Bayreuth is the only opera that's any good to me
Bayreuth is the only opera that's any good to me
Living with thirty kinds of salami : a portrait of 75-year-old Pierre Boulez anno 2000.
Auteur : Jos Hermans
“The simple fact that Bayreuth, after the brilliant inauguration of the Festival, attended by all the ruling aristocracy in 1876, was condemned to silence from 1877 to 1882, with the première of Parsifal, left Wagner bitter and, even more so, perplexed. Was his dream of a national art premature, or was it a mere illusion? How distant and unattainable seems the enchanted communion of Greek tragedy… The society which he wanted to endow with a unique self-identity derives a few moments’ amusement from this intention and then forgets it, temporarily, untill a series of misunderstandings converts his work into a narrowminded symbol of nationalism and of racism : a posthumous phenomenon of sordid irony! Stripped of this hideous mask, Wagner’s oeuvre continues to exercise its fascination, for that is the crux of the matter: an oeuvre - and a theatre. The duality of this legacy is a true enough reflection of the measure of his revolutionary accomplishment. The oeuvre has been, and still is, an essential leaven in musical life even more than in theatrical life; and not without reason, for, possessing a universal significance, it has had universal consequences, and without it the musical language as we know it today is simply unthinkable”
(PIERRE BOULEZ, Divergences: de l’être à l’œuvre, januari 1976)
A wildly kicking Pierre Boulez had loudly proclaimed in the sixties that blowing up all opera houses was the most elegant solution to get rid of "the problem of opera" once and for all. In those days, he still saw opera as an art form as unbearably sterile, and with his destructive tendency to dissent from the prevailing opera practice, Boulez seemed like the reincarnation of Richard Wagner, this other radical who saw the Semper Opera go up in flames from the barricades of Dresden and was falsely accused of arson for doing so.
Boulez has since become a great deal more magnanimous because, in addition to being the interpreter and pioneer of the French avant-garde, he has also become an impressive icon of the music world: the glamour-boy of modernism, the monstre sacré of contemporary music. The verbal attacks against the music business that accompanied his flailing years have gradually lost their sharpness. The official music establishment, which was fiercely attacked at the time, has proven itself resistant and Pierre Boulez has not been spared from compromise. Today he is hammering away from within. In this, too, he resembles the tamed iconoclast Richard Wagner, the author of the Zürcher Kunstschriften, who no longer preached his revolution on the barricades but wanted to bring it about through his art. With age, one discovers one's territory and is supposed to retreat to it. A river, wild and impetuous, begins its descent into the sea; once near the sea, it widens but also has a strong current.
For Boulez, paving the way means first and foremost bringing the music of this century to the concert stage. "The concerts I give are usually conceived around contemporary music. But if you present contemporary music then you must also present the repertoire; a large orchestra cannot survive without the repertoire. Therefore you have to make a compromise, a compromise in the good sense of the word. It has everything to do with the audience: if the audience gets the feeling that you can conduct àll pieces then they will continue to follow you from the confidence that what you are doing is not completely absurd." (1)
Boulez also followed a trajectory in his aesthetic views of music. The strict determination aesthetic of serialism from his early days as a composer has given way to a less rational formalism in which intuition has come to play a greater role. "The most important thing in music is the balance between structure and intuition. Only structure is uninteresting, is academic. Just intuition is not enough. While that can create a shock, it doesn't hold up after multiple listening because the structure is inadequate. That is why the balance between calculation and intuition fascinates me" (2)
A remnant of his experimental years within the confines of rigid serialism is undoubtedly his attachment to precision and clarity of expression. For Boulez, music only begins with precision. Traditions that had stiffened into sloppy performance practices he broke open on several occasions. In doing so, he never shied away from jumping into cold water; he has always been and remained a difficult negotiator. "What is tradition? Tradition consists of mannerisms that someone has caused and which have subsequently been adopted and thereby transformed into mannerisms of a questionable kind because they no longer have a right to exist. Everyone has their mannerisms. I am sure I have mine but I am not asking anyone to imitate me. And so if you ask me about what Furtwängler did in the 1930s it was obviously very good because it was Furtwängler himself and it was his own time. But today you can't do things the same way." (3)
Like no other, Richard Wagner's music symbolizes a tradition burdened with the calluses of a questionable past. It was precisely to wipe away the unbearability of that tradition that Boulez began conducting Wagner's music in Bayreuth. "When I went to Bayreuth in 1966 with Parsifal and then in 1976 with the Ring, I experienced violent hate reactions as rarely in my life. And what I had wanted -in the first two years I may not have quite succeeded in that, but it has always improved afterwards- was to eliminate the pompous rhetoric that people held for Wagner, with all its silly turgid crescendi. One held that for expression but it was a false rhetoric. The misery with Wagner is that he was caught between being an adventurer and a very reactionary man. The audience that Wagner enjoys today is just as split and divided between reactionaries and adventurers. And I think that will always be the case. What I always insist on: musicians who always interpret classical and romantic literature, say from Mozart to Bruckner, they always think in categories of the past. They do not nourish themselves with the thinking of today but always think of a mausoleum. They do not undergo a lively exchange between past and present and reason as if in a coffin. And that is unbearable for me, that is when I become a little furious. When I was young this world did not interest me but now that I see this world as part of my own life, I really want there to be a constant exchange between how I conducted Wagner yesterday and how I view the score today. That's interesting. Looking at the score only as a closed box,is not interesting." (4)
Boulez's interest and personal investment in opera remained rather marginal in all of this. It only took shape through his collaboration with Wieland Wagner, initially through his Frankfurt production of Wozzeck, barely a few months before his death in October 1966. This did not turn out to be a good omen at all. Most of his grandiose plans for the opera died with the directors with whom he had decided to collaborate: first Wieland, then Jean Genet and finally Heiner Müller. He delivered his most important achievement together with Patrice Chéreau: the fact that the scandalous Centenary Ring of 1976 can hardly shock us today is the best proof of how radically the Boulez/Chéreau tandem was able to change the opera landscape in those years, far beyond the boundaries of Wagner's home theater. He appreciated Chéreau's radical, but nevertheless literal, handling of the text, the way he managed to cast it in symbols and leave the singers stunned every time he managed to counter their objections by diving into the text with them.
About his Ring experience in Bayreuth, he recalled sour memories a few months ago: "It was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. This terror of the audience and of the orchestra! From time to time I had the impression in the orchestra pit that all hell was breaking loose in front of me and behind me. Several musicians wanted to prove that I was not capable of conducting the Ring. Therefore they played, although not literally false, but then not in accordance with what I had demanded. The rehearsals were already a torment and when at the première, at the beginning of the third act of Götterdämmerung in the auditorium, the chorus of whistles also started, I was about to throw everything overboard. But since that would have been exactly the reaction my reactionary opponents were hoping for, I went ahead. That was the pleasure I did not want to grant them." (5)
On the eve of his conducting of The Ring he had still stated, "Next year I will conduct the four cycles of The Ring in Bayreuth. Beyond that, I don't want to waste my time in some opera house. I find this business, with its ever-changing orchestras and singers, its interrupted rehearsals, etc., totally unbearable. You never get serious work done that way. Rather, one should make the effort to build up a permanent ensemble: not thirty kinds of salami but just one! Bayreuth is the only opera that is any good for me. I can work here unhindered and do not have to share rehearsals with another conductor or an assistant: I cannot use any spectators. In Bayreuth simply everything is as it should be: singers, orchestra, acoustics, simply everything. And when the working conditions coincide in such a happy way then only can we rediscover the pieces, which have been of great importance for musical development. Only then does it become possible to reinterpret their meaning and message for a different time." (6)
Boulez will never again get around to conducting in Bayreuth, though. He can no longer afford to devote three months of his time to the realization of an opera as the Bayreuth system requires. But he never gave up plans for an opera of his own. That creation is destined for Daniel Barenboim. "The first thing I put on Daniel Barenboim's heart is that I don't want to know about any deadline. I have conducted opera, not that much, but enough to be aware of the difficulties. And for opera I want to achieve the same thing I did with Répons: to break out of a conventional environment. Of course, conventions exist not only for their own sake but also because they are efficient, for example with regard to acoustics. I once saw a performance of Boris Godunov in Paris. Joseph Losey was directing. He wanted a direct contact between the singers and the audience. He closed the orchestra pit and placed the orchestra behind the singers. The contact was extremely difficult, obviously because the conductor could not see the soloists; and so monitors were set up everywhere. The balance was completely gone! When the choir was at the front of the stage you could hardly hear a note from the orchestra. The singers could be heard out of all proportion. So you can't just decide to put the orchestra here and the singers there. You also have to deal with the acoustic problems. I want to think about that together with the librettist and see what we can do about it. Music doesn't have the same flexibility as theater." (7)
Reforming the theater is an area in which Wagner almost totally failed, Boulez says. "His fierce attacks, written more than a century ago, remain relevant today in every respect, for nothing has changed -the languidness of repertory theater, its failures and its fickle manner, the blind choice of repertory, the arbitrary casting of singers and actors, the lack of rehearsals, the sauve-qui-peut routine. Architecturally speaking, the Bayreuth model has remained dead letter and we are still left with theaters modelled on the Italian model." (8)
That was in 1975, when there was no talk yet of a "salle modulable" at the Opéra Bastille. But even that has remained dead letter, and the new possibilities of the Cité de la Musique in La Villette have not yet proven themselves for musical theater. Will the 75-year-old adventurer still manage to surprise us on this point sooner or later?
Pierre Boulez has overcome his resentment of opera, an art form that in bad hands can degenerate into the most unbearable kitsch, by playing a not insignificant role himself in the upgrading of opera as the artistic code of our time. By doing so he has continued to count Richard Wagner among the greatest personalities of music and theater history which comes as a solid boost. Pierre Boulez is therefore the hyphen between Richard Wagner and modernity.
