In the intermission, the French flirt, the Germans drink beer and the English read the libretto

A history of the Bayreuther Festspiele. Part 1

Author : Jos Hermans

This 11-part article series dedicated to Bayreuth is based on "Bayreuth - A History of the Wagner Festival" by Frederic Spotts, a researcher at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, a book that appeared in 1994 and in which Spotts, with a lucid, if possible objective view, tackles the history of Bayreuth burdened with so much unhealthy fanaticism.

At the time of its publication, Time Magazine signaled rumors that Wolfgang Wagner had begun his autobiography "Lebensakte" as soon as he got wind of Spotts' "rival" book. Spotts is not exactly friendly to Wolfgang, does not shy away from Bayreuth's darkest period and does not hide his adoration for his brother and artistic rival Wieland.

Prelude

Richard Wagner is the most controversial artistic figure of all time, and the renowned opera festival he created at Bayreuth in 1876 is no less so. In a country like Germany where music was always extremely important and every artistic act inevitably became a political act, a major cultural undertaking like the Bayreuth one was bound to become entangled with the fate of the nation. Wagner, who was already a political figure in his own right and saw his festival idea incorporated into the overconfident nationalism that arose after the German unification of 1872, struck a sensitive chord with his music dramas, deep in the psyche of the German people. The myths and the romance, the gods and the heroes, the social outcasts and self-immolating heroines, all coincided with a vague but powerful longing for redemption that was enclosed in the national folk nature of the German.

"Wagner's art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-criticism of German nature imaginable," said Thomas Mann. Wagner without Bayreuth, however, would have been like a country without a capital, like a religion without a church. Without the Festspielhaus, the link between the operas and the German psyche would have remained platonic. By contrast, with its annual celebrations, the festival quickly fell prey to the ideological vicissitudes of the young German Empire. Soon the fateful development occurred that the most fanatical and conservative followers transformed the festival into a temple of a pseudo-religious cult - complete with messianic savior, a holy scripture, a Holy See that considers itself infallible and a place of pilgrimage, with apostles, loyal disciples and apostates, with orthodoxy and heresy, with submission and excommunication - and Bayreuth converted into a mighty fortress in defense of "true German values," in other words, into a bulwark of conservatism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. The result of all this was that Wagner's operas, consciously imbued with a universal message, and a festival that was meant to be at most a national but by no means a nationalist institution, were hopelessly compromised. And so the fatal equation arose: Wagner = Bayreuth = Fascism, an equivalence that has never really been overturned.

"Bayreuth is Germany," the Wagner biographer Glasenapp boasted, and so it has always been. Sometimes it was Germany's pride, sometimes its shame but always its fascination. And Hans Mayer wrote : "To write a history of Wagner and the Festival is also to write the history of Germany and of the world."

An old barn

Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus has been described in many ways. He himself once called it an "old barn." Nietzsche thought it a "colossal Nibelungen structure with four towers." Igor Stravinsky found it rather lugubrious and very similar to an old-fashioned crematorium. No one ever found it beautiful. Nor was the latter in any way the composer's intention. "I agree to a construction entirely of wood, however much my fellow citizens of Bayreuth may blame me," he wrote in 1872, and although the walls were built of brick, the supporting structure consisted of a lattice of wooden beams, which would last at most half a century.

The fact that Wagner would still recognize his theater today is due to contemporary building technology and more specifically to the invisibly integrated structure of steel and prestressed concrete that has come to reinforce the original wood construction. This major renovation from 1958 to 1968 enabled the theater to retain its original interior. A number of facilities have naturally been added since then. Today there are three rehearsal rooms in addition to the actual stage, so that four productions can be rehearsed simultaneously. There is also a rehearsal room for the ballet, a wood- and metalworking workshop, a painter's studio, etc. The amphitheater-shaped auditorium would be found almost exactly as he knew it, still with the double proscenium with which he wanted to create the illusion of depth and with the sunken orchestra pit through which the theater can be enveloped in complete darkness. Technically, of course, the theater has also advanced greatly so that today a stage change can be performed soundlessly in a few seconds.

The Bayreuther Geist

By realizing his dream of having his own theater for an annual performance of his works, Wagner also immediately invented the modern music festival. It wasn't until the creation of the Salzburg Festival in 1920 that something similar emerged. A similar family venture did not occur until John Christie's Glyndebourne in 1934. Wagner's concept was that the same 7 works, and only these 7 works, would be performed year after year in the surroundings of a dormant provincial town. It could have been an undeniable recipe for artistic and financial catastrophe - and it almost was - but once again, against all logic, Wagner succeeded in fulfilling his ambition. As so often, he triumphed through the combination of determined obstinacy and the fanatical devotion of his admirers. This wagnermania had no precedent in history and was almost religious in its fanaticism and self-sacrificing devotion.

Participants in the 1876 Ring premiere testified about their experiences as if they were a sacred rite. Thus was born the "Bayreuther Geist" of which the festival has remained permeated ever since. Birgit Nilsson once said, "I still remember exactly the moment when I first saw the Festspielhaus perched on the hill. I thought my heart would burst. I simply could not believe that I would get to sing in this temple, in this hall where Wagner had lived and worked. It seemed like a dream. With beating heart I entered the Festspielhaus and felt that Wagner's spirit was roaming over everything." This kind of humble devotion is all the more remarkable since the profession of singer is known for no small amount of haughtiness. In the beginning, some singers and conductors refused any remuneration - as later also Karl Muck, Arturo Toscanini and Hans Knappertsbusch did. To this day, singers and conductors accept to be paid substantially less than at other opera houses.

Bayreuth has never been swayed by the "star system" and uses a fixed fee per role without regard to the person singing it. Success in Bayreuth, however, is a release for the international career. As Astrid Varnay once said, "To Bayreuth you come to work, to make money you go elsewhere ". One of Wagner's most shrewd decisions, however, was to run the festival in relative isolation. The isolation creates a remarkable psychological effect by not only promoting total concentration but also by creating a unique family atmosphere, an effect that applies to both the cast and the audience. But as important as the seclusion and the unique atmosphere are, it is the building itself, and more specifically the magic of the sound produced by the hall, that makes Bayreuth a special experience.

Opera critic Joseph Wechsberger described his experience of a Rheingold rehearsal as follows in the 1956 New Yorker: " Then there was silence - and out of the silence and the darkness came a sustained E flat, so low I could not distinguish exactly when the silence ended and the sound began. Nor could I be sure where the sound came from. It might have come from the sides of the auditorium, or the rear, or the ceiling. Slowly the invisible orchestra began to play melodic passages, barely audible at first and gradually increasing until the auditorium was filled with music, the music of the waters of the Rhine. I will never forget that moment."

A famous acoustic

The sound in Bayreuth is the result of an optimal mix of the basic ingredients of good acoustics. Especially important here is the reverberation time - roughly speaking, the time it takes for sound to fade out. In the Festspielhaus this is 1.55 sec, which is ideal for a "heavy" sound mass, such as that of Wagner, which needs a longer reverberation time than lighter, more transparent music such as that of Mozart or Stravinsky. Furthermore, the reverberation time is greatest for the low frequencies which benefits Wagner's rich score. Hence, Bayreuth's acoustic superiority is really only valid for a certain type of music, specifically for Der Ring des Nibelungen for which the theater was built and Parsifal which was created by Wagner with the acoustics of his new theater in his mind.

Since little was known of acoustics when the building was constructed, this unusual successful result must be attributable to a dose of luck and to Wagner's remarkable intuition. Another factor is the effective diffusion and projection of the sound. Here the wooden structure of the building is of fundamental importance. All the woods used - pine, fir, maple - contribute to the brilliant resonance. Leonie Rysanek once said, "It is incomparably more beautiful to sing in Bayreuth. I can hear myself then and that is important to me. Not out of vanity but because I can control my voice better then. There are many opera houses, for example the Met, where the voice just gets lost. In Bayreuth it comes back to you ". And Manfred Jung mused: "Wood breathes. It absorbs and then gives back."

The sound is further enhanced by other structural features: the empty space under the auditorium acts as a resonator, the wooden roof and the sailcloth of the ceiling (the velarium) act as a reflector. The auditorium is thus an exceptional receptor of sound, which mixes, distributes and softens it, thereby increasing its clarity.

The resulting sound quality and balance between voices and orchestra are unparalleled. The Festspielhaus is in this sense more subtle than any other opera house: the slightest nuance can be felt throughout the auditorium. The text intelligibility and the vocal color nuances are expressed here like nowhere else. Above all, the auditorium is kind to the voice. As Karl Muck once told a young, inexperienced Karl Böhm, "Should you ever get to Bayreuth, you will never make the orchestra too loud for the stage; you can turn it up full volume, but you will not obscure even a singer with a weak voice. That is the miracle of Bayreuth." Chorus and soloists can sing piano where elsewhere they would have to sing mezzo-forte or even forte.

Achieving this balance between singers and orchestra at the same time as achieving a fusion of the orchestral sound were in fact two of Wagner's goals in designing his theater. As the orchestral sound became richer and richer in his later works, he was forced to dampen the volume in some way. To achieve the sound he desired, he introduced a number of innovations that have remained quasi untouchable ever since. One of these is the arrangement of the musicians. These sit in 9 rows and at 6 different levels. First there are 2 rows of violins, first violins on the right and second violins on the left. The violas are on the 3rd and 4th rows, then follows a row of cellos, flanked by double basses on either side. Then follow the woodwinds, flanked by the harps and finally at the deepest level - below the stage - the brass and percussion. Although this arrangement promotes balance and homogeneity of orchestral sound, it is claimed that it only benefits Parsifal and that other operas could benefit from a different arrangement.

Another novelty was the covering of the orchestra pit with a hood at the front and a damper at the back. The front cover was originally intended to shield the auditorium from light reflections from the orchestra pit, while the rear cover was added in 1882 for acoustic reasons. Together they modulate the volume, particularly of the woodwinds and brass, and force the sound to the front of the orchestra pit where, along with the strings, a fully mixed sound is created. Because lower frequencies rise more readily from the pit than higher ones, the orchestra acquires an exceptionally dark and silky sound.

Wagner's guidelines create enormous problems for just about everyone in the orchestra pit. Conductor and orchestra members can barely see each other. Furthermore, the orchestra members have no idea of the total sound they are producing, they often only hear their neighbor playing and are often overwhelmed by the infernal volume. In other words, they are more dependent on the conductor than anywhere else. During the rehearsal of the Ring in 1983, Georg Solti complained, "If anybody had told me when I was at music school that I would one day be in an pit where I couldn’t hear anything or see all the players, I would have become a doctor." Another major drawback comes from the architecture of the orchestra pit itself. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick was the first to observe -at the time of the Ring premiere- that the pit had the effect of compromising “if not precision, at least the brilliance of the orchestra”. Camille Saint-Saens complained, "There is a great deal of musical wastage at Bayreuth. Many interesting details evaporate in the great orchestra pit". Loss of intensity and detail - this has always been the main criticism. The moderation and blending of sound at times results in blandness.

For all the beauty of tone, there is consequently a loss of the sheer physical thrill of the orchestral sonorities, especially in the big climaxes. Furtwängler claimed in 1930 that he felt that "delicate passages lost something of their intricacy, illumination and plasticity" and that "the sensual sound and splendor of the orchestra, which were the composer’s objective, were not fully realized." Georg Solti said of his first experience in the auditorium in 1982, "It was an entirely different Wagner sound than I had ever heard before. I missed the masses of sound and the colors I love so much in Wagner". Most critical yet was Richard Strauss. Based on the three seasons he conducted there, he judged that "the covered orchestra pit was effective only in Parsifal, Tristan and the Ring. Otherwise, many of the inexhaustible riches of the score are lost at Bayreuth - I need only mention Meistersinger."

Although the composer had succeeded in redimensioning the orchestral sound to the benefit of the voices, he had to pay a substantial price for doing so. As Strauss put it, Wagner the composer had been willing to sacrifice his music for the benefit of Wagner the dramatist. Die Meistersinger, as Strauss pointed out, is its greatest victim. The sometimes polyphonic style and chamber-music passages benefit more from a strongly articulated rather than a covered sound, from sharp contrasts rather than flowing transitions, from differentiated orchestral sonorities rather than constant blending. A year before the first performance in Bayreuth in 1888, conductor Herman Levi already knew that there would be problems. An assistant and witness to the disastrous rehearsals reported : "Despite the most assiduous efforts it proved impossible to produce clear sound; the intricacies of the score, the sonorous gothic of this music was lost in the confusion of sounds; ambiguity and turgidness were all that remains of fruitless efforts."

Die Meistersinger also poses practical problems. More than in any other Wagner opera, the voices are accompanied by woodwinds. Since the woodwinds can barely hear the singers, they have no choice but to mechanically follow the conductor's instructions. It depends solely on him to keep both parts together. Coordination with the singers also poses a problem due to the covered orchestra pit. After all, the orchestral sound does not flow directly into the auditorium, as in any other opera house, but is projected onto the stage where it enters the auditorium only after reflection on the walls of the sets and proscenium. Only here do the voices and the orchestral sound come together. The synchronization of both sound waves, due to a slightly lagging orchestral sound, is a great challenge for any conductor, soloist or chorus. In an ordinary opera house, a singer follows the beat of the conductor. In Bayreuth, therefore, he must lag a little behind and how much depends on the sets. In sets that lack depth like Sachs' studio or Hunding's hut, they can sing practically simultaneously with the orchestra. The deeper the sets the longer they must delay. In Götz Friedrich's 1979 Lohengrin production, in which even the rear stage was open and the chorus ranged along the entire depth, the sound of the chorus varied by as much as half a beat depending on where the singers stood. Nevertheless, the soloists apparently manage to adjust to the time difference relatively easily. The choir, on the other hand, has to scrupulously follow instructions from the conductor and his three assistants. They watch the conductor on TV monitors and simultaneously listen to the choir with one ear and through headphones to the orchestra with the other ear.

A nightmare for conductors

It is the conductor who must have the strongest nerves. He must consider the time difference he himself hears as non-existent and not try to compensate or orchestra and voices will never be equal. With an inexperienced conductor, the tempo will automatically drag. Daniel Barenboim: "A conductor can see and hear remarkably little either in the pit or on the stage, just as singers and chorus members are able to catch scarcely a glipse of him". Wieland Wagner: "The conductor is the one who hears the worst." Rudolf Kempe was so shocked that he later admitted that at his first rehearsal in 1960 he had wanted to pack up immediately. So how do conductors cope?

At the time of Cosima Wagner, the singers had to follow strictly formal gestures and tempos were rather slow. Later conductors like Hans Knappertsbusch learned to lip-read to understand the singers and many have followed him in this. A conductor has no idea how the music sounds in the auditorium. Even the best conductors need a few seasons to adjust.

Joseph Keilberth on his conducting experiences from 1952 to 1956: `Richard Wagner created a wonderful sounding board when he designed this house but he did not make it easy for the conductor. I have worked here for several summers now but each time it takes me a good while to catch on. I can hardly hear the singers. And they can’t see me very well. So I work in shirt sleeves. Some of the conductors wear shirts that reflect light. The musicians don't hear the singers at all, in some sections of the pit they don't even hear themselves. Right here, though, the music literally beats around your ears. Under the circumstances, the conductor has a hard time keeping singers and orchestra together. He has to rely on instinct, float along with the singers and keep the orchestra moving. I have worked in a lot of places but I assure you, Bayreuth is the toughest ".

Chorus and orchestra

The orchestra is exceptionally large. It makes audible what is happening on stage visually and psychologically, it even tries to sculpt the inexpressible. To create this narrative orchestra, Wagner needed music of exceptional richness, color and detail, even new sounds. He not only expanded the orchestra but also added new, modified and rarely used instruments. For Bayreuth, Wagner wanted a more extensive string section - 16 first violins, 16 second violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, 8 double basses and 2 to 8 harps - in total up to 27 more instruments than in the conventional Wagner orchestra. The string section always remains unchanged; the number of woodwinds, brass, and percussion varies from opera to opera. For example, the total number of instruments for Lohengrin is 89 and for the Ring 124. Today, some 183 musicians are available during the Festival.

Indeed, most musicians play only 4 of the 7 works and the horn players are often replaced between the second and third acts of Götterdämmerung. Wagner recruited his musicians in 1876 from the best orchestras in Germany and this tradition has endured to this day. Each musician is given a contract of only one year at a time, and if he underperforms he is not invited back. The fee is barely sufficient to cover his expenses. There is no musicians' union and the musicians have to accept a demanding rehearsal schedule. These are working conditions that seem possible only in Bayreuth. The chorus has been the best in the world since 1876. More than an ensemble of singers, the choir in Bayreuth sounds like one seamless, unified voice with crystal-clear intonation. A large number of them are soloists. Until the 1960s, the chorus members were exclusively from Germany and Austria. Today they come from all over the world. There are 134 members - 76 men and 58 women - with an annual turnover of about 20. Finding and rehearsing the chorus members is the responsibility of the chorus directors, successively: Julius Kniese, Hugo Rudel, Friedrich Jung, Wilhelm Pitz, and since 1972 Norbert Balatsch.

When you walk back down the Green Hill after the performance, an almost religious feeling of solidarity with the other participants in the ritual creeps up on you, moved by the shared experience. Why does life seem unfulfilled without this festival and how did it all come about?

Source : Frederic Spotts, "Bayreuth-A history of the Wagner Festival," Yale University Press, 1994

Originally published in the print edition of Leidmotif, October 1997