Author : Jos Hermans
The artistic crisis into which the Bayreuth Festival had slipped after Wieland Wagner's death had forced Wolfgang Wagner, the single-minded artistic director, to realize fairly quickly that without outside help he would not be able to restore Bayreuth to its international standing. As famous soloists and conductors left the sinking ship, he was ultimately left with little choice but to look elsewhere for fresh ideas, try new techniques, and hand over the stage direction to others. In addition to his own uninspired, old-fashioned non-interpretations, daring, experimental productions now emerged from 1969 onward, which he ordered from outside from directors who approached opera primarily as theater.
The basis for this radical approach had already been established by the two brothers at the reopening of the festival in 1951. It was rooted in the realization that Bayreuth, as a temple for the swooning Wagner believer, was destined to disappear in the future. Instead there was to be “eine Werkstatt” - a workshop where Wagner's operas would be subjected to relentless re-evaluation and experimentation. Wieland had always seen his stagings as "work in progress”. Each season he had corrected and readjusted them. Precisely because of this, Bayreuth had acquired the postwar reputation of a "living opera theater" and precisely because of this, it had also been an adventure for audiences to go there each time. After almost a century of trying to create in Bayreuth the perfect model performances that Richard Wagner had dreamed of -his original intention in creating the festival- this utopia was now recognized as an unattainable ideal. The workshop concept now became the hallmark of the post-Neubayreuth era. Keeping Wagner's works alive meant constantly reinterpreting them to make them relevant to a contemporary audience. The festival no longer became the end point but a launching pad for singers, conductors and directors. The performances were prepared with as much care as in the past but the main objective was to create experimental theater.
Der fliegende Holländer (1969)
At first Wolfgang placed his bets on August Everding, a theater director from Munich and Josef Svoboda, a Prague architect and set designer. These were to provide Der Fliegende Holländer of 1969 with some "Gewitter und Sturm”. Everding deliberately distanced himself from Neubayreuth and presented the opera as an allegorical, romantic ballad. Svoboda's sets enveloped the performance in a fitting mood full of romance, mystery and menace. From the opera he extracted some crucial themes which he simplified and made the core of the production. Daland's fishing boat took up the front of the stage. The Hollander's ship towered and menaced above it with its large, black prow. From up there, 40 feet above the stage floor and enveloped in a glittering, sinister light, the Dutchman delivered his great monologue. It was a thrilling scene.
In the second act, the Hollander's boat disappeared through a magic trick with the light: by illuminating symbolic set pieces -a door, a portrait and fishermen's nets- the deck of Daland's boat was transformed into the interior of his home. The nets were intended to hint at both at Senta's imprisonment and the world of fantasy in which she lived. The unreality of that world was also suggested by a portrait of the Dutchman brought to life that moved within its frame only to disappear when the Dutchman appeared on stage in person. The finale with Senta's leap into the sea was rather conventional.
Everding and Svoboda received good press, although some reviewers remained critical of the combination of abstraction and realism. The soloists were met with cheers: Leonie Rysanek (Senta), Donald McIntyre (Hollander), Martti Talvela (Daland), Jean Cox (Erik), René Kollo (Steuermann). Such was not the case with Silvio Varviso’s conducting.
Although the performance had ultimately proven to be very creditable, the Everding-Svoboda tandem had failed to make the festival an exciting home of the arts once again. Wolfgang Wagner therefore became increasingly convinced that he could achieve this only through provocative and heterodox interpretations. He therefore considered it necessary to bring to Bayreuth theater directors who had hardly had anything to do with Wagnerian opera, who knew hardly anything about Wagner, or who even had no opera experience at all.
Tannhäuser (1972)
For his latest production of Tannhäuser he first called upon the renowned Milanese dramatist Giorgio Strehler. When he declined the offer, he turned to the Berlin director Götz Friedrich. Friedrich had studied under Walter Felsenstein, the famous theater innovator and practitioner of realistic musical theater at the Komische Oper in Berlin. Although Wolfgang had often engaged East German soloists - they were cheaper - his invitation to an East German director was a bold step at the time and could have offended both of his vital financial sources - the Bavarian state government and the equally conservative 'Freunde von Bayreuth'. It was also a major artistic gamble. Friedrich had never directed a Wagner opera before and Wolfgang had never seen any of his productions. Moreover, there was a fundamental difference between the avant-garde of Bayreuth and that of East Germany. Typical of the approach of East German directors was an unmistakable commitment that was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the political situation in which they had to work.
They tended to unmask situations and people. They considered the historical context in which a work had been created and the personal circumstances of the composer to be at least as important as the theatrical or musical form. Characteristic of the Felsenstein school were: a dynamic presentation, dramatic clarity, precise imagery, a stark profiling of the characters and clear directing instructions for the singers. Directing was so central that the approach became known as "Regietheater”.
No production at Bayreuth since Wieland Wagner had engaged with Tannhäuser in such an original way. Friedrich's starting point was even more drastic than Wieland's: "We who do opera, who do music theater, must ask ourselves anew in each individual case why this work should be performed , for what purpose and for whom it is to be performed" According to Friedrich, the key to the work was to be found in the context in which it had been created, namely in Wagner's own struggle with an oppressive social order, a remnant of the social hierarchy with which the protagonist of the play is also confronted. By moving away from the traditional interpretation - the man torn apart by erotic and spiritualized love - and presenting the work as a chronicle of the artist in his relationship to society, the piece gained real bite and became truly interesting. Tannhäuser's dilemma was how to maintain his creativity and integrity, on the one hand without conforming to social norms and on the other without giving up the social ties that an artist needs to get his message accepted. And so the opera told the story of the artist treated as an outcast who does not conform to the prevailing social norms. "The work was strongly autobiographical," Friedrich said in the Festival programme, "not only for Wagner the artist but also for Wagner the political rebel of 1849." What he glossed over was that the work was also autobiographical with respect to himself, as an artist working in a communist state. Tannhäuser thus became a parable of the artist's journey in search of himself, through inner and outer worlds, a journey that led him from an artificial paradise (the Venusberg) to a world of ideological coercion and social repression (the Wartburg and Rome). Self-realization was as impossible in the one as it was in the other.
Earthly and heavenly love were not seen as opposites but as different sides of the same coin -Venus and Elisabeth were sung for the first time by the same soloist- and Elisabeth died not as a saint but as an old, broken and lonely creature. Tannhäuser himself did not go down as a redeemed sinner but as a man whose tragedy lay in his failure to connect with his world. With his reinterpretation of the idea of redemption, Friedrich hoped to make clear to his twentieth-century audience that belief in social tolerance could replace faith in miracles.
The overture featured a Tannhäuser who, leaving the real world of the Wartburg, fled to the fantasy world of the Venusberg. The bacchanal was choreographed by John Neumeier as a fantasy, as a sexual and sadomasochistic nightmare among the dead and the depraved, thus demonstrating that erotic excesses inevitably lead to barbarism, cruelty and death. The sets were bare, mysterious, threatening and ugly. The hall of song of the second act was a bleak and forbidding rostrum formed by 14 sharply raising stairs referring to a domineering, hierarchical society. It was a clear reference to the Third Reich and a metaphor for the fate of the artist, who was encouraged when he supported the regime and banished to the camps if he failed to do so. Here was an opera by Wagner was the revolutionary rather than Wagner the Christian redemptionist.
The fresh breeze that Wolfgang Wagner had wished for his Green Hill immediately took on the force of a veritable hurricane. No Tannhäuser had caused such a furor since the infamous Paris performance of 1861. Back then, Paris was only about a handful of troublemakers; now, anger was sweeping through just about everyone. Music critics complained about the idiosyncratic direction and bizarre choreography, the bare sets and the provocative costumes. The outfit of the landgrave's retinue looked suspiciously like the uniforms of storm troopers, the pilgrims returning from Rome looked more like an oppressed proletariat coming from the factory. Especially the costumes gave the impression that this Tannhäuser was about class struggle, about a totalitarian police force and about redemption of the artist in a socialist state. The excellent performances of Gwyneth Jones (Venus and Elisabeth), Bernd Weikl (Wolfram), Hans Sotin (Landgrave) lost their luster with the poor performance of Hugh Beresford as Tannhäuser.
The one who spared his criticism the least was conductor Erich Leinsdorf himself, who refused to descend back into the orchestra pit the following year. Leinsdorf accused Friedrich of sacrificing his artistic integrity for the sake of a political statement. He would later continue to make acidic comments about Friedrich in his memoirs: "In his preparations he must have reread the whole opus of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Liebknecht. What he did not read up on was Wagner". But the original sinner was Wolfgang, whom Leinsdorf accused of "calculated dishonesty" by inviting Friedrich just "pour épater les bourgeois."
A shocked bourgeoisie was certainly the result. Seldom if ever in theatrical history could there have been such a stunning example of life imitating art, such a perfect transposition into an auditorium of what had just been performed on stage. In one afternoon Götz Friedrich had become Tannhäuser, and the German establishment of 1972 saw itself mirrored in the Thuringian establishment of the thirteenth century. Friedrich was denounced as a dangerous red who was a threat to the Federal Republic and was best sent back to East Germany. Some accused him of having transformed the opera into a communist attack on Nazism, others of having used the work to celebrate the unstoppable triumph of the poor over the rich. The paradox, of course, was that Friedrich, the putative communist propagandist, had spent his entire career contending with the ideological oppression of the East German communist regime.
Anti-clerical, anti-religious, and anti-establishment, Friedrich's Tannhäuser was the most blatantly ideological production to have ever appeared on the Bayreuth stage up to that point. Wolfgang, who continued to support his director, was found guilty by association. He received bomb threats and piles of poisonous letters addressing him as "the red director of the festival" and labeling him a "propagandist of Soviet ideas." And so, in the end, Wolfgang Wagner had his wish. Nothing could better have proved that Wagner’s works still spoke to the contemporary world. Nothing could have better demonstrated that the mixture of politics and culture still produced dynamite in Germany. Only in Bayreuth could an opera performance have produced such an explosion. All the commotion was quickly over, however : the next season the production was cheered to the rafters.
Tristan und Isolde (1974)
Friedrich's sensational Tannhäuser was followed by a pure "son et lumière" staging of Tristan und Isolde by the Everding-Svoboda team. The barrenness on the stage was almost total. The sets were suggested by the lighting. In the second and third acts, images of foliage were projected onto a network of countless vertically hung ropes that achieved an almost glass-like translucence. Color and light seemed fluid. This made the scenes tangible and mysterious at the same time. The effects were eye-catching because of their visual magic. Changes in color and changing patterns in lighting determined the atmosphere of each scene and mirrored the mood of music and the action.
The first act was set on the prow of what appeared to be a modern liner. The stage setting was dominated by a conventional sail. Each act was marked by a shift from the real world to the private world of the lovers. The drinking of the love potion was followed by a sudden blackout that enveloped both lovers in a pool of deep blue light while behind them the sailcloth glistened in the moonlight. The second act was a fairy tale scene dominated by indistinct shapes and lush colors that ranged from deep green to autumnal brown and, during the love scene, to inky blue. In the final act streamlined walls framed the scene against a background of an enormous , glittering abstract tree.
Everding had sought a path that departed both from Wieland's minimalism and from Friedrich's crude abstractions. His productions were eye-catching and humane; his characters were real people with whom the audience could identify. The strong direction and visual splendor of his Tristan were matched in its premiere year by the baton of Carlos Kleiber -the great success of the season- and by the outstanding vocal performances of Catarina Ligendza (Isolde), Helge Brilioth (Tristan), Donald McIntyre (Kurwenal), Yvonne Minton (Brangäne), and Kurt Moll (Marke).
The Ring (1976)
In 1972, French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez had been given carte blanche by Wolfgang Wagner to assemble an extraordinary production team in preparation for the 1976 centenary Ring. Boulez first called upon the famous Swedish filmmaker and director Ingmar Bergman. When the latter informed him by telegram that nothing in the world could have filled him with greater disgust than Richard Wagner and when Peter Brook also turned out not to be interested in the project, negotiations were held for a while with Peter Stein of the Berlin Schaubühne. That cooperation foundered on Stein's difficult relationship with Bayreuth and on some of his unreasonable conditions. Stein demanded, among other things, that the conservative Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss be forbidden to attend the performances.
When Boulez finally chose the very young Patrice Chéreau, it could be considered a big gamble. Chéreau, whose only familiarity with Wagner was that he had once slept through a performance of Die Walküre in Paris in 1972, took the job to heart with no prior knowledge and great open-mindedness. Together with set designer Richard Peduzzi and costume designer Jacques Schmidt, the Ring had thus come into the hands of a full-blooded French production team and was therefore immediately destined for controversy: it became the most sensational production to have ever been staged in Bayreuth since the founding of the festival in 1876.
A theater director at heart, Chéreau saw the Ring primarily as a vehicle for exciting acting, more exciting than had ever been seen on the Bayreuth stage before. The stage direction therefore became the most important element of this production. The drama itself Chéreau considered an allegory about power, about the way power is used and how it can be destructive. Innovative were the sets, the costumes and the idiosyncratic direction with which he did not imprison the characters as gods in their mythical universe but presented them as human beings of flesh and blood. Chéreau's Ring was not a timeless Ring but a Ring with specific historical references and with the nineteenth century as its main time axis, the time of Richard Wagner himself, a time he had never stopped criticizing. Chéreau's most heretical act was that he treated the work not as one whole but as four separate parts. Each of the four parts of the tetralogy was given its own dramaturgy that grafted largely on George Bernard Shaw's anti-capitalist interpretation with Rheingold as a metaphor for the pre-industrial world; Die Walküre as the early capitalist world with Hunding as its first entrepreneur; Siegfried as the time of 19th century industrialization and Götterdämmerung as the interwar period of pre-fascist capitalism.
From the opening scene of Rheingold in which the Rhine was symbolically seen in the form of a hydroelectric power station, it was clear that this was not a Ring like any other. The treasure was guarded by three voluptuous tarts who first tempted and then rejected the grubby worker Alberich. The Wotan family lived in a Renaissance palazzo and dressed in chic nineteenth-century attire. The Ring was chopped from Alberich's hand, demonstrating the sadistic brutality of capitalism. The Valhalla resembled a hybrid between a Tuscan hilltop village and Wall Street.
Die Walküre opened not in Hunding's hut but in the courtyard of a palazzo. The ensuing love scene was played with a passion that was good for an X rating. The second act began in the vast drawing room of Valhalla whose meagre furnishings included a large mirror and a pendulum suspended from an invisible ceiling. Fricka appeared in a white décolleté gown and Wotan in a stately morning coat. He delivered his great monologue in front of the mirror, which he covered with his dressing gown in an impressive gesture as soon as he could no longer bear the sight of himself. The third act opened in a haunted graveyard where the Valkyries brought the dead heroes with carts pulled by living horses. In the final scene, the cemetery walls gave way to what Chéreau had intended to be a glacier but which looked more like an Aztec pyramid.
Siegfried revealed a gigantic modern blacksmith shop and a Mime with a battered suitcase, ready to take off. The second act featured Fafner as a giant toy dragon on wheels. Not under the lime tree of an impressive forest but in a defoliated copse, Siegfried listened to the rustling of the trees. The forest bird was trapped in a cage.
The Gibichungen Palace was a loggia with classical columns, equipped with only a modern chair as furniture. Gunther wore a contemporary tuxedo and Gutrune a fashionable dress from the better couturier. A scruffy, half-shaven Hagen wore a crumpled suit while Siegfried, who had arrived in a tattered plunge, hoisted himself into a tuxedo for his wedding. During the closing scene, a crowd could be seen staring straight into the audience with an expression of dazed hopelessness.
As the curtain fell, the greatest uproar in the history of the Festival occurred with the audience divided into two hostile camps. Immediately after the opening performance, a bloody hand-to-hand fight ensued in which the newest wife of festival director Wolfgang Wagner saw her gala dress shredded. Another lady's earring was ripped off - along with the corresponding body part. Death threats and bomb threats followed, friendships and planned marriages were broken off. Siemens threatened to withdraw as a sponsor, the Friends of Bayreuth offered to finance an entirely new production if only Chéreau's was scrapped. To combat the new defection, Wagner fundamentalists formed an "Aktionskreis für das Werk Richard Wagners." Mutiny ensued in the orchestra.
Once again, the old Bayreuther Geist had proved capable of exerting its paralyzing effect on a form of theatrical innovation. Despite some peculiarities, this production was no more revolutionary than others that had been staged in Kiel, Kassel, London, Milan, Geneva or Leipzig. But what could pass without offense elsewhere, on the fringes of Wagner civilization, counted as a sacrilege in the shrine itself. Wieland might have committed sacrilegious acts but at least he had been a German and, moreover, a Wagner. "Have you seen what he has done to our Wagner," was the often-heard complaint to be noted on the street according to the reporter of Nouvelles Littéraires. Profanity was indeed a big part of the problem. For the political conservatives, the production was unbearable because Chéreau had not only taken the Germanic gods off their pedestals-Wieland had done so before-but he had ridiculed them and their world. To them this was no longer serious opera but vaudeville, cabaret, science fiction, satire, grand guignol. To anyone who would hear it, Winifred Wagner told them that she would kill Chéreau if she ever got to see him. For a good Ring you had to go to Salzburg now, she claimed. A good year later she confessed to Chéreau that anger had been worth more than boredom. The international public eventually judged likewise, demonstrating its extraordinary resilience by rewarding the final 1980 performance of this initially so extremely controversial production with an ovation that lasted 90 minutes.
The critics reacted in much the same way. All of them found striking moments though each had his own favourites. There was much praise for the flair and expertise of the direction and the acting of the soloists. "The fury would have been less intense if Mr. Chéreau had simply bungled his job; the real aggravation is that his production makes so many illuminating, often unkindly truthful points about the Ring," wrote The Times. While many French critics were terrified to admit that it had been a Frenchman who had made such a racket, Le Monde defended the production: "Chéreau's production proved that it was possible, through hard work, to find something new to harvest in this sterile terrain". The New York Times dismissed Chéreau as a "director going amok" and condemned his production as having "little to do with the Ring cycle."
Serious critics stressed several points. It lacked the intellectual and visual coherence, timelessness and universality of Wieland's Ring. Rather, it was a confused collage of myth, psychology, social comment and environmentalism. The presentation was an incomprehensible blend of the mythical, the medieval, the mid-nineteenth-century and the contemporary with an incompatible collection of stage pictures. The sets and acting often blatantly contradicted the score. The underlying interpretation was based on merely one of the composer's themes -social revolution- and therefore drastically diminished a noble epic.
The allegation of its being a Marxist Ring was a red herring. In its hostility to science, industry, and urbanization, Chéreau's treatment marked an unintented throw-back to German conservatism and fascism. His vision was more anti-modernist than anti-capitalist. What was subversive about the production was his treatment of drama. Until then, even the greatest iconoclasts had still respected the essence of Wagner's stage directions. That link was now broken. After Chéreau, nothing, not even Bayreuth, could remain the same.
The storm of outrage that rose around conductor Pierre Boulez was at least as great. Boulez had intended his reading of the score to be as heterodox as the staging itself. Some disapproved of his interpretation in advance because of all that was on the stage. Others who liked the production itself declared they were nevertheless shocked by what they heard. A large proportion of the critics joined the majority of the orchestra members in their criticism that Boulez did not have a good command of the score. They complained that he had not properly rendered the grandeur of the score and had given a reading that, despite some brilliant moments, was basically bloodless. "Like Chéreau on stage, he presents a partial and small-scale view of the work as a whole," The Observer reported. At the same time, Boulez was praised for his "fine-grained and translucent textures" as well as for "a lyrical tenderness that is new in his conducting." This was also the view of Le Monde who attributed to Boulez "a perfection of detail, a transparency, a finesse and an exceptional equilibrium", qualities that had been typical of his conducting style for years.
Peter Hofmann's Siegmund was the undisputed vocal highlight of the season. Karl Ridderbusch poured his personal loathing of the production into both his roles of Hagen and Hunding and did so superbly. Gwyneth Jones (Brünnhilde), Donald McIntyre (Wotan), Hannelore Bode (Sieglinde), Yvonne Minton (Waltraute), Zoltan Kelemen (Alberich), Eva Randova (Fricka), René Kollo (the young Siegfried) and Jess Thomas (Siegfried) all received mixed reviews.
Der fliegende Holländer (1978)
For his new 1978 production of Der Fliegende Holländer, Wolfgang called on another of Felsenstein's protégés, Harry Kupfer, the head of the Dresden Opera. Together with his set designer Peter Sykora, Kupfer designed a post-Neubayreuth style that testified to a dream-like realism that even bordered on surrealism. His interpretation easily maintained Bayreuth’s exceptionally high standard for this work.
In Kupfer's idiosyncratic reinterpretation, the opera was presented as taking place in the imagination of Senta, a hysterical character who dominated the performance and remained present on stage from beginning to end. The overture, which was played with the curtain up, showed her standing on a platform above the stage as if in a trance. At the crescendo of the storm motif, the portrait of the Dutchman fell from the wall; she picked it up and clasped it in her arms as a silent witness to all that was to follow. The Hollander's ship appeared in the form of two huge hands that opened and threw a chained Hollander ashore. What initially appeared to be a galley boat was transformed into a flower-laden love boat during Senta and the Dutchman's duet in the second act. The final act with its brilliantly directed choral scenes ended with Senta's leap from the window under the crowd’s disapproving stare at her dead body.
Some understood the treatment as a psychodrama about schizophrenia; others saw its connection to Henrik Ibsen, as a woman's rebellion against the restrictive norms of a bourgeois society with death as the only escape. All agreed that this was a tragedy without redemption, without transfiguration, without pity. In the end, the greatest praise came from those who felt that Kupfer had ingeniously turned this early work of Wagner into one of his most relevant and powerful statements. With its rapidly changing scenes, which gave tremendous momentum to the fleeting impressions of Senta's fantasy world, Bayreuth had produced a technical feat. The sets skillfully and intelligently blended a strong form of realism with a subjective form of supernaturalism.
The success rested on the shoulders of Lisbeth Balslev, without whom the production would have been "unthinkable," according to Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Simon Estes (Hollander), Matti Salminen (Daland), Robert Schunk (Erik) also shared in the accolades. Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Dresden version.
Although there was as much vehement disapproval as unstinting critical praise to be noted during the première year, it was clear in time that this production had become one of the Werkstatt Bayreuth's greatest post-war successes.