Author : Jos Hermans
Lohengrin (1979)
Seven years after the Tannhäuser scandal, Götz Friedrich returned to Bayreuth. This time he was allowed to have a go at Lohengrin, a piece he connected to his previous production through the characters of Tannhäuser and Elsa. Both he considered social outcasts and both were in search of self-realization and truth; the former followed a path that led to rebellion and death, the latter entrenched in herself, in a state of internalization that ended in self-destruction. Unlike other directors, Friedrich regarded Lohengrin as Wagner's most pessimistic opera, and the production itself reflected this bleak disposition. On the one hand, he adopted much of the abstraction, stylization and symbolism of Wieland Wagner's 1958 version; on the other, he rejected the exuberant play of colors of the latter's lush production, without, however, fully exploiting postmodern realism as he had learned from Felsenstein. Günther Uecker designed the sets.
Lohengrin's traditional blue and silver was replaced by black and steel, and throughout the performance the stage floor was covered with a sheet of lead intended to symbolize the patriarchal-militant social order. The prelude was played with the curtain open and showed Elsa immersed in a nightmare. The first act began not in a pastoral setting along the banks of the Scheldt but in a science-fiction chamber. It was a cold and ominous scene with Brabant and Saxon warriors lined up along both sides of the stage against a black wall decorated with steel studs. Lohengrin arrived in a blinding light on a revolving disc that manifesting his deviancy from the strict and orderly world of Brabant. The bridal scene took place in a gloomy room decorated only with steel rods and a huge feathery bed. The production was well received. Friedrich was credited with having successfully forged legend, romantic fairy tale and historical narrative into one. At the same time, he had revived the idea of the miracle. Critics were mainly annoyed by the somber settings, but there was no opposition from the audience. All the traditionalists seemed to be extinct. Edo de Waart's musical direction did not earn him another invitation. He was subsequently replaced by Woldemar Nelsson.
Tristan und Isolde (1981)
For the new production of Tristan und Isolde, Wolfgang first called upon Patrice Chéreau. When he declined, Wolfgang decided to take Daniel Barenboim's suggestion and engage Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who had just delivered a bizarre Ring in Stuttgart. Ponnelle's only condition was that Isolde's Liebestod would be allowed to be excluded from the stage and depicted only as the fantasy of Tristan's fevered brain. It became a fairy tale version like never before. Tristan and Isolde were transformed into Pelléas and Mélisande. Melancholy was present but little tragedy; heartwarming beauty also but little heartbreaking sadness. The visual enchantment was still talked about years later. The second act was especially memorable: a gigantic tree glittered with tiny lights, under which the lovers rippled their fingerts in a limpid pool of water. Some found it too saccharine, a tad like Hansel and Gretel. Indeed, the last act was depicted as Tristan's agonizing hallucination. As a result, the tragic hero managed to live 25 minutes longer and died in the arms of Kurwenal and the shepherd.
After the première year, no one else appeared on stage; Marke and Melot were visible only as shadows while Isolde sang her Liebestod from the orchestra pit. Soloists René Kollo (Tristan), Johanna Meier (Isolde), Hermann Becht (Kurwenal), Matti Salminen (Marke) and Hanna Schwarz (Brangëne) received good press. There was no unanimity about Barenboim's musical direction. He was dismissed by some as a symphonic conductor with little understanding of opera while Opern und Konzert went so far as to write that "Bayreuth now at last possessed a great Wagnerian conductor."
Parsifal (1982)
The 1982 centenary performance of Parsifal fell to Götz Friedrich. Set designer Andreas Reinhardt designed one of the most unusual sets that had ever been seen in Bayreuth. Taking Gurnemanz's words as his starting point, "Here time is one with space", Reinhardt designed sets that were at once poetic and realistic, and which seemed to seamlessly blend time and space. For the first time in the history of Bayreuth, even the slightest reference to Joukowsky's Byzantine temple was completely absent. "Within this space, I wanted to destroy conventional visual images and encourage the audience to explore for new visual possibilities," he defended his concept. Indeed, he did so by creating a space that seemed to challenge both the laws of normal perception and physics. It was as if his set had turned the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana near Rome inside out and laid it on its side. The audience looked up at rooms inside a tower. Depth gave the impression of height. Klingsor's castle was a hi-tech lab. The Flowermaidens, a nightmare for any director, were convincingly erotic in their magical garden that looked more like a brothel. Unusual as it was, the performance nevertheless met with surprisingly little criticism. Friedrich's Parsifal was a secularized Parsifal, a social commentary without religious connotations. An elitist, closed community had lost its sense of compassion and humanity, and brought the brotherhood to the brink of bankruptcy. At the end, which also heralded a new beginning, the community opened up, knights laid down their swords and helmets, and women entered the world of the grail. Although the utopia of a peaceful society was not assured, it seemed within reach. The underlying notion was that the world needed compassion as a human, social need.
A weakness, even for those who liked the production, was the difficulty in making the connection between the way Friedrich portrayed the work and the meaning he wanted to impart to the opera. At least one person was troubled by both the staging and the interpretation: James Levine considered the performance intolerable. He gave the score a sacerdotal reading that went directly against Friedrich's intentions. Oper und Konzert wrote that Levine's direction brought the beauty of the score to the surface but lacked dramatic zest; he turned Parsifal into what it was not - "a religious service with beautiful music'. When Levine refused to continue conducting the production after the 1988 season, Wolfgang sided with his conductor, replacing it with his own version. The cast of the first season was considered very successful. Peter Hoffmann was considered an ideal Parsifal; Leonie Rysanek made a successful comeback as Kundry; Simon Estes was an impressive Amfortas; Hans Sotin's Gurnemanz, Franz Mazura's Klingsor and Matti Salminen's Titurel were all well received.
The Ring (1983)
With the Ring in 1983 Bayreuth had one of its most magnificent flops. In the preparations for this Ring, Wolfgang had begun with the choice of conductor: Georg Solti he already had tried to recruit twice in vain. Now Solti agreed on condition that the work would receive an old-fashioned, romantic treatment, without psychological interpretations, political analyses or stylistic abstractions. Solti thereupon engaged Peter Hall as director. According to Hall, Wieland and Wolfgang had brought symbolic versions of the Ring to highlight the psychological elements in the operas; Chéreau's political interpretation had been a reaction against it. Hall's Ring would now become a reaction against Chéreau. He decided not only to follow the composer's stage directions down to the last frog, ram, horse, bear and bird but also to emphasize the often neglected sensual and sexual element. "I wanted to see a Ring based on nature, about weather, about rain and clouds, water and mountain peaks and fire," Hall said. To William Dudley, who built the sets, he made it clear that he wanted real water, real fire, real trees, a horse that looked like a real horse, and a carriage pulled by real rams. This leap backward was contrary to every artistic trend that had taken place in Bayreuth over the last 50 years. Such a production had for years been a dream of all conservative Wagnerians who longed-if only for once-to experience a truly old-fashioned, naturalistic Ring that would possess the atmosphere of 1876 and be realized with today's technical means. But Hall went further and tied a robust English anti-intellectualism to it. He characterized the Ring as "a children's fairy tale, elevated into an adult myth" that had to be comprehensible even to a 12-year-old. The production team decided to thrill from the opening scene of Rheingold, the scene where, as Chéreau put it, you have to throw your cards on the table, and had the Rhine daughters swim around naked in a large water-filled tub with the images projected through mirrors in the auditorium. Now in practice it proved virtually impossible to get rid of 50 tons of water during the subsequent interlude of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. A complex and costly platform therefore had to be constructed to cover the pool. To accommodate both the tub and the platform construction on stage, it was necessary to reinforce the stage to support the additional 65 tons of weight. After only two scenes, it was clear that the production team had gotten themselves into serious technical difficulties. Over time, things went from bad to worse. Scenes and costumes arrived late, special effects had to be canceled, the budget was exceeded, and there were multiple threats of dismissal. The British team did not speak German. The German staff spoke no English. Hall and Dudley were blamed for stubbornness, demandingness and ingratitude. They themselves considered the German staff unwilling, inefficient and hostile. The end result of all this was that after three years of hard labor just hours before the premiere of Götterdämmerung, the final scene still needed to be worked on. The production fell into an abyss. Friedelind Wagner was enraged: "This is the greatest amateur show I have ever seen in a theater. Peter Hall has no idea of the Ring, nor of directing.... This is the downfall of Bayreuth".
"Circus giants with plastic hands and faces, a rocking horse as Grane, two stuffed rams for Fricka and otherwise Hansel and Gretel or even Walt Disney sets, none of this works" wrote Opera. As in 1876, it was mostly the effects that went wrong. According to the Sunday Times, the Gibichungen hall resembled an old-fashioned railroad station. The production was also faulted for stylistic inconsistencies. "A juxtaposition - of styles cobbled together from a century of Wagner history" reported the New York Times. Most critics appeared surprised that such flabby directing and acting could have come from a director with Hall's experience. And they admitted difficulty with a lack of conceptual coherence. Hall responded dismayed. As if a Ring in Bayeuth was equivalent to a children's musical in London, he lamely explained at a press conference after the premiere, "I believe in naiveté in the theater. I would like this production, visually and in its actions, to make sense to a child." The production also had its defenders who stressed that the collaboration between Hall and Dudley had produced any number of beautiful scenic images. "A poetic, flowing, illusionistic performance," thought Joachim Kaiser. Die Zeit praised the production as "well-conceived, of stature, lively, with moving scenes of overwhelming beauty. " The Times found that three quarters of the performance was "visually staggering." Walter Bronnenmeyer found it as impressive as a film of Snow White. And there were those who loved traditional naturalism. The arch-conservatives of the Aktionskreis fur das Werk Richard Wagners formally thanked Hall and Solti. In their publication, the Richard Wagner Blätter, they published an spirited apologia, presenting the attacks on Hall as a conspiracy. The performances of the première year were poorly sung. The German press spoke of an outright Sängerdämmerung. That was in part because the production team tried to exclude all singers who had worked for Chéreau. Reiner Goldberg had to be replaced at the last minute by Manfred Jung. Hildegard Behrens sang her first Brünnhilde. Siegmund Nimsgern made a good start as Wotan but later became ill. Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde), Hermann Becht (Alberich), Matthias Hölle (Hunding), Aage Haugland (Hagen) and Peter Haage (Mime) received good press.
Expectations for Georg Solti 's conducting were high. He was the last Central European romanticist, a musical perfectionist and a tireless coach and rehearser. But he faced the classic problems of the covered orchestra pit. Since what came out of the orchestra pit during rehearsals was not the big sound he was used to, he experimented with the pit cover to get the colors and the fiercer climaxes he wanted. Eventually, he felt he had struck the right balance. But he continued to find it an uphill battle. "By the end of each performance, I felt like I couldn't go on any more", he explained. "It wasn't just the exhaustion, it was the heat. People have no idea what the suffering is in that pit." The critical reaction ran the gamut, only more so. Opernwelt went so far as to claim that his conducting qualified him to be the successor to Furtwängler; Bachmann found it the most conspicuous weakness of a conspicuously weak production.
More unforgivable than the failure of the production itself was the subsequent attitude of the triumvirate that had created it. A rightly aggrieved Wolfgang Wagner declared to the New York Times, "Peter Hall and Georg Solti have left us with a ruin. Neither had the courage to standby their work and bring it to completion." Notwithstanding major concerns about ticket sales, Wolfgang kept the production in the repertory anyway. Peter Schneider took over from Georg Solti and Michael McCaffery, one of Hall's assistants did his best to clean up the mess until finally the production no longer caused the festival a painful embarrassment.
Lohengrin (1987)
In 1987, film director Werner Herzog was called upon to see what he could do with Lohengrin. The result had its peculiarities but, thanks to Henning von Gierke's staging designs, was outstandingly beautiful. The mood of this production was not one of miracles but of disillusionment. The kingdom of Brabant was one of frigidness and desolation, a world of ice, snow, black sky, moon and stars. The opera opened on the frozen-over Scheldt. The second act was set in the ruins of the cathedral and the bridal chamber scene of the last act took place outdoors against a backdrop of ice-covered mountains. Elsa did not die at the end of the opera but joined hands with Ortrud as snow began to fall. The cast included Nadine Secunde as Elsa, Paul Frey as Lohengrin, Gabriele Schnaut as Ortrud, Ekkehard Wlaschiha as Telramund and Manfred Schenk as King Heinrich.
The Ring (1988)
The greater the expectations the greater the potential for disappointment. In this, an opera audience is not essentially different from mice in psychological experiments. Harry Kupfer's Ring was one of the most promising productions ever. His previous success in Bayreuth with the Dutchman and his iconoclastic productions elsewhere in Germany together with the Vienna State Opera's rejection of his Ring as too avant-garde, led to hopes of a thought-provoking masterpiece, possibly even the Ring of the century. Yet when it was finished no one liked it and few felt inclined to praise it. Wotan hid behind the macho look of dark sunglasses. His family looked like a bunch of riff-raff with mafia-like features. The Rhine was simulated by a fierce green laser light. Nibelheim was a hi-tech factory manned by robotic workers in white overalls. Valhalla was a glass skyscraper that the Wotan family ascended by means of a glass elevator in the colors of the rainbow. Hundings hut was a smooth metal structure furnished with a state-of-the-art table and a matching tree stump made of aluminum. Mimes forge looked like a discarded industrial boiler-or was it a stranded submarine? The Wood Bird came not out of the forest but out of Wotan's pocket and was fixed on the end of his spear where it danced a jig. Fafner, a huge beast with metal tentacles reverted to its original giant form at the moment of Siegfried's lethal stab. During Götterdämmerung's prelude, the norns strung the rope of destiny along TV antennae. The final scene featured a partying crowd, cocktail glass in hand, watching the end of the world on TV monitors. In essence, this Ring was a parable about how the power-hungry cheat, lie and terrorize to get what they want, and in the process destroy the innocent and ultimately themselves.
Visually, it was the ugliest Ring the was ever seen in Bayreuth. Some called it the Chernobyl Ring. At the root of the problem was Chéreau. Just as Peter Hall had set himself off against Chéreau so Kupfer was now reacting to Hall's production. Had Hall established an unconvincing contrast with Chéreau, Kupfer's Ring could be considered an inferior pastiche. Like its 1976 predecessor, this Ring met with a poor reception in its first year but this time the mood did not change in subsequent years. One of the main reasons was that Kupfer's liberties had distorted the drama. Not only did Wotan appear in places he was not supposed to be but he directed some events in contradiction to Wagner's intentions. Hans Schavernoch's sets had few admirers. Manfred Voss's laser lighting was considered enchanting by some; others found them fit for a provincial disco. "Rarely has the relationship between Wotan and Fricka or the sexuality of Siegmund and Sieglinde or the physical closenes between Wotan and Brünnhilde been so powerfully portrayed," wrote the New York Times. The strength of the production was Kupfer's directing, in particular the psychological interpretation of the characters and their relationships.
Musically, it became a Ring that improved with age with Graham Clarke as Loge and Mime, John Tomlinson as Wotan, Nadine Secunde as Sieglinde, Linda Finnie as Fricka, Günter von Kannen as Alberich, Matthias Hölle as Hunding, Philip Kang as Hagen and Waltraud Meier as Waltraute. Substitutions after the first year strenghtened the performances: Anne Evans filled in for Deborah Polaski as Brünnhilde, Poul Elming for Peter Hofmann as Siegmund and Siegfried Jerusalem for Rainer Goldberg as Siegfried. About Barenboim, opinions were again divided. Most were little impressed but Le Figaro spoke of "A triumph" and the Observer had "rarely heard better playing in Bayreuth."
Epilogue
Revolutions devour their children. The revolution launched by Wieland Wagner in 1951 was consumed after his death by changes no less drastic. In his effort to keep Bayreuth at the center of the Wagnerian world, Wolfgang Wagner had turned to producers who might provide renditions of the operas that would show them to be relevant to the contemporary world and make them provocative, novel and exciting. Once under way, the innovatory process became self-reinforcing and ever more daring.
Beautiful, exciting, shocking and even scandalous, these productions made Bayreuth one of the liveliest places on the world's cultural map. Yet for all the excitement, the question arises whether what is being presented on the stage is faithful to Wagner's intent, whether it elucidates or obstructs the meaning of the music dramas, whether a production brings the work nearer intellectually and emotionally, forcing audiences, as Wagner hoped, to see themselves and their own world in it. Many of the post-New Bayreuth novelties neither originated at nor were unique to Bayreuth. But performed on Green Hill, they gained a special validation. An artist is never fully aware of the depths of his own creations, as Wagner himself acknowledged on more than one occasion. Since his works attempt to encompass the entire spiritual cosmos, to explore the inner meaning of human life, they open the possibility of endless adventure. Contrary to the conviction of Cosima Wagner, Daniela Thode, Hans Pfitzner, Adolf Zinsstag, the Aktionskreis für das Werk Richard Wagner and all other Wagnerian dogmatists, there can never be a final objective meaning to any of Wagner's works nor a platonic ideal of a productionwhich, once found, remains forever valid. Time marches on and perceptions of the world are overturned. Even the dulles-witted member of a contemporary audience cannot regard the works in the same way as did someone who attended 50 or 100 years ago. A great opera is like a precious gem, to be looked at from different angles. And the strength of Wagner is, in Harry Kupfer’s words, that "his range of ideas is so vast, so inexhaustible in fact, that even when dealing with the same work a second or a third time, one always discovers new facets ... it is as if the work itself changes and suddenly reveals things that one simply did not notice before."
As it enters its third century, Bayreuth is a simulacrum of the German nation much as it has always been. Through sacrifice, hard labor, great patience and eminent good sense, the German Federal Republic rose from ashes and ignominy to become the world’s best-governed country, with a benign social system and an economy the envy of the world. It gradually came to terms with its past and learned the crucial difference between national pride and nationalism. Similarly, the Festival emerged from moral, political and financial bankruptcy and through great effort and imagination achieved a position of unchallenged eminence. It too eventually freed itself from its fascist past and became a model of good management and inventive activity. Bayreuth has always had its ups and downs but it has remained what it has always been and what has never be duplicated elsewhere: a genuine festival which enjoys the exceptional devotion of artists and audiences, a great historic tradition, incomparable conditions of performance, a devotion tot the same seven works, and above all, the Festspielhaus itself. All this ensures that it will remain a special place.
I leave this last paragraph, in which the author once again addresses the moral decay of Germany at the time of the Third Reich and praises the resurgence of the Federal Republic under the aegis of the United States, entirely to the author's credit. It indicates a lack of objective historical understanding and reveals a bias so typical of historiography produced by the victors of WWII.