Bayreuth Festival (4) - Tannhäuser, 13 August 2019

Festspielhaus

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Stephen Milling

Tannhäuser – Stephen Gould

Wolfram von Eschenbach – Markus Eiche

Walther von der Vogelweide – Daniel Behle

Biterolf – Kay Stiefermann

Heinrich der Schreiber – Jorge Rodriguez-Norton

Reinmar von Zweter – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Elisabeth – Lise Davidsen

Venus – Elena Zhidkova

Young Shepherd – Katharina Konradi

Four Pages – Cornelia Ragg, Lucila Graham, Annette Gutjahr, Elena Zhidkova

Le Gateau Chocolat – Le Gateau Chocolat

Oskar – Manni Laudenbach

Tobias Kratzer (director)

Rainer Sellmaier (designs)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Manuel Braun (video)

Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Eight years after I last saw Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, in Sebastian Baumgarten’s truly bizarre production, came the highlight, for me at least, of this year’s Festival: Tobias Kratzer’s new staging, conducted not by Valery Gergiev, as expected, but in a last-minuted substitution, Christian Thielemann. Not only was this unquestionably the best staging I have seen of the work in years; not only was it the best Wagner I have heard from Thielemann since the very first time I heard him (Meistersinger, 2000); it convinced me in a way no other performance and production have that there are genuine dramatic, as well as stylistic, reasons for giving Tannhäuser in its (almost) original, Dresden version.*

As the Overture plays, we see the Wartburg on film. We then see a troupe in a van – action switches between film and stage, or combines the two with outstanding skill and insight – making its way there. Or is it, perhaps, making its way from there, to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus? It could be either; after all, we are not all [cue: Anglican clerical voice] ‘in a very real sense,’ on our way between the two? Tannhäuser as clown (Stephen Gould), Venus (Elena Zhidkova), the voluptuous Le Gateau Chocolat (as herself), and the diminutive Oskar (Manni Laudenbach, surely a reference to Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum) are clearly used to a few scrapes on the road, not least when Venus splits her time between driving and entertaining her grotto guest. A pitstop at Burger King goes horribly wrong, a policeman spying Gateau Chocolat and Oskar drawing petrol from another vehicle and coming to confront the troupe after Venus has offered its update Young German motto, ‘Frei im Wollen/Frei im Thun/Frei im Geniessen/R[ichard] W[agner]’ as payment. (Or, as Don Giovanni might have put it, ‘Viva la libertà!’) In a move that clearly shocks the others, Venus puts her foot down and kills the policeman. Thus is the scene set for the nearby guest house. Oskar faces a surprise with the kitschy gnomes outside, and more seriously, Tannhäuser decides to make a break with the gang and make his own way to the Festspielhaus and, presumably, also in life.

The pilgrims, the Bayreuth audience itself, are of course on their way to a performance: his performance; at least it should be, if he deigns to turn up on time. If the fellow Minnesänger, studying their vocal scores – Tannhäuser always has his upon him – and taking the occasional sip of a local brew, are more relaxed about Tannhäuser’s return to the fold, Elisabeth, in a brief appearance, shows her true feelings, slapping his face in the wake of jeopardising the entire performance. This is the first, but far from the last, occasion on which we realise that Elisabeth is here a flesh-and-blood human being, no mere virginal saint. And then, we in the audience make a reverse progression down the hill to an interval show from Gateau Chocolat and Oskar, inflatable unicorn, fabulous new bathing costume, and all.

On returning to the house, we see a splendid Wartburg recreation set. It is the Festspielhaus after all, then, not the Wartburg ‘itself’. Elisabeth alternates between fury and arousal, as one – perhaps not Wagner – might expect. Such roleplaying, metatheatrical to a determined, in many respects deeply moving, end, divests the work of many of those problems with dramatic motivation it has often been held, not least by Carl Dahlhaus, to present. Mythology, history, performance, reception, psychological realism, and more can happily coexist, come into conflict. Is that not the very stuff of drama? And is not love, ‘whatever that means’, as the Prince of Wales once had it, always a ‘show’ too? Such is very much what Tannhäuser ‘itself’ is about, is it not?

Having narrowly missed Tannhäuser outside the Festspielhaus at the end of the first act, the troupe-as-was invades the house (on film) during the Arrival of the Guests, emblazoning the balcony with a flag declaring its Wagnerian motto. Venus deals with one of the pages so that she can take her place in the hall, whilst Gateau Chocolat and Oskar wander around the house, taking in a few images of previous conductors (Thielemann, ironically given the substitution, one of them, and much to Gateau Chocolat’s taste, and James Levine – well, the less said the better). Knowing neither her lines nor her moves, Venus must be kept in line – good luck with that – by one of the other pages. Nevertheless, she just about maintains her cover for a while, until all hell breaks loose. Shades of Ariadne auf Naxos, as two operatic worlds collide? Inevitably, but this remains its own tale. Venus sheds a layer, puts on her own show, to the shock of respectable singers and patrons. She dances, to what is supposedly Tannhäuser’s own music, to win him back, but reminds us that he never really has his own musical style; rather, he assimilates to wherever he is. Does that make him an artist, or…? You decide. He still has his score. Meanwhile, the security guard on film has alerted Katharina Wagner, who calls the police. They pause for a while before the unfurled motto, before doing what they must, and closing down the show(s).

The world-weariness, even despair, of the opening to the third act is evoked powerfully onstage – as well as in the pit – by a wasteland, in which the van has crashed and/or taken root, only Oskar remaining. (We later learn that Gateau Chocolat has gone solo, making it to the big time, her image gracing an advertisement for eponymous watches. That’s show business, we suppose.) Elisabeth still needs Tannhäuser; indeed she needs him more than ever, so much so that she has poor Wolfram dress in Tannhäuser’s clown costume. Then, and only then, can she welcome him into the van; then, and only then, and even then after a good deal of self-persuasion, can Wolfram take her. Shades of Siegfried/Gunther/Brünnhilde? Again, the suggestion is made, or at least can be, but the drama plays out on its own terms. And of course, then and only then can Elisabeth die. It is too late for Tannhäuser himself; he finally tears apart his cherished vocal score. Tannhäuser is free of Tannhäuser. And so, at the close, in a staff-sprouting miracle for our own time, Tannhäuser and Elisabeth are united at last, resurrected, as is the van, in which they drive off into the sunset. Fantasy? The after-life? An actual happy ending? That, ‘in a very real sense’, is up to us.

The cast responded with excellence and enthusiasm to Kratzer’s vision. Stephen Gould seemed much more at home with the conflicts and opportunities presented by Tannhäuser than he had in Tristan (equally well sung, yet quite without agony). Lise Davidsen’s Elisabeth was as poignantly human as I have ever seen or heard the character – and equally possessed of vocal power, wisely dispensed. Elena Zhidkova grasped the nettle of this particular Venus with everything she had, and made the role her own, ably assisted by her fabulous assistants. If I say that I found Markus Eiche’s Walther every bit as moving as Christian Gerhaher’s, many readers will appreciate the distinction of his performance, if anything perhaps slightly more attuned to verbal subtlety. All Minnesänger roles were sung with great distinction; if I mention in particular Daniel Behle, it is only because Wagner gives him more to do. Stephen Milling’s Landgrave and even Katharina Konradi’s Shepherd offered similarly impressive performances.

So too did the ever-excellent Bayreuth Festival Chorus, once more as distinguished in stage as in vocal terms; Eberhard Friedrich’s stewardship of these singers has not been the least joy of recent years in Bayreuth. So too, last but not least, did Thielemann’s conducting and the simply outstanding playing of the orchestra. Here, stepping in at what seems to have been very short notice, Thielemann showed none of the affectation that had sometimes detracted from his Tristan and Lohengrin. Structure became dynamic form in the moment; ‘beauty’ took care of itself, rather than being imposed upon it. And crucially, both he and Kratzer, who had previously directed a different version*, demonstrated their belief in the coherence and singular interest of the ‘Dresden’ Tannhäuser. Not once – well, save for the lost Bacchanale – did I miss what was ‘not there’. When I heard the musical drama turn otherwise from what is imprinted on my memory, it was unarguably right at that moment and in this context for it to do so. Thielemann, it seems to me, not unlike Simon Rattle, fares best when presented with a challenge. To this challenge, to these challenges, the assembled company rose with excellence. A happy ending, then, indeed, for an ultimately happy troupe.

* For detail on the versions – not quite what many think they are – and other thoughts on the work, please see my Royal Opera House programme note, ‘Owing the World a Tannhäuser. (Click here.)

Tristan und Isolde, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18 March 2018

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Tristan – Andreas Schager

King Marke – Stephen Milling

Isolde – Anja Kampe

Kurwenal – Boaz Daniel

Melot – Stephan Rügamer

Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova

Steersman – Adam Kutny

Young Sailor, Shepherd – Linard Vrielink

Tristan’s Mother – Kristin Becker

Tristan’s Father – Mike Hoffmann

English horn (onstage) – Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Tieni Burkhalter (video)

Tatina Vereshchagina, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Raymond Hughes)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Tristan (Andreas Schager) and ensemble

No one doubts the supreme challenge presented in performing Tristan und Isolde. After seventy-seven rehearsals, the intended 1861 Vienna premiere had to be abandoned. A work that had taken less than three years to write took more than double that, as John Deathridge has observed, to ‘overcome prejudice about its viability. … Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Prague, and Vienna: in the end none of these opera houses would touch it.’ When Munich finally did, in 1865, Wagner’s Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died after just four performances. Wagner’s foes, political, aesthetic, and ‘moral’, seized on the opportunity to claim, ludicrously, that Tristan, rather than typhus was the agent of death. If audiences today avoid quite such high (melo)drama, more often than not they meet the curse on the other side of Wagner’s melodramatic coin: ‘only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, - I cannot imagine it otherwise. This is how far I have gone!! Oh dear! – I was just in full career! Adieu!’

The twin dangers of unviability and necessary mediocrity were avoided in this outstanding performance from the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, and a cast headed by Andreas Schager and Anja Kampe. When I last heard Barenboim conduct Tristan, in 2010, I observed that this, ‘of the three Tristans in the theatre’ I had heard him conduct, had ‘surely [been] the best, above all in as searing a first act as I have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.’ This proved a more powerful musical experience still, and quite different. Yes, the first act was ‘searing’, but it had little in common with Böhm, save perhaps for the visceral, overwhelming quality to the close, which left me in quite a state of shock: not so far from Wagner’s ‘perfectly good ones … bound to drive people mad’. Barenboim now appears to be hearing Tristan more overtly through ears transformed by his recent Parsifal performances – or at least leading us to do so. (Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that they too have been collaborations with Dmitri Tcherniakov – and Schager, and, oneyear, Kampe too.)

Some people have, apparently, been complaining that his tempi were ‘slow’: do they really want a ‘fast’ Tristan? I fear that, unconsciously or even consciously fearful of Wagner’s ‘perfectly good,’ they actually might. Perhaps sometimes they were. I have no idea, not being a clock-watcher. More importantly, there were ample space and tension, for the ebb and flow of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian Will to find orchestral representation. For, still more than Parsifal, the music of Beethoven – and Barenboim’s recent Beethoven, as heard in a life-changing symphonic Proms cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – made its harmonic mark. The ‘growth’ of harmony from the bass line, even when, indeed particularly when, Wagner’s extreme chromaticism tugs away from it, ensured both musicodramatic comprehensibility and a placing between Beethoven and Schoenberg, yet reducible to neither. The Staatskapelle Berlin might almost be taken for granted in this, so inveterate is its Wagnerian excellence; it should not be. Without its dark, ‘German’ tone, ‘traditional’ and yet probing so many of those new musical worlds seemingly born in this score, we should come nowhere near The World as Will and Representation at all, still less to a ‘perfectly good’ Tristan.

Isolde (Anja Kampe), Brangäne (Ekaterina Gubanova)

Likewise Barenboim’s excellent cast, crucial to far more than the ‘surface’ role Schopenhauer’s aesthetics might suggest. Schager again might readily be taken for granted. (Remember when we had no such Heldentenor? It was not so long ago.) His was certainly the finest account of the role I have heard in the theatre, fully worthy of comparison with the great, doubtless mythologised performances of the recorded past, although again certainly not to be reduced to them, nor indeed to comparisons therewith. If the seemingly infinite vocal resources Schager can call upon to make his way through the third act monologue – it was to that in particular that Wagner referred in his letter – suggest Lauritz Melchior, there was none of the laziness or, at least, somewhat cavalier attitude that could afflict the latter’s work. Schager can sing the part and he does, but dramatically it needs to be hard work; we need to feel, to share in, Tristan’s struggle, even as it frightens, repels us. We did, in this, a performance for the ages. Kampe’s Isolde was perhaps not on quite so grand a scale; nor did it need to be. She offered her own detailed portrayal, again matching ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ imperatives – as if they might ever formally be separated! – to a degree it would be difficult to match, let alone to surpass. Boaz Daniel and Ekaterina Gubanova offered far more than support as Kurwenal and Brangäne, the latter’s ‘operatic Lied’ approach, unfailingly sensitive to words and their implications, without permitting them to override the imperatives of the musical line. King Markes rarely disappoint: what a gift of a role it is in a more traditional sense. Nevertheless, Stephen Milling’s depth of tone and grace of character impressed greatly. Amongst a strong ‘supporting’ cast, Linard Vrielink’s beautifully sung Young Sailor and Shepherd stood out.

There remains, however, another common danger, increasingly common, to contemporary Tristan performances – more strictly, to productions. That is of missing the point of the work entirely. I hope it will not be taken that I am referring in some generic reactionary fashion to the ‘creator’s intentions’. However, Tristan seems in practice to prove unusually resistant to attempts even to question what it might be ‘about’. The idea of the work being shoehorned, for instance, into a justified protest against anti-immigration policies hardly bears thinking about. Tristan is certainly not in any emphatic sense ‘about’ its ‘characters’, insofar as they be characters at all; it seems to come closer than any other of Wagner’s dramas to that all-too-celebrated description of ‘deeds of music made visible’. Prior to Tcherniakov’s staging, I had yet to see what might broadly be termed an ‘interventionist’ staging that worked.

King Marke (Stephen Milling), Tristan, Melot (Stephan Rügamer), Kurwenal (Boaz Daniel)

Does Tcherniakov change that? I hope it is not unduly pretentious – it may already prove a little late to sound that alert – to say I think it too soon to tell. What I can say is that his production has made me think about the issues involved like no other: an achievement I think worth lauding in itself. By contrast with his perhaps atypical, unquestionably brilliant Parsifal – the best I have seen since Stefan Herheim – we return to Tcherniakov’s homeground of the unpleasant rich. Fair enough: with kings, queens, and princes, that is what we are dealing with. Elena Zaytseva’s costumes and Tcherniakov’s own set designs – in the first act, a true luxury vessel, replete with ‘bespoke’ anything you might care to mention; in the second, a ‘tasteful’ Jugendstil indoor forest ‘theme’ we want to hate, yet secretly want – instantly evoke the excesses of a corporate, materialistic world we know only too well. The third act by contrast retreats to a homely comfort zone for Tristan, an old moneyed boy who never grew up (haunted, as his monologue tells us, by the circumstances of his birth, visions of his parents appearing in his delirium).

Is that all too specific, though? Does it fall into the trap of making Tristan about the trappings of wealth? Not really, for there is an intriguing, deadly game afoot. Tcherniakov does not treat the lovers as identical, as two mere parts of ‘Tristan and Isolde’. He does not accept Wagner, let alone Schopenhauer, at face value. Instead, he implicitly, even explicitly, criticises some of their (neo-)Romantic premises. Is Tristan, perhaps even Isolde at times, actually mocking whatever it is they play out? It is not always clear, but there is a degree of unnerving alienation to the proceedings that intrigues, questions, even (metatheatrically?) frightens. A woman fainting in the second act seems to fall into their trap, or is she in on the game too? Or, perhaps most important, is this a critique of the game we play, when we sit around, almost as Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’, ‘disciples – benumbed, pale, breathless!’, both at the performance, enraptured, and afterwards, discussing how singular this work is, how it refuses directorial interventionism? The question of aestheticisation is live, just as in the Staatsoper’s newproduction by Hans Neuenfels of Salome, which I saw the previous evening: a fascinating, provocative pairing. Who, both productions seem to ask, is the Wagnerian now, whether on or off stage? The English horn player on stage (the excellent Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen) perhaps asks us something similar, his deeds of music rendered unusually visible.

Shepherd (Linard Vrielink), Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen (English horn)

Tcherniakov seems to me on balance to succeed where many others have failed, presenting an element of alienation that holds work and musical performance at arm’s length, without descending into mere reductionist banality. In the separation of ‘work’ and staging, even of musical performance and staging, the two become problematically, rather than mystically, reengaged. Romanticism is decisively rejected, whether in work or reception. It need not always be, perhaps, but it is here – and fruitfully. For instance, Karol Berger has recently argued that that is, part way through Tristan’s monologue, it ‘is clear thus far … that the escape from the separating illusions of Day into the unifying truth of Night remains Tristan’s goal, but a goal he cannot accomplish in Isolde’s absence, since they need to escape together.’ Perhaps. I should certainly allow, at least, that that was Wagner’s intention, most likely even what he thought he had achieved. The work here, though, I think, knows better than its creator. Wagner’s need to ‘transcend’ at the close already betrays the relative poverty of such Romanticism, just as Mozart’s terrifyingly clear-eyed coda to Così fan tutte does (more knowingly, I think, although that may be debated).

Tristan and Isolde

Tcherniakov’s treatment of the so-called Liebestod – Wagner’s own ‘Verklärung’ is worth fighting for against Liszt’s well-meaning misunderstanding – seems to me of particular interest here, sharing, even intensifying the ambiguity of work, conception, and tradition. Tristan’s room returns to darkness, Isolde having cocooned herself with him, safe from prying eyes – whether ours or those on stage. The prior onstage separation between Shepherd and his instrument, the scenic and the musical, seems thereby at a remove almost to have been overcome. We could believe in what she is doing, she doubtless could too; but we do not, and we doubt whether she does. Wagner’s reconciliation is false. Which returned this listener at least to one of the most searching – as well as, on occasion, utterly wrong-headed – of Wagner’s critics after Nietzsche: Theodor Adorno. On the final page of his Essay on Wagner, we read: ‘Tristan’s curse upon love [Minne] is more than the impotent sacrifice intoxication offers up to asceticism.’ It is rather music’s rebellion against its own ‘constraint of Fate’. In that rebellion, music will often benefit from enlisting the services of ‘drama’, and vice versa. Negative dialectics indeed.

Bayreuth Festival (6) - Götterdämmerung, 28 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Gunther – Markus Eiche

Alberich – Albert Dohmen

Hagen – Stephen Milling

Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster, Andreas Rosar

Gutrune – Allison Oakes

Waltraute – Marina Prudenskaya

First Norn, Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Second Norn, Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel

Third Norn – Christiane Kohl

Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director)

Aleksander Denić (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Rainer Casper (lighting)

Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

All good things must come to an end. All bad things too, I suppose, or at least hope, although looking at the world outside the Festspielhaus… But then the Festspielhaus has always looked to the world outside, nowhere more so than in the Ring. I have no idea how one would measure – yes, neoliberals still wish to do so, however many years after the Frankfurt School, after Romanticism, after anyone possessed of any intelligence and/or humanity ever… – degrees of the ‘political’ in an artwork, but if one could, it is difficult to see what, all things told, and many, many things are told here, could beat the Ring in that respect. Nothing could be less ‘faithful’ to Wagner’s intentions, let alone to our own needs, than some idiotic Disney ‘experience’ such as that purveyed by the likes of Otto Schenk. At least, I think, we have been spared a Zeffirelli Ring. (Should that sound like a contraceptive device, there may be good reason for that.)

Bayreuth in particular is and always has been a workshop, a place for experimentation, tendencies towards sacralisation (Bühnenweihfestspiel, anyone?) notwithstanding. That was what attracted Boulez to Bayreuth in the first – and second – place; that was thus what brought Patrice Chéreau there, for what must surely remain, bar the very first, the most celebrated Ring production in history. The Boulez-Chéreau films remain a miracle: as watchable – and as listenable – as when they first appeared. Moreover, and without slight, say, to Harry Kupfer’s estimable successor – let us draw a veil over Peter Hall’s contribution – Chéreau’s staging changed the work forever. Arguably, there was a good deal in it, coincidentally or otherwise, presaged by Joachim Herz in Leipzig; but at least in the West, and indeed worldwide, given its filming, it was the ‘Centenary Ring’ that informed and reminded so many what the work was, or might be, really about. Having come to the end of my viewing of Frank Castorf’s Ring for the third time, I am happy to put my neck on the line and to say that, for all its problems and imperfections – not unlike the Ring itself – this is a production which, like Chéreau’s, Herz’s, and Kupfer’s too, has changed the work forever. I recoiled from some of it the first time I saw it, and freely admit that I was, in many cases, quite wrong to have done so, although I think it also fair to say that many of the performers have grown into it during its progress and also that it has itself grown in stature following revision. For that reason, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn too harshly those who found themselves lost or bewildered.

Let us hope, though, that there will be another opportunity for them, and for others who have never seen this Ring, to experience it, on DVD. Some of Bayreuth’s recent choices in that respect have frankly been bizarre: still no Herheim Parsifal, but an instant release for Laufenberg’s miserable successor. Wagner may have died owing the world a Tannhäuser; Bayreuth would do much to stave off any such demise by giving the world a Castorf Ring. Marek Janowski’s conducting has had its ups and downs, the first two acts of Die Walküre the nadir. Yet here, if still lacking much of the epic scale and dramatic thrust, let alone the critical stance, of what we see on stage, it acts well enough as a foil. Bar a few inevitable brass fluffs – I am not sure I have ever heard a Götterdämmerung in which that did not happen – the orchestra was excellent on its own terms. Moreover, the vocal and dramatic performances on stage have surely been better this year than in any of the previous instalments.

For Götterdämmerung, the cast was identical to last year’s – except for one partial, unforgettable exception. Wagner is and remains theatre, which entails a great deal of contingency. In this case, we were treated to our first – well, certainly my first – trans Brünnhilde. Having injured her leg during the curtain calls at the end of the first act, Catherine Foster, awe-inspiring in both her artistry and her professionalism, sang the part magnificently: on crutches, from the sidelines. Meanwhile, production assistant, Andreas Rosar donned a dress, wig, and so on, and acted the role on stage. Both deserve the highest of praise, not just ‘in the circumstances’. What deserves unmerited scorn and outrage is the small contingent in the audience that booed Rosar. Seriously: what piece of subhuman scum would act in such a way to someone who, at almost no notice, quite literally saved the show? It is not as if such is an unheard of practice in the theatre, and if, for some reason the AMOP delegation did not like it, why did they not just leave? If, somehow you have managed to escape the sound and sight of resurgent fascism all around us in ‘the real world’, here it was, frighteningly and sickeningly present, railing at the mirror Wagner, Castorf, and their performers held up to that world. I should love to have it revealed that the substitution was actually all along part of Castorf’s Konzept, but I think we can assume otherwise. At any rate, the same people booed his indefatigable assistant – in many ways the greatest star of the entire four-part show – Patric Seibert. His Everyman, surely unique in direction and participation in such a piece, has clearly both been on quite a journey and taken us on several others.

Back, anyway, to Castorf ‘proper’, whatever that may mean. The cosmic tittle-tattle (Thomas Mann) of the Norns takes place in an appropriately exhausted, end-of-the-world setting. Aleksander Denić’s set designs, Adriana Braga Peretski costumes, and not lest the gloomy lighting of Rainer Casper are very much in tandem with those world-weary E-flat minor opening chords; this is not a production that always criticises or works against the musical drama, far from it. Exhaustion in a well-nigh Beckettian sense rules: Fin de partie? A weird shrine, almost Marian, yet anything but, continues to draw attention and repel. But to what is this little room into which not only the Norns but many of their successors, canonical characters and others, continue to enter and, perhaps just as important, from which they continue to attempt to leave? It suggests exhausted consumerism, replete with plastic refuse, born, of course, of the oil that has run through the entire cycle. It advertises a deadly contemporary far-right politics, which, as the poster puts it, prefers ‘Oma’ to ‘Roma’. We also see glimpses of an eternally televised non-revolution such as we endure in our own late capitalist lives: as witnessed Andreas Deinert’s and Jens Crull’s video footage, both on the particular television screen within the shrine, and elsewhere onstage. East and West both led here: state capitalism as well as the still worse neoliberal variety. There is no escape. This is a world that takes its leave from Chéreau’s Götterdämmerung, or at least may be read as having done so: a world of rituals in a post-religious society that knows no morality, indeed finds it impossible even to ‘know’. Yet still, in this nihilist hell, it must somehow continue to ‘do’ something – just as the second act will offer up desperate, pointless evocations to gods who are already dead in any meaningful sense. The Norns are all dressed up for a ball to which they know they are neither invited nor capable of attending; but what else is there to do? They can sing, of course, and all three of them do – magnificent both in solo and in blend.

The Gibichungs, heirs in many ways to the ‘minor gods’ of Das Rheingold, are a still more desperate bunch. (Ultimately, the Norns need not care that much.) Gunther’s self-love, in a commanding, yet never too commanding performance from Markus Eiche is immediately apparent, vanity and insecurity two sides of the same black leather coin. Allison Oakes’s dolly bird Gutrune is certainly the victim of misogyny, but she is happy in her little smart car and would doubtless recoil, except again through the agency of song, from any feminist accusation that she should have attended to weightier, or at least different, matters. Stephen Milling’s powerfully sung Hagen has had her number all along; indeed, in a less common suggestion of incest than the usual Gunther-Gutrune one, his agency is confirmed in gaining her attention to participate in the plot in the first place. He does not need to do very much; Hagen rarely does. But what he does reminds us that he, or perhaps the mysteriously still-with-us – or is he? – Alberich of Albert Dohmen, in perhaps his finest performance here, is pulling more of the strings than anyone else; which is not, of coruse, to say that there are not forces beyond anyone’s control at work here. Wotan may have dismissed Erda as Fate, but what does that mean? Not very much, perhaps, in a world in which chemical works and Wall Street (both featured, both crucially, undefeated, even at the last) continue to rule.

Siegfried is no better. He may even be worse. It is, after all, only at the last in Wagner’s drama that he seems a character remotely worthy of the hopes invested in him – whether by Brünnhilde to Sieglinde or by the newly-human ex-goddess to herself, or indeed by us as bystanders (‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’) to a revolution that fails. Humping Gutrune quickly, brutally, before asking Gunther his sister’s name is horrible enough, but the reality of his rape of Brünnhilde, video projections both clarifying and intensifying the horror of what is going on, and of who, via the Tarnhelm, is who, chills as rarely before. The brutality of Wagner’s score here does much of the work, of course – so too did Foster’s frighteningly imperious impassivity before Marina Prudenskaya’s heartrendingly imploring Waltraute beforehand – yet it can so readily be partly undone by an uncomprehending staging. Siegfried is leader now, his demeanour, his costume, the projections tell us: and what good has it done us? None.

What I said about Stefan Vinke in Siegfried counts doubly here: the voice may not ingratiate, but should it? He is tireless, almost inhumanly so, and that is surely a more important thing to register. That Gunther and Siegfried make their oath of blood brotherhood in the kebab stall kitchen, none too careful with hygiene, serves to underline not only echoes of Wagnerian Palazzo Vendramin decadence but the sheer bestial depravity of the world within and without the theatre. All the while, Wall Street, carelessly concealed in cloth, awaits its deliberately underwhelming revelation. No one really bothers to hide who is running the show any longer.

The second act is thus set for another attempt at revolution that fails. Think, perhaps, of the ‘anti-capitalist’ protestors who neither know nor care what they want, but like a bit of attention. There is real crisis here, real hunger. Or is there? Do the members of the crowd putting up posters to that effect, and acting as if their lives are at stake in their pillaging, really mean what they say? Or are they just engaging in desperate rituals, whose meaning – again, like those evocations to the gods – has almost passed from memory? There is certainly no doubting the brutality of their behaviour, sons of Siegfried and Hagen, to Seibert’s character, desperately trying to cater to their demands. Or is he ‘just’ an actor too? His ‘death’ at the beginning of the third act is certainly stage-managed. The video shows him smear himself in ketchup (from his stall, perhaps?) and leave himself for dead, awaiting the Rhinemaidens – like the Norns, equally fine individually and in ensemble – to bundle him into their car, prior to their cavorting with Siegfried and his subsequent brutal attack upon them. (Shades of Alberich in Rheingold, but in semi-reverse? To return to the second-act crowd: does it have any revolutionary potential left in it, when Siegfried clearly does not? Try as we might, it is difficult to find. A good few of its members seem more preoccupied with culinary and sexual excess; still, fake radicalism is a good way to win a girl, is it not? The shots Seibert serves to many – Gutrune included – only make matters worse, but he is hardly in a position to argue.

And so, when Brünnhilde threatens to set Wall Street alight, nothing really happens. Everything is even worse than we had feared. No more has the end of this miserable world come than a revolution has saved us. Various participants go through the motions; someone even pops a Picasso out of the window for safe keeping. Or is it just to put it on more brazen display to the plebs below? The Rhinemaidens survive – or at least they do on screen. (That someone was a Rhinemaiden.) They even give Hagen a kitschy Rhine funeral, or at least see him off. Video, as it had in Das Rheingold, both comments on, elucidates, and frustrates the action; it has done so in the Funeral March too, Hagen marching back in a ‘Romantic’ landscape such as one might always have wished for until, jarringly, one saw it – and thought ‘what a load of rubbish’.

It is all, perhaps, a bit Heimat 3: which, the more one thinks about it, the more appropriate it seems. As Herbert Marcuse put it, in his self-reflexive critique of Marxist aesthetics, The Aesthetic Dimension: ‘If art were to promise that at the end good would triumph over evil, such a promise would be refuted by the historical truth. In reality it is evil which triumphs, and there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time. Authentic works of art are aware of this; they reject the promise made too easily; they reject the unburdened happy end.’ Rejecting the catharsis unburdened tragedy, or gnawing away at it out of post- or non-revolutionary ennui, twists the dialectical screw further. What a world is ours.

Bayreuth Festival (6) - Götterdämmerung, 25 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Gunther – Markus Eiche
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Hagen – Stephen Milling
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune – Allison Oakes
Waltraute – Marina Prudenskaya
First Norn, Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Third Norn – Christiane Kohl
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksander Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

It would be a poor excuse for a Ring that did not change those taking part in it, whatever their roles – and that includes, or should include, members of the audience. Frank Castorf’s Ring of 2016 vintage will, I suspect, most likely prove to have changed me more than most. There remains an abiding irony that the two greatest live Ring performances I have heard have been concert stagings: both, believe it or not, at the highly unpromising venue of the Royal Albert Hall, under Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim. I shall not even claim that I felt something was missing on either of those occasions, since I did not. It was, though; one does not have to be a crazed ‘authenticist’ to believe that, ideally, opera should be staged. An excellent staging, moreover, is all the more likely, at least in many cases, radically to transform one’s understanding of a work and its possibilities. For all its flaws, which I should neither wish to exaggerate nor to ignore, Castorf’s Ring has accomplished that in spades for me. Many of the intriguing ideas hovering, sometimes more than that, in 2014 have more fully come of age. Some, perhaps especially in Götterdämmerung, have yet properly to do so. This has clearly become, though, a striking achievement for Bayreuth.

 

There is, however, another signal irony to mention: Castorf, it seems, has washed his hands of the production, dissatisfied with certain of the conditions in which he had to work. Quite when the changes took place, I cannot say, since I did not see the production in 2015. I think it is only fair, however, to credit Patric Seibert, not only the production’s Everyman, but Castorf’s assistant, who has remained with the staging, as well as the rest of the production team. This thought must remain speculative, but it seems quite possible that it took some distancing from Castorf to achieve a more satisfactory dialectic between engagement with and alienation from, even criticism of, Wagner’s work. Perhaps that may even be owed to Seibert’s engagement onstage with Wagner’s characters, whom Castorf himself may, at least initially, have underestimated. Whatever the precise truths concerning responsibility may be, however, we should celebrate both the achievement in itself and the reminder that opera is of its very essence a collaborative effort. Wagner, his near-superhuman efforts as provider of words and music notwithstanding, knew that very well. He did not, after all, conduct the Ring at Bayreuth, knowing that he had more than enough on his plate supervising the production. Perhaps more importantly still, he was deeply dissatisfied with the results, offering those concerned and us his celebrated exhortation, well heeded by Castorf et al.: ‘Kinder, macht neues!’

 

There is apocalyptic atmosphere aplenty in this grand denouement. The Norns’ cosmic tittle-tattle gains both in portentousness and in gossip-quality as they and their strange costumes – somehow both redolent of extravagance and of bag-lady existence – make their way across the stage and into a little shrine, whose function remains mysterious in its apparent meaningless. The end of the world is truly nigh, it seems. Writing on Patrice Chéreau’s legendary Bayreuth production, Günter Metken spoke of Valhalla as ‘no longer the undamaged place it once was,’ with ‘something of the unhealthy air of Venice … It is one of those choice apparitions of death conjured up by the previous [nineteenth] century, in order to repress the rapacity of daily life.’ He went on to liken the entry of the gods into Valhalla to a tableau vivant of Bruegel’s Parable of the blind — astute commentary upon both Chéreau and Wagner. It also seems rather well to fit both this Götterdämmerung, and perhaps even its relationship to Chéreau as well as to Wagner.

 

‘The people’, or whatever we want to call them, have not, hitherto, been entirely absent from this Ring. Indeed, their intriguing inclusion, not only in the person of Seibert’s character, but also on video (think, for instance, of the community in Die Walküre’s Azerbaijan), and its collision with a world of cruel gods, dwarves, heroes, and so on, has proved an important device not only of alienation, not only of ‘relevance’, of Aktualität, but also of dramatic interaction between those ‘kinds’ of being Wotan would rather keep apart. They are nevertheless far more present here; such, after all, is the nature of the work, in which the grand opéra chorus, as well as certain other Meyerbeerian phenomena, is triumphantly reinstated, aufgehoben. Part of the question posed seems, at least insofar as I understand, to be a classic Marxist, and indeed more generally socialist, one. In a world of abundance, the genuine achievement of the bourgeois mode of production, how can we achieve redistribution? The world can feed itself, can provide for the needs of its inhabitants, many times over, and yet does not. Hence, I think, the importance here of food. As my friend and former pupil, Sam Goodyear has pointed out to me, Wotan has previously proved conspicuous in his wastefulness. What does he care if he orders several times over at the Alexanderplatz café in Siegfried? Money is no object.

 

Yet there are many, labouring under the yoke of Wagner’s multiple post-Feuerbachian divinites – the state, capital, religion, power, etc., even ‘love’ – for whom the denial of food, and indeed the denial of other necessities and freedoms, most certainly does. So long as the Gibichung regime provides for the people, it seems that Gunther and Hagen will have their loyalty; and the frantic nature of provision as the crowd is worked up by Hagen in the Vassals’ Scene seems suggestive both of the relationship, increasingly stretched, between supply and demand, and of dangerously fascistic frenzy, such as we see increasingly on our streets in a Trumpist, Faragist, burkini-prohibiting world. The petty flags of different ‘nations’ underpin the violence as members of the crowd set upon each other and, perhaps most crucially, the poor Everyman who must serve them, perhaps echoing, even if unknowingly, the brutal treatment of the Migrant from Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960. Video both relays the action and invite others, us included, to take pornographic pleasure in watching the goings-on, just as we do with ‘the news’. When the Rhinemaidens find the body of the murdered Everyman, and put him in the boot of their car, the end seems closer still, which, of course, it is. Their mermaid seduction of all three men, Siegfried, Gunther, and even Hagen, pleasuring them in that same car, makes a chilling point of decadence.

 

There are still certain parts of the drama, as I implied, which seem to me to work less well, with Aleksander Denić’s magnificent set designs being relied on to do a little too much of the work for themselves. The temperature drops, or at least seemed to me on this occasion to do so, for the Waltraute scene, Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s Romantic heritage a little too prominent in the mix. And even the final scene has something of a provisional air to it at times, although it was now strongly assisted by a commanding performance from Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde. For the most part, however, a greater willingness for characters to perform their role in a greater dramatic whole, as well, perhaps, as a greater ability from a number of them to perform that role, has led to a significantly more impressive achievement.

 

Foster’s Brünnhilde now seemed to own the stage, equally at ease with the demands of character and production. Stefan Vinke, moreover, offered a huge improvement over Lance Ryan. The latter could act but, to put it bluntly, could not sing the part. Vinke accomplished both, even though there were understandable signs of strain at times (especially, though, early on, so it was perhaps as much a hangover from Siegfried as anything else).  Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester, an excellent Gunther indeed, found a worthy successor in Markus Eiche: darkly dangerous, no mere pushover, with violent tendencies of his own, intriguingly internalised more than externalised, nowhere more so than at the end of the second act. Stephen Milling’s Hagen initially sounded slightly on the gentle side, but quickly grew into the role – or my assumptions died away. One sensed both sadism but underlying fear too: this was anything but a one-dimensional reading. Allison Oakes’s Gutrune was very well sung, also treading well the thin line between manipulator and manipulated. As I said, I missed a degree of dramatic engagement in the scene with Marina Prudenskaya’s Waltraute, but think that may have been as much a matter of the production as anything else; it was certainly not something I could put my finger on, in what was an accomplished performance.

 

If Siegfried were the highlight of Marek Janowski’s reading of the score, then there was nothing to complain about in Götterdämmerung. The strange balances heard in both Das Rheingold and, to a lesser extent, in Die Walküre, were gone. There was, moreover, in general a fine sense of ebb and flow, Janowski unafraid to relax as well as to push forward. There were times when I longed for a stronger sense of the orchestral ‘voice’ as Greek Chorus reimagined, but that was a matter of degree. Towards the end of the first act and at the beginning of the second, there was a sense of coasting, of the orchestral temperature dropping somewhat, but again I should not wish to exaggerate. There was much to admire in Janowski’s navigation – and it was, after all, only his first year at Bayreuth, a theatre and acoustic with very specific difficulties. Both orchestra and chorus should be highly praised for their achievements; they, as much as anyone else, were crucial contributors to a truly challenging Ring. The final, distinctly unsettling feeling, mixed with the exhilaration of the conclusion of such an experience, was much as Boulez, at work on in this work in this theatre, said it should be: ‘Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.’