How can Bayreuth be preserved as a museum ?

Gerard Mortier in conversation with Jürg Stengl

Translation : Jos Hermans

Looking back at opera in the second half of the 20th century, one has the impression that renewal took place primarily in the area of the visual and the understanding of direction and much less in the area of dramaturgy and music.

Certainly, after the Second World War, the real renewal in the field of opera happens in the field of interpretation and not primarily in the field of creation itself, of composition. The great personalities are the directors, stage designers and the singers. It is striking that these renewals are very often related to Wagner. His visual ideas are far behind what he created musically in comparison. But Maria Callas also stands for renewal. She did it unconsciously, it was pure instinct that led her to the insight that singing itself must be truly dramatic in order to have a right to exist in a literary scenic context. As his letters show, Mozart also knew this very well: for him, the most important thing in the interpretation of the melodic line was the dramatic expression of the melody.

But let's go back to Mozart's expression "Prima la musica e poi le parole": the differences between Wagner and Berlioz, between Tristan and Les Troyens 2000 at the Salzburg Festival points to problems that are also taken up again in the new operas of the last decades. Berlioz actually created an "academic" opera with Les Troyens, which did not follow the innovations of his time. He, the great innovator before Richard Wagner, goes back more to Mozart, but Wagner goes back more to Gluck, whom Berlioz challenged so much. Mozart -I think of Idomeneo- and Berlioz have always thought of the renewal of the musical structure. Mozart undertook the renewal of opera seria from the musical form, as La Clemenza di Tito shows. The question then arose, however, whether Wagner's renewals were to be continued. Wagner had placed the musical structure in the service of a dramatic vision and had designed his own musical mode of presentation for it. But didn't Wagner, the innovator, thereby lead opera into a dead end?

Composers such as Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and also Olivier Messiaen have again attempted to lead opera out of this dead end through their own considerations of musical form. Their templates are Greek tragedy (Nono), the fairy tale (Lachenmann), religion (Messiaen), but these templates are only vehicles for a totally new musical theater, musical theater really "from the spirit of music." Now we have to invent an architecture in which these new operas find their place. We see that all the great operas of the 20th century have repeatedly blown up the "classical" space of the Italian opera theater, such as Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, or Messiaen with Saint François, which is not meant for a "normal" opera house.

But given this view of theater and opera history, how can one deal with a theater space like the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which was built according to the ideals of one composer, Richard Wagner, to perform the Ring, and for which Wagner composed only Parsifal? Is a certain tradition not virtually anchored in such a space?

Yes and no. Such a theater is virtually predestined to become a museum. You can compare it well with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which was also built for a very specific altar. And what does one do with this museum without the altar? What Wagner accomplished in his Ring and in Parsifal had an incredible influence on many composers. A first possibility would be to perform exactly these other great developments of music in opera that came out of these musical thoughts of Wagner. I think that Nono's Prometeo is in some ways very close to Parsifal. You can't think of the space of Prometeo without the spatial sound of Wagner. There are several works in 20th century music that have developed these ideas. Reviewing them through performances at the Festspielhaus Bayreuth would have to be incredibly interesting. I'm also thinking of Lachenmann's Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, where "sound thought," "sound in space," and "sound space and time" play an essential role. But you can also think about renewal in a museum: I worked for a very long time in a very traditional theater space, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, always trying to create a dialectic with the visual spatial design of the stage to the baroque lush, even restorative interior of the opera house. An existing space does not necessarily have to be a blueprint for what happens on stage. In Bayreuth, it is something very special. My big problem remains that the idea of Bayreuth, the relationship of the eye to the stage, has not been adopted as architecture by other opera houses; for example, the height of the stage portal, which is suitable for all mythological, all non-concrete works. Mozart in Bayreuth is totally excluded, even the Magic Flute. With Mozart, you have to see the characters, Gods I don't have to see, I have to feel their presence. I don't have to see their eyes, lips, nose, that even bothers me. Mozart is the "Renaissance composer", I find Wagner rather a composer of the Middle Ages: it's more about groups, supernatural people. Saint François d'Assise in Bayreuth, I might be interested in how that might sound in Bayreuth. And then of course Pelléas et Melisande by Debussy.

There, the Parsifal sound space appears "composed out", so to speak.

Absolutely. Pelléas, too, is not about very specific characters belonging to a social sphere, but it is also about higher-level ideas, as in Tristan and Isolde; that is not, after all, a pair of lovers, rather a certain type of lovers.

However, there are also specific difficulties that are not given by an architecture, but difficulties that are given by a certain type of music. It is no coincidence that in the second half of the 20th century composers who were concerned about music theater hardly ever spoke of Wagner, of a topicality of Wagner.

If they did, then the composers thought of a topicality of Mozart, of Monteverdi or Rameau and thus of a completely different type of music theater than that of a "mythological" opera.

Wagner could have lost any musical topicality, as Helmut Lachenmann pointed out in his conversation. The discussions about "Wagner and German politics", "Wagner and Judaism" possibly obscure the fact that Wagner's music has perhaps become considerably more "outdated" than Mahler's symphonies.

Lachenmann is absolutely right. I had this experience again with the last Tristan that we performed here with Claudio Abbado, where I suddenly had the feeling that the philosophical romantic question that Wagner poses in Tristan und Isolde can no longer be met with this music today. When I see Tristan, I am looking at a museum piece. With Verdi, it has long been acknowledged that parts of his operas are really outdated: the use of certain operatic conventions, the use of the choruses, and so on. And yet a Traviata is always much more up-to-date than any Wagner opera with the exception of Parsifal. (If I had said that twenty years ago, I would have been stoned . . .) Even today I see in Traviata Verdi's most modern opera, actually more modern than Falstaff and Otello.

But let's go back: I can completely agree with Helmut Lachenmann. And yet I think we have special problems with all the other works as well: Idomeneo is tied to antiquity, and this, together with the operatic conventions of Mozart's time, makes it obsolete. With Monteverdi, on the other hand, nothing seems outdated perhaps because his works come from an early period of opera in which there were few fixed conventions. The beginning is still the most "modern" thing in opera.... Messiaen and Lachenmann, too, will one day be seen as belonging to a certain period of the 20th century. But that's not bad, it's also true for theater, painting, literature. In the case of a work of art, it depends on the extent to which the statement is so relevant for today that it can absorb the historical circumstances, so that these do not cover up the work or do not crush it. I can show this in Verdi, in the difference between Traviata and Rigoletto. In purely musical compositional terms, Rigoletto often goes further than Traviata, the night music at the beginning of the second act, for example. Nevertheless, today I have more difficulty playing a Rigoletto than a Traviata, because the taste of the times is so clearly expressed in Rigoletto. It is perhaps also easier to play Phèdre by Racine than Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo. There are so many time-bound circumstances there that I can't "overplay" now and that actually almost crush the originality of the piece. It will probably be the same with Richard Wagner, and I suspect that the Ring is that piece of Wagner's that will survive the worst. Strangely enough, with Lohengrin and Tannhäuser one does not yet have this claim of the brilliant "Gesamtkunstwerk", which is almost unbearable for me. I can't see a Ring every year.

So the way we perform old pieces from the 19th century, for example, should be a concrete answer to the question of what these pieces still have to say to us today?

Of course. But Bayreuth is also a museum. Museums are important parts of our culture, which of course also includes Wagner. Bayreuth certainly has a museum function: new generations who love music have the right to go to an ideal museum where this very museum piece Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed, so that they can get an idea of what it means.

But I am an opponent of monographic exhibitions, of great Chardin , Rembrandt or Vermeer exhibitions. I am more interested in a juxtaposition of the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and of Georges de la Tour. Or a particular theme in Caravaggio and de la Tour. If the museum function of Bayreuth is to be preserved, it can only be preserved if it is contrasted or compared with other pieces, so that the meaning and spirit of Wagner's work can be better understood. I come from Flanders: I understand a Jan van Eyck much better when I confront him not only with Flemish "primitives" but with other paintings that arose from the same spirit or contrasts with him.

The museum function of Bayreuth can only be realized if it is dialectically opposed to the art of our time. In Brussels, works by Joseph Beuys are confronted with portraits of the 16th century: this has a fantastic effect. The subject matter that Wagner developed, which of course was often time-bound, juxtaposing these thematic thoughts in other operatic works with his works is the only way to preserve Bayreuth as a museum. Otherwise, the museum will close one day.

But what do you do when you have foundation statutes that supposedly don't allow that?

Then you have to change the foundation statutes.

Source : Wolfgang Storch, “Der Raum Bayreuth. Ein Auftrag aus der Zukunft”, Suhrkamp 2002

Originally published in the printversion of Leidmotief, january 2003