Author : Jos Hermans
First rehearsals of the first Ring
Opera history was written with the production of the first Ring in Bayreuth. Every aspect of the work was at the service of the drama, and with such an approach opera had never been realised before. Wagner's first problem was the casting and already in 1872 he was looking for 'actors who could also sing'. Three years later he had his cast together, but he was only completely satisfied with four of them: Karl Hill as Alberich, Albert Niemann as Siegmund, Franz von Reichenberg as Fafner and Lili Lehmann as Rheinmaiden/Norn. And yet, with Amalie Materna he had a solid Brünnhilde, with Franz Betz an impressive Wotan, with Emil Scaria a promising Hunding and with Therese Vogl a fine Sieglinde. His greatest concern was whether Georg Unger would be able to handle the role of Siegfried. Vogl and Scaria finally left the team, the first because of pregnancy and the other because of a disagreement about the fee. Vogl was replaced by a disappointing Josefine Scheffzky and Scaria by Gustav Siehr, who turned out to be an eminent Hagen.
But there was a much bigger problem. Bringing this colossal work, with the dimensions of a Greek tragedy, to the stage was an undertaking that confronted Wagner with the inherent dilemma of opera: as a sung and therefore somewhat artificial-looking theatre, opera by definition lacks a certain realism, but as a drama it had to portray true-to-life situations. For Wagner, the illusion of theatre was everything and he hoped to find assistants who would intuitively understand his inner vision and who would be able to tangibly put into practice this phantasmagorical universe of the Ring with the primitive stage techniques of the time. But how could he hope to create an illusion through naturalism in the sets? How were his mythical, symbolic and psychological dramas to be realised by physical means?
Wagner knew one thing and that was that he did not want a conventional set designer. Instead, he commissioned the Viennese landscape painter Josef Hoffman to produce sketches based on his Ring text. Wagner was quite satisfied with this and in 1874 he sent these sketches to Max and Gotthold Brückner, two set designers at the Coburg court opera, who immediately suggested major changes. A heated argument ensued that led to Hoffmann's dismissal, but Hoffmann's sketches ultimately remained the basis of all the sets, which were to set the tone for Bayreuth and beyond for half a century.
For the costumes, Wagner called on the Berlin costume designer Karl Döpler, but instead of letting himself be led by "inventive fantasy" as Wagner wanted, he sought historical authenticity and combed all the museums in Germany and Denmark for ideas. The result was a harmonious whole, but Cosima felt that the costumes made the actors look too much like Red Indian chiefs. Both the Hoffmann-Brückner sets and the Döpler costumes were to remain the norm for decades.
Two full summers were spent on preparations. The first rehearsal round began with auditions on 1 July 1875 at the Wahnfried home with Joseph Rubinstein as the piano accompanist. Three weeks later the first sets for Das Rheingold arrived. The cast was present at the theatre on that occasion and Wagner, referring to the Rhine Daughters, called out: "Let's hear something". Thus, for the first time, the opening scene of Das Rheingold sounded in the new theatre and both Wagner and the singers were delighted by the acoustic effect. On 2 August, the orchestra played in the orchestra pit for the first time. "It is exactly as I wanted it", Wagner remarked, "now the brass instruments no longer sound so harsh". As conductor he chose his faithful disciple Hans Richter and the orchestra rehearsals went on for 12 days at a stretch, one act a day. Wagner himself sat at a small table on the stage and carefully followed the score by the light of an oil lamp. Sometimes he sang along, sometimes he gave directions to the conductor or the soloists. Who would not have loved to experience these moments?
The second round of rehearsals started early in May of the following year. The scenic problems now presented themselves in all their urgency. Carl Brandt, for instance, had wheeled swimming cars constructed for the opening scene of Rheingold. The Rhine-daughters initially refused to go on these silly contraptions, but ballet master Fricke managed to convince them and the scene ultimately went very well. The difficult scene transitions were concealed by large clouds of steam from the boiler of an old locomotive operated by a railway machinist. The steam clouded so luxuriantly that Hill disappeared into it completely, making it difficult for him to sing, and descended further into the orchestra pit causing the harps to lose pitch. The Ride of the Valkyries was achieved by projection of Döpler's drawings painted on glass by means of a magic lantern. The entire Ring-fauna was manufactured in London. The Rheingold serpent was considered a "masterpiece of imagination and machinery" but the dragon, which arrived in several parts and whose neck was sent to Beirut by mistake, seemed to inspire more pity than fear.
The theatre animal
Wagner himself was occupied with coaching the singers, and this applied to both singing and acting. As Heinrich Porges testified, his talents in this area were truly astonishing. What he tried to teach his cast was not only beauty of tone and perfect vocal technique, but also a sense of the meaning of the text and the art of expressing it vocally. Angelo Neumann, himself a famous director, described Wagner as "not only the greatest dramatist there ever was, but certainly the greatest stage director and actor". According to Porges, he had the phenomenal ability to transform himself instantly into any character in any situation. Lilli Lehmann later described in her memoirs how Wagner played the role of Sieglinde to perfection, concluding: "There has never been a Sieglinde who could come even close to him".
Of greatest importance to Wagner was finding the right balance between orchestra and singers. Porges reported that Wagner repeatedly stressed that the sung words were of the utmost importance and that the sound volume should be adjusted accordingly. While repeating, he sometimes changed the dynamic indications in the score. The orchestra had to carry the singers along like a rough sea carries a boat without ever bringing it in danger of capsizing it, he explained to Porges.
In his urge for perfection, he sometimes drove his collaborators crazy. One day he wanted it this way and the next day he could sometimes demand the opposite. Needless to say, this was not without its frictions: there were shouts and tumults, and tears rolled down the cheeks. Sometimes he made sardonic comments like the time when the orchestra complained about draught in the orchestra pit. "I composed the opera", he said, "now I have to close all the windows too". In the end, the atmosphere became so tense that all outsiders were banned without mercy to avoid a public scandal. The only actor who did not cause Wagner any trouble was Cocotte, the black stallion King Ludwig had sent for the role of Grane. But fearing it would steal the show, Wagner removed the horse from one of his best scenes, the Annunciaation of death in Die Walküre. The final rehearsal of Gotterdämmerung took place on 26 August, which was not a moment too soon, as Bayreuth was gradually filling up with guests.
High visitors
In the past, composers had paid homage to kings; now kings came in homage to a composer. This had never happened before. Among those present: Kaiser Wilhelm, King Ludwig, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, the King of Württemberg, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, the Grand Duke of Schwerin, the Duke of Anhalt, Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, as well as German princes, princesses, counts and countesses and an assortment of Austro-Hungarian nobility. Present composers were Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Peter Tchaikovsky, Camille Saint-Saëns and Franz Liszt as well as about all the directors and conductors of all the German opera houses and about 60 music critics.
King Ludwig accepted Wagner's invitation only on condition that he would not be gaped at or have to undergo an ovation. The dress rehearsal was therefore held for him alone, but Wagner convinced the misanthropic monarch that the hall needed an audience for acoustic reasons, and Ludwig attended the following performances in a full house. The performances went well - the vocal highlight was Niemann's Siegmund and Ludwig felt he had received an excellent return for his investment: "Words are inadequate for me to even begin to express my enthusiasm and my deepest gratitude", he wrote after Rheingold. At the end of the cycle he was ecstatic with emotion and expressed his emotions in a long letter: "You are a god-man, the true artist by the grace of God who has brought the sacred fire of heaven to earth to cleanse, sanctify and redeem it! Never before have I been transported into such a state of inebriation, such unprecedented sanctity, so filled with such an unprecedented enthusiastic sense of joy".
A few days after Ludwig's departure, the other kings arrived. At the station, Kaiser Wilhelm was met by Wagner and the entire orchestra. "I never thought you would pull it off", said the Kaiser, and immediately considered the festival a "matter of national order", a statement that struck the composer as ironic since the nation had not provided any assistance, as he wrote to Ludwig.
On 13 August, the festival could begin. However, the first cycle did not go as smoothly as the dress rehearsal. During Rheingold, things went wrong. Wagner was beside himself. At the end of Rheingold, there was half an hour of applause, but Wagner did not show himself. Inconsolable, he sat in his office, cursing at everyone but Hill. The three remaining parts went off without serious problems and at the end there was a stormy applause. This time Wagner appeared on stage with the cast and made a short speech: "You have now seen what we can do. Now it is for you to want. And if you want, we shall have an art".
King Ludwig had been so deeply moved by what he had seen that he asked Wagner to let him experience the last cycle again. Completely isolated in the central lodge and only entering it after the lights had gone out, he experienced the entire cycle again together with Wagner. When the last bars of Götterdämmerung died out, there was such a stormy ovation that some thought the theatre would collapse. Wagner appeared on stage and even King Ludwig came to the front of his lodge to receive the seemingly endless applause. Wagner praised Ludwig as the sole benefactor and co-creator of the work and further hoped that his undertaking would be a step forward towards a true German art - as if the German people had not produced any art until then. Wagner's tactlessness was as great as his talent, Saint-Saëns said.
The partially unsuccessful performances of his work left Wagner with a severe depression. Already during the first cycle he noticed one mistake after the other and thought some things had to be changed. "Next year we will do it completely differently," he declared. The press was divided in its opinion, but they did agree on one thing: that this was not only the cultural event of the century, but also one of the great moments of cultural history. "It is no opera at all. It is a play, the speeches in which are declaimed rather than sung, to orchestral accompaniment…The work has taught us nothing new either in music, the drama, or as regards Wagner himself," wrote the New York Times. Hanslick wrote: "The Ring will not be the music of the future. It was not an enrichment but a distortion, a perversion of basic musical laws, a style contrary to the nature of human hearing and feeling". Tchaikovsky reported that he had been impressed more by the colossal dimensions of the work than by its musical qualities. Apart from some beautiful moments, he considered the music an "incredible chaos". The Figaro wrote: "No, it is not a theatrical work; it is literally a complete hallucination, the dream of a lunatic, who thinks to impose upon the world a most frightful sort of art”. Grieg thought everything was beautifully composed and praised the orchestration as "incredibly well done". Curiously, most critics considered Siegfried the best part and Die Walküre the worst, despite the strong first act.
The Ring's failure was largely due to frustrated expectations. Long beforehand, there was much talk of the technological feats and effects that would be seen, and it was precisely these things that usually failed. It is regrettable that Wagner had to begin his undertaking in Bayreuth with such a difficult work to stage as the Ring. After all, the staging was an indigestible combination of literalism and romanticism. Grieg seems to be the only one who could put his finger squarely on the problem when he claimed that such realistic settings distracted attention from the drama. It would have been better if the audience had been able to create devils and demons in their own imagination, he thought. Innovative and revolutionary as he was in so many ways, when it came to the staging Wagner was the conventional man of his time, shackled by the traditions of Central European romantic naturalism. Grieg's critical remark seems not even to have occurred to him. That he faced a serious dilemma, he knew. The drama had to be the visual expression of the music, his dramas had to represent "musical actions made visible". By relying on papier-mâché rocks, horned helmets and backdrops painted with naturalistic scenes, much of the psychological, symbolic and mythical content was lost. "Fantasy in chains", Nietzsche said.
In Bayreuth's cafés and restaurants that summer, the arguments were occasionally so heated that they erupted in outright brawls. Even for a nation where art was taken very seriously, the Wagnermania was exceptionally large. By the mid-1860s already, a group of zealots had developed who claimed that music before Rienzi had hardly existed, that Haydn, Mozart and Haendel were of no importance and Bach and Beethoven were playing a sort of John the Baptist role while waiting for the coming of the Messiah, that Wagner was this saviour and that he alone had brought music to the level of true art. By 1876 the festival was already regarded as a sacred ceremony and the audience as a community of believers. Wagnerism had rapidly turned into an ersatz religion with Bayreuth as its holy temple. And in a society that was losing its grip due to rapid industrialisation and secularisation, there was room for a new faith. For fanatics, however, Wagner offered not only an artistic religion but also a political ideology. In the wake of the unification of 1871, Germany was flooded with reflections on national greatness, on the "German soul", the "German spirit", "national salvation". In each of these areas Wagner's dramas and prose works had something to offer. It was also natural to compare Wagner's struggle to establish this festival with Bismarck's exploit as the founder of the Empire, and to see the success of 1876 as the cultural antithesis of the military and political triumph of 1871. To turn Wagner into a conservative national hero did require a drastic piece of cosmetics, given the history of his years in Dresden. But nothing was simpler. Far from being a revolutionary, the chorus sang, Wagner was an idealist whose aim was not to reform society but to free Germany from the yoke of foreign influences. In this sense, one can understand Nietzsche's statement that the true Bayreuthians should be stuffed or better still preserved in alcohol... labelled "a specimen of the spirit in which the German Empire was founded". The vital distinction between culture as the expression of national character and culture as the extension of nationalism was destroyed in 1876. By the time the curtain fell on the first Festspiele, the Wagnerian world had come to mean something different to Germans as well as to non-Germans.
Financial pit
To recover from the aftermath of the festival, Wagner left for Italy where news reached him that he was ultimately 148,000 marks short - the whole enterprise had ended up costing 1,281,000 marks, including the construction of the theatre. Moreover, Wagner still owed the Bavarian treasury 216,000 marks for the loan of 1873. Not only did he abandon all hope of organising a new Ring Festival the following year, he even toyed with the idea of handing the whole thing over to the Reich or to Bavaria or to an enterprising opera manager. As nothing came of these ideas, he went on tour to England to conduct a number of concerts. These concerts were well attended but in the end brought in barely 15,000 marks. Wagner was more bitter than ever: Bayreuth as a unique and independent institution had proved to be an illusion. He felt abandoned by the nation and so he was to sell Wahnfried and emigrate to America. But as in his Swiss years, his despair alternated with the most irrational hope. Now he was brooding on plans for festivals in 1880 (Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin), in 1881 (Tristan and Meistersinger), in 1882 (the Ring) and in 1883 (Parsifal), then he wanted to hold another festival in Munich. Financial matters were settled in March 1878 when, through the intervention of King Ludwig, the Munich Opera decided to pay royalties for the performance of Wagner's works until the debt was cleared. Despite this relief, Wagner gave up his plan to reserve the Ring for Bayreuth. He released the work and the first performance took place in Leipzig, directed by Angelo Neumann after the Bayreuth model. Four years later, Neumann bought Wagner's entire scenery and founded an itinerant company that presented the Ring in 135 opera houses, from London to St. Petersburg.
Parsifal 1882
Wagner was now completely absorbed by the composition of Parsifal. It gave him great joy, but the thought of a performance filled him with revulsion: "Having invented the invisible orchestra, I would now like to invent the invisible theatre", he said to Cosima, "and the inaudible orchestra", he added jokingly. He spent most of 1880 in Italy, slaving over the score. Ideas for the staging came naturally. During a visit to the Palazzo Rufolo in Ravello, he thought he had found Klingor's magical garden. He asked the painter Paul von Joukowsky to make a sketch of it, and he was so pleased that he promptly offered him the opportunity to provide the scenery and costumes for his new opera. A few months later, Wagner visited the cathedral in Siena and was moved to tears by its interior. He had thus found his temple of the Grail.
Another problem was just as easily solved. After all, in his desperation to liquidate the debts of the Ring Festival, Wagner had given permission in 1878 to perform Parsifal in Munich after its premiere in Bayreuth. The prospect of a production outside Bayreuth appalled him and already in 1879 he raised the subject with King Ludwig. From Siena, he wrote that the subject of the opera was too serious to be performed in a conventional opera house where it would be alternated with frivolous comedies. The king agreed to his request and wrote that "the work should never be desecrated by contact with a profane stage". The offending clause of the old agreement was dropped and Wagner could announce his Parsifal festival for the summer of 1882.
As cast he chose Hermann Winkelmann as Parsifal, Materna as Kundry, Scaria as Gurnemanz, Hill as Klingsor and Theodor Reichmann as Amfortas. Conductor Herman Levi and the orchestra of the Munich opera were offered to him by King Ludwig. To guide the Brückners in the materialisation of Joukowsky's designs, he called again on Karl Brandt. The rehearsals during the first three weeks of July went very well. All 23 soloists, 107 orchestra members and 135 choir members had received the score a year in advance and were well prepared.
Scenic problems arose most in the transformation scenes. Brandt's innovation for the transformation scene of the first act was the 'Wandeldekoration': a painted canvas that was five times wider than the stage and was slowly unrolled, giving the impression that Parsifal and Gurnemanz were ascending Monsalvat. The mechanism was rather complex and, in the first tests, the music was over before the curtain had been completely unwound. When asked to lengthen the score by 4 minutes at this point, Wagner cynically remarked that he was usually asked to shorten his operas. When the problem was not solved, he growled "Now I'll have to compose by the yardstick". Engelbert Humperdinck, one of the assistants, wrote the missing bars, which were deleted 7 years later, when the mechanism was perfected.
The festival started on 26 July. Once again, it attracted an international audience with a whole host of aristocrats but no real crowned heads. Liszt, Saint-Saens and Bruckner were back with an army of critics. To Wagner's dismay, king Ludwig declined his invitation. He preferred to wait for his private performance that was to take place in Munich. The performances went off without a hitch and Wagner wrote to King Ludwig that the scenery was more successful than anything he had seen before, that the voices were good and that the scene with Klingor's flower girls was unsurpassable. He could not praise Levi's dedication enough. Towards the end of the last performance Wagner crept into the orchestra pit and took over the baton from Levi for the last 25 minutes, during which time he is said to have kept a particularly slow pace.
Compared to 1876, there was less critical opposition and generally people were very positive about the new work with which, according to many, Wagner had reached the zenith of his art. Everyone considered it an amazing achievement for a 70-year-old, fresher and more modern than the work of any younger contemporary. Even Hanslick agreed. The Times wrote that the choral parts alone would ensure Parsifal's permanent and unique place in music history.
The staging was widely praised, especially the Wandeldekoration and Joukowsky's imposing temple. Curiously, everyone seemed delighted by the music of the flowermaidens in the second act. Hanslick even thought he recognised the highlight of the opera in it. The Good Friday music was enjoyed by all, and Hanslick found the finale "dazzling". There were only discussions about the nature of the drama. The great controversy that summer was whether the drama really possessed the sacred character that Wagner ascribed to it and what that was supposed to mean. To the antichrist Nietzsche, it meant high treason.
Parsifal's message of redemption for the world responded to the deep-rooted desire for national salvation in broad sections of the German population. And after the Ring had become the vehicle of German nationalism, it was now Parsifal's turn. An important catalyst in this was Hans von Wolzogen, who in 1878 founded the Bayreuther Blätter, a publication intended for the holders of Patronat-Scheine.
After the festival, Wagner again fled to Italy, but this time without a post-parturition depression and with the comforting thought of a financial success. With revenues of 240,000 marks, he could record a net profit of 135,000 marks. “With Parsifal stand or falls my Bayreuth achievement”, Wagner wrote to Neumann. He wrote to King Ludwig that in the next ten years he would perform each of his other operas, after which his son would succeed him. To Neumann, he had previously written that he saw Bayreuth's future as bleak and that he did not see anyone who could succeed him. Sheer indomitable will had created the Bayreuth venture, and it was generally taken for granted that the project would die with its creator. On 13 February 1883, the latter had his rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.
Source : Frederic Spotts, "Bayreuth : A history of the Wagner Festival", Yale University Press, 1994