘end of history’ – how hollow such claims
have seemed ever since 1989, but certainly since the UK’s decision to leave the
EU[1]
– we might all have become historians, or indeed analysts: a challenge already
to the ‘gathered congregation’ of Bayreuth orthodoxy, whether that be Wagner’s
own or not.[2]
That position stands superficially close, perhaps, to post-modernism, yet,
given the persistence of the ‘work concept’, that is, in this case, of drama
existing in the work ‘itself’ and not just or even principally in its
realisation and/or interpretation, it perhaps remains more grounded in some
form of object, some form of reality, than critics of history, the musical work
and the connections between them, might wish. Intelligent productions will
strengthen the work, and vice versa, to which we should also add intelligent
audiences, ready to think, to be challenged; this is quite the opposite of a zero-sum
game. Wagner, though he might sometimes come close to positing a false
immediacy of audience response, was no proponent of art as non-reflective,
non-reflexive, Rossini-like entertainment; he had no desire to be a mere
purveyor of the scenic and vocal diversions that opponents of interpretative
stage direction more often than not wish to see (and hear) ritually enacted.
‘Our theatrical public’, he complained in ‘Opera and Drama’, ‘has no need for
the artwork; it desires diversion from the stage, […] well-crafted details,
rather than the necessity of artistic unity.’[3]
The enemy here was miniaturism, the inability to construct a greater whole,
which can be extended to all aspects of Wagnerian music drama, whether in
theory or in practice – and, in his essay, ‘On Conducting’, lavishly praised by
conductors from Furtwängler to Boulez, most certainly was.[4]
Likewise in Parsifal. An attempt,
even if forlorn, to achieve some form of unity of vision remained the
modernistic goal.
Let us, though, keep our sights
upon Herheim’s Parsifal for the
moment. That matter of conducting is not irrelevant here, for whereas some
aspects of individual vocal performance may ultimately prove to be of ephemeral
interest, the question of coherence between ‘music’ and ‘drama’, itself a false
antithesis, is avowedly not. Under the musical leadership of Daniele Gatti, the
‘work’ strained towards that unity which in some sense it must present. Gatti’s
reading proved controversial, some writers finding it lethargic and uninspired.
That, however, was not Herheim’s opinion. In a fascinating interview, he
averred that, whilst he admitted to retaining reservations concerning some
choices of tempi – consider quite how unusual it is for a stage director even
to think about such matters – the experience of working together with Gatti had
been fruitful for both and had made the collaboration far more than the sum of
its parts:
When I heard him conducting his
first Parsifal in Rome (concert
performance), I was somewhat surprised and startled: he was even slower than
Toscanini – the first act alone lasted for well over two hours. Daniele was equally
suspicious of my ideas, and for a while I was afraid that our different approaches
wouldn’t be productive and that the collaboration wouldn’t work. But during the
rehearsals in Bayreuth, we immediately began to communicate. Daniele saw that I
felt the musical gestures totally intuitively, and that my direction
corresponded with his interpretation of the score. And during the rehearsal
process, I learned to understand his tempo choices and musical perspectives
much better. Our collaboration turned out to be very productive, creative and
we have great respect for each other.[5]
Herheim, it should be added,
began his career as a cellist, and is a more unusual example than one might
expect, or at least desire, of a director who reads the score. The issue of staging
the Prelude to the first act was resolved more amicably, more fruitfully, than
it would be with Daniel Barenboim in Lohengrin.
Initially Gatti was sceptical, concerned that the audience might be distracted
from the music. But Herheim made the excellent point in the interview cited
above that that would suggest that once the curtain rose, the audience need no
longer concern itself with the music, continuing, ‘I’m not saying that in
principle the Prelude should always be staged. But if you have good reasons to
portray the music in the prelude, it’s just the way that it’s done that you can
argue against. Gatti acknowledged this and was excited about the symbiosis the
staging entered into with the music.’[6]
Crucially, that symbiosis
enabled, even provoked, the emergence of an idea of the score as redeemer,
contra the superficial FAZ criticism
cited above. It was subtle rather than thrust in one’s face, unlike the
provocative second-act Nazi imagery, which I shall address later. Yet, for that
reason, and it might well take more than one encounter fully to appreciate
this, Herheim’s candidate for an answer to Wagner’s riddle of ‘Redemption to
the Redeemer’ – that is, the music, in all its contradictions as well as all
its emotional and psychological immediacy – emerged all the more convincingly.
Again, that was a possibility rather than a definitive ‘solution’, but
successful dramas, like successful performances, do not trade in the latter.
The tale of German history, of Parsifal
as a work developing through that history, could thereby be seen and heard as
requiring and receiving some form of transcendental, or at least beneficial,
intervention, not so much ‘grace’, but something more immanent, arising from
within, the attempted negation of the litany of negative dialectics to which
history and work have been subjected. There was no false mediated unity in which
h to rejoice or rather to wallow. Ritual is in Parsifal and through Parsifal
dynamically, dialectically challenged from within as well as from without; that
indeed is the very stuff of Wagner’s drama.
For Parsifal was intended to be and remains different. Wagner’s various
attempts to avoid the pejorative – to him – ‘opera’ as a description of his
later works may nowadays elicit as much scepticism as blind adoration, though
in simply calling TristanundIsolde
‘drama’ (Handlung), he certainly
captured a quality of that singular work. However, it would take a Wagnerian of
extreme, unhealthy devotion not to raise at least a hint of a smile at the
cumbersome Bühnenweihfestspiel. And
what that term might mean has brought all manner of consequences for the work’s
reception, even indeed, given the determination of Cosima and other Bayreuth
loyalists that it should remain confined to the stage it allegedly consecrated,
for the possibility of staging it at all. The surrounding aura of sanctity may
seem to many repellent (‘an unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as
religion and the theatre as a temple’ – Stravinsky)[7],
ridiculous (Debussy, albeit continuing to honour the score alone as ‘one of the
loveliest monuments ever raised to the serene glory of music’)[8],
or both, as in Nietzsche’s case. Moreover, the claim that Parsifal is in any
straightforward sense a ‘Christian work’, as opposed to a work that treats,
amongst other things, Christianity, would find few takers today. Even if the
end of the first act were an invitation to receive Holy Communion, the Grail Knights’
words – ‘Partake of the bread, valiantly transform it into corporeal strength and
power’ – suggest a church or theology whose heterodoxy extended beyond the merely
Gnostic. Deeds as well as secret knowledge transgress; indeed, the boundary between
the two for Wagner, as an inheritor to Fichte’s and Young Hegelianism’s Philosophie der Tat (philosophy of the
act) often comes close to dissolution.[9]
That said, this tale of a ‘pure
fool’, so ignorant that he knows neither whence he has come, nor even his name,
who, through the offices of divine grace rather than by his own deeds,
enlightened through compassion (Schopenhauer’s Mitleid, ‘suffering with’), rejuvenates a dying community, remains
quite different from the operatic essays of any of Wagner’s contemporaries and
many of his successors. Parsifal resists assimilation to the opera house; it is
out of place amongst champagne, canapés and diva-worshippers. Wagner wrote to
Ludwig II that he wished to protect it from ‘a common operatic career’.[10]
Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic as well as
compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly wrote of
Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are […] like cafés where […]
you can hear waiters calling out their orders: ‘One Carmen! And one Walküre!
And one Rigoletto!’[11]
Wagner’s works declare their incompatibility with existing theatrical
conventions and norms – even today, arguably still more so. And of those works,
Parsifal remains the ultimate.
The signal strength of Herheim’s production is that it engages
with these problems: with the fraught associations, both with Bayreuth – which,
for better and for worse, is also quite different from anywhere else –
and with broader historical themes, associations the work has gathered from at
least the time of its premiere in 1882. So intensely dialectical and
multi-layered is Herheim’s direction that we tread successfully a tightrope
between presentation of his guiding Konzept – the history of Parsifal
as a work and of the world in which it has developed from the time of its
first performance to that of its most recent – and recounting of the immanent story
of Parsifal. Two stories run not so much in parallel as with mutual
influence, yet without inflicting harm upon each other and with no sense of
contrivance.
In the first act, we therefore witness the early days of
post-Wagner Wahnfried, the sickly, incestuous goings-on of an impeccably haut
bourgeois family and its nursery (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks comes
to mind), in the era of an oft-present Imperial Eagle. As Christianity enters
an especially peculiar phase, dreams and childhood come to the fore, likewise
the psychopathology of religious experience (which both Nietzsche and Mann saw
as fundamental to the work). A priest, incense – Nietzsche’s accusation of
Wagner sinking to his knees before the Cross re-examined – and, most
shockingly, circumcision of the infant who may or may not ‘be’ a young
Parsifal, offer almost as much food for thought as Wagner’s own inversion,
echoing the philosophy of Feuerbach, of the elements. The violence of the deed
could hardly have been more topical during the 2012 legal controversy over infant
genital mutilation in Germany; and yet, it also points to something older,
deep-seated, and of course very much part of the work’s reception history: the
question of whether antisemitism might be expressed in Wagner’s drama. (It
notably does not propose answers to such questions, old yet unquestionably
alive; rather, it suggests to what further interpretative work they might
fruitfully be put.) Amfortas in this production seems far more central to the
drama. His cry of pain jolts us from complacent ‘knowledge’ of the work, and
also points forward – or backward! – to Kundry’s scream of laughter at Christ,
who, whatever Wagner may have hoped, must also have undergone the procedure, on
the road to Calvary.
The second act opens in a field
hospital. For once – and this is typical of Herheim’s attention to Wagner’s
detail – we actually see the renegade Knights, Sir Ferris and all. Klingsor
resembles the master of ceremonies from the film Cabaret; for now we
behold Weimar Germany, our Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and
fishnets.[12]The delicious
representation of the Flowermaidens as orderlies and flappers – is that not
just what they are? – gains dramatic attention, as well as firmly placing us in
the inter-war period. (I say ‘firmly’, but historical time passes as its
performative cousin does.) And yet, a reminder that various levels of
interpretation are anything but distinct is offered by a greater keenness of
manipulation when it comes to Kundry’s acts: above all, what she tells Parsifal. She is in turn being
manipulated by Klingsor; yet perhaps so many of us are understandably now influenced
by feminist readings that we feel uncomplicatedly sympathetic. It is salutary
to be reminded that this Rose of Hell – the rose very much part of Herheim’s
imagery, deploying ‘new’ video technology – has, despite her plight, agency of
her own. That is more properly feminist than to consider her purely as victim.
And the similarity of costume between her and Klingsor, both in Weimar
cross-dressing travesty, reinforces the need both have for each other, an Hegelian
master–slave dialectic re-imagined. Wagner’s artwork is permitting of answers,
or better, further questions, which he may or may not have been able to
conceive himself. Historical understanding enables it to become of the present,
even of the future.
The final scene of the second act is electric: the coming of Bayreuth’s
and Germany’s darkest years truly shocking. Indeed, the phrase coup de
théâtre might have been invented for this advent of the Third Reich,
signalled by the ‘Weimar’ castle’s destruction, the arrival of stormtroopers
and a brown-shirted, tomorrow-belonging-to-him little boy and the unfurling of
swastikas. Overdue yet nevertheless courageous, the festival seemed at last
ready to begin to come to terms with its history. Judging by the disgruntled
noises from some members of the audience – it should hardly surprise that ‘conservative’
critics of searching productions would feel discomfited by a reminder of their
ideological kinship – it remains an absolute necessity too.[13]
Then, the final act opens in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried.
Parsifal’s arrival and Good Friday offer the possibility – illusory? – of rejuvenation.
In a tribute to the Bayreuth Tannhäuser
of Götz Friedrich, with whom Herheim studied, a procession of the starved
postwar population crosses the stage, victims of what has gone before and, prospectively
at least, of the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder
(postwar ‘economic miracle’) and its culture industry. The point of ultimate
hope comes when a star briefly appears in the sky: wonderfully touching, yet what
does it signify? A (false) messiah’s advent? A simple, childlike pleasure? It
certainly rings truer than the gaudy coloured lights signalling Parsifal’s
descent into the realm of the (lifestyle?) guru. Another brave coup de théâtre – Herheim never forgets
that Parsifal, amongst other things, is
theatre; nor should we – comes with a projection during the Transformation
Music. A request is displayed from the young Wagner brothers, Wieland and
Wolfgang, at the 1951 re-opening of ‘New Bayreuth’, that political discussion
be banished from the Green Hill. An image of Wagner is bricked up behind
Parsifal’s childhood wall, the composer remaining too hot to handle. Might we
also recall that Wahnfried wall built by Wolfgang, on whose other side Winifred
remained until her death, a standing, tenacious reminder that politics could
not so easily be banished?
If anything, politics stand still more starkly at the heart of the final scene. Amfortas’s trial – in every sense – takes us from postwar 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 present 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?[14] 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 of the mirror upon the audience? It comes across as an invitation, indeed an incitement, to question everything we have thought. ‘Educating Parsifal’, the character, is also ‘educating Parsifal’ (or more accurately ‘Parsifal educating us’) – and not in merely didactic but in dramatic fashion. As Horace put it many years earlier, ‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’.[15] It is perhaps only what Wagner had been doing all along, although, in the emotional context both Wagner and Herheim have developed, as opposed to the abstraction of a mere act of reporting, it would be an unimaginative soul indeed who did not relish the mirror’s ambiguous invitation. The communal, religious and political role of Attic tragedy Wagner wished to recreate is just as relevant, to a revolutionary artwork of our future as to one of his.
I should now, however, turn to
Tcherniakov’s Berlin production, which I saw both at its 2015 premiere, and
again, in 2016, on Good Friday.[16]
The outer acts, in their different yet similar ways, suggest a Russian thinker
approaching Wagner. Like Herheim and indeed many of the most interesting
contemporary opera directors, Tcherniakov seems more concerned to open up
possibilities than to present definitive verdicts. Modern, relatively
indistinct dress does not distract, but suggests sameness and indeed an
ossified dedication to something that no longer pertains: a lesson for ‘traditional’
staging fetishists, among others. Crucially, however, Tcherniakov does not
disregard religion as religion; it is not a proxy for political or aesthetic
concerns. As in Wagner’s work ‘itself’, the relationship is complex, indeed provocative.
There is here a (once)
Christian theology gone wrong, as Wagner’s conception of Monsalvat demands.
Just as in the second act of Götterdämmerung,
when increasingly desperate pleas are made to gods who have already departed
the stage, so in Parsifal, the crowd
continues to believe and to act out of desperation in accordance with that
belief, or at least to act as if it still believed. Men act to protect a ritual
which has long lost its justification, if ever it had one. (What Wagner
presents, after all, is heretical in the extreme, as much a Feuerbachian
inversion, even a black mass, as anything else. And it is a representation, a
dramatisation, not the thing itself.) A world of Russian holy men, perhaps
allied to the anti-Wagnerian challenges of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, reacts with that
of Wagner’s still-live (and later, Tcherniakov’s still-life) contest between
Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. These are old believers and, perhaps, Old
Believers; certainly the final outward turn of the community on stage,
magnificently presented as if a revivification of an Old Master painting,
suggests Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina
with a Goya-like twist. Will the new rule, political or monastic, of Parsifal
bring more of the same – Gurnemanz, after his shocking stabbing in the back of
Kundry, seems effortlessly to have transferred his loyalty to the new regime,
although at what cost has he been concealing whatever it is he has done in the
past? Or will that new rule bring something different? We do not know; nor do
they. Who or what, if anything, has been redeemed? What we do know is that
Gurnemanz has swiftly put paid to the ‘purely human’ – as the younger,
Feuerbachian Wagner would have put it – rekindling of sexual relations between
Kundry, or Woman, and Amfortas, or Christ, or at least Jesus of Nazareth.
There are certainly clues.
Amfortas is identified more with Christ than I can previously recall. He is
carried by the knights so as to make him, however unhappily and unwillingly, a
visual if perhaps not spiritual reincarnation. More disturbingly still, we see
during the final scene of the first act, a re-enactment not only of Amfortas’s
wounding but also of some form of transubstantiation, or perhaps mere
vampirism, of his own blood. The sustenance drawn may well be nothing – a
negative reading of Feuerbach – or it may even be primarily vengeful. There is
no doubt, however, that this sick community requires it, and, most intriguingly
of all, it is commanded by Titurel, whom we see walk onstage and enter his coffin.
Titurel’s ritualistic staging of his own death in the first act and
re-emergence from the coffin once ‘it’ is all over stand at the very heart of
the drama. He is a sinister, charismatic dictator: the cult leader we all know
and fear. Moreover, his sadism in insisting, for whatever reasons, that his
son, Amfortas, go through what he must time and time again, chills to the bone.
Is Titurel a fraud or a thaumaturge? The knights are desperate for him to touch
them. He certainly appears to be pulling the theological strings of a cult that
has become nasty indeed.
The sameness of the first act –
the scene does not shift during the Transformation Music, and indeed the
production here burns as slowly and yet as brightly as the work – receives its
response in what to begin with seems the unconnected action of the second.
Here, Tcherniakov offers a brave, challenging exploration of sexuality, above
all of those paedophiliac tendencies our society would desperately wish away as
aberration, as the misdeeds of individual ‘monsters’. Klingsor, the very image
of a tabloid newspaper’s ‘paedophile monster’, has built a home with his
daughters, the Flowermaidens. Some are young; some are older; all are dressed
as ‘pretty girls’. Such is clearly what has proved the undoing of Monsalvat’s
knights. He clearly repels Kundry, not least when he paws her, but she of
course remains in his power. (Perhaps because he has put himself beyond the
‘moral’ pale? Very Nietzschean. Or perhaps we might think of Crime and Punishment.)
When in Klingsor’s power,
Kundry is certainly willing to learn from his example, or from what it might
suggest. Her kissing him already suggests an inconvenient truth concerning the
complexity of abuse. Wagner’s path of realisation, which I am tempted to call
psychoanalytical, is given shocking realisation in Kundry’s education of
Parsifal, partly visualised in the
staging of his memories. Andreas Schager as Parsifal cemented his reputation as
the finest Heldentenor alive, indeed
the finest I have heard in the flesh. Moreover, his movements on stage offered
a well-nigh perfect portrayal of the awkwardness of an adolescent discovering
his sexuality. His reluctance to show himself, hiding under his hood, pulled
down by Herzeleide and Kundry alike, finds its counterpart in his persistent
changing of clothes: seemingly a desire to be clean that can never be
fulfilled. This Parsifal and his mother, Herzeleide, were close, perhaps too
close. She is furious when she sees his adolescent first exploration with a
girl-next-door, or perhaps even his sister. The emotional fall-out kills her,
just as Kundry tells him – and us. Kundry, however, attempts to play upon those
complex feelings, to reignite them, reintroducing him to the miniature rocking
horse with which once, under Herzeleide’s spell, he had played. Quite what
happens remains unclear, since the moment of the ‘kiss’ – is it perhaps more
than that? – takes place offstage. The transformation it effects, when the
undressed Parsifal, followed by Kundry, runs back onstage, is, however, never in
doubt. The would-be sign of the Cross in this dark world is Parsifal’s piercing
of Klingsor with the spear.
A crucial feature of the
production that has tied both acts together is the circular seating and action
of the respective crowds: Knights and Flowermaidens. Sickness pervades both;
they may well be more closely connected. The third act continues the work of
drawing the two together, though again, suggestively rather than didactically.
Ritual to drama – to ritual aufgehoben
by drama. But was it the wrong drama? When, in the third act, Amfortas opens
his father’s tomb and has the body fall to the ground, is that simply revenge for the inhuman treatment – the abuse – our
Christ-like, yet ultimately not-so-very-Christ-like, victim has suffered? Or is
it also perhaps a hint at the death of God, Titurel being his father? Nietzsche
as well as those Russian writers seems to be hinted at, or at least available.
Nihilism or theological rescue mission? As when one reads Nietzsche,
perspectivism demands and yet obscures the answers.
One signal strength of both productions, I think, is their
willingness to deal with that particularity of the work mentioned earlier – its
insistence upon its difference, its opposition to general operatic culture –
as well as such a myriad of connections, correspondences and so forth, some
intrinsic, some developed along the way of the work in the world since its premiere
in 1882. (I have barely begun to scratch the surface but have devoted a chapter
of a recent book to Herheim’s staging.)[17]What David J.
Levin analysed as the operatic conservative’s – in this case, James Levine’s –
dread of the ‘hectic stage’, of ‘discursive overload’, has turned out actually
to harness such overload to fidelity in a sense all manner of operagoers could
and eventually did appreciate.[18]
That is certainly also highly relevant to the Syberberg film discussed elsewhere
in this issue.
We perform, then, rather than re-enact; similarly, we study as
well as perform, so that we think rather than wallow. History, musical or
otherwise, is something we write as well as make, something we think; we might,
perhaps, say the same about dreams, Wagner’s and our own. Herheim’s and
Tcherniakov’s dramaturgies have enabled Wagner’s music, perhaps still more so
than his words, to emerge as redeemer: not in a discredited sense of ‘absolute music’,
with the reactionary, neo-Romantic connotations that has acquired, but in a
critical sense suited to our own time and its concerns.
[1]The referendum on the UK’s
membership of the EU was held on 23 June 2016, nine days before the conference
at which this paper was originally given.
[2] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and
the Last Man (Harmondsworth, 1993).
[3]Richard Wagner, Oper und
Drama, ed. Klaus Kropfinger (Stuttgart, 1994), 388. ‘Das Publikum unsrer
Theater hat kein Bedürfnis nach dem Kunstwerke; es will sich vor der
Bühne zerstreuen, […] künstlich Einzelnheiten, nicht aber die
künstleriche Einheit Bedürfnis.’
[4]Richard Wagner, ‘Über das
Dirigieren’, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th edn, 10 vols.
(Leipzig, 1907), viii.261–337.
[8] ‘Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater’,
tr. B. N. Langdon Davies, in Three
Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York, 1962), 46–9.
[9] On Wagner and the Philosophie der Tat, see Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s
‘Ring’ (Aldershot and Burlington, 2006), 28–9, 175–81.
[10] Letter of 28 Sep. 1880; Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr.
and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), 903.
[11] ‘Time re-explored’, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, tr.
Martin Cooper (London and Boston, MA, 1986), 262.
[12] It has recently been suggested, although I
think this may be over-egging the pudding, that Klingsor here might represent
Siegfried Wagner. (Exhibition, ‘Siegfried Wagner: Bayreuths Erbe aus
andersfarbiger Kiste’, at Schwules Museum, Berlin, 17 Feb. to 26 Jun. 2017.)
The exhibition, curated by Peter P. Pachl, Achim Bahr and Kevin Clarke, has
some fascinating material on display, but some of the commentary suffers either
from factual inaccuracy or wild conjecture, as well as the repetition of
bizarrely outdated psychological tropes, such as the ‘responsibility’ of an
‘overbearing’ mother (Cosima) for a son’s homosexuality.
[13]Tash Siddiqui reports ‘a
kind of audible shudder, a repressed Mexican wave, surging through the Bayreuth
audience at this point’ (personal communication).
[14] Horace, ‘Satires,’ I, I, 69-70, in Satires,
Epistles, and Ars Poetica, tr. H Rushton Fairclough, revised edn (Harvard
and London, 1929).
[15] Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche
Katastrophe; Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden, 1946).
[16] (Additional note: I would see it in 2017.
Reviews of all three performances may be found on this blog.)
[17]‘Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal’,
After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (Woodbridge,
2014), 210–33.
[18] David J. Levin, ‘Reading a Staging/Staging
a Reading’, Cambridge Opera Journal, ix (1997), 57.
