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Author : Jos Hermans
Angelo Neumann's performances of the Ring tetralogy marked Wagner's real breakthrough in Russia. Four cycles were performed conducted by Karl Muck. Since no part of the Ring had ever been performed in Russia, this was an event of stature, and according to the daily Teatr i zhizn (which closely followed the events and recorded daily synopses) no less than the "whole of Petersburg" gathered to attend the first performance of Das Rheingold. The four cycles were completely sold out, and Neumann judged the Russian tour to be a great success. Not only did the Russian orchestra compare favorably with that in Bayreuth in his view, but he also considered that the male chorus in Götterdämmerung was the best he had ever heard. Therese Malten was only booked for the first cycle, but Neumann had to persuade her to stay, after a vociferous display of indignation from the audience at the beginning of the second cycle necessitated police intervention.
Typical was the altered, quasi purified attitude of the native composers and musicians, who had initially vehemently opposed Wagner. As early as 1867, for example, Mussorgsky said to Rimsky-Korsakov: "We often rail against Wagner, but Wagner is strong, and he is strong because he touches art and shakes it." Tchaikovsky devoted an admiring review to the Lohengrin prelude in 1871 and reported from Bayreuth in 1876, where he attended the first Festival with Nikolai Rubinstein, Cui and the Petersburg music publicist Laroche. In his highly critical review, however, one could also read passages like this: “Wagner's tetralogy, in its gigantic scope, is such a complicated and so finely thought-out work that much time is required for its study and it must be heard several times. [...] I must say that anyone who believes in the ethical power of art must take away from Bayreuth a very refreshing impression in view of this great artistic enterprise, which by its intrinsic value and effect will virtually become a landmark in the history of art. [...] As a composer, Wagner is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable personalities in the second half of this century, and his influence on music is tremendous. Not only was he gifted with a great power of musical imagination, but he also opened up new forms to his art and found ways that had not been known before him; he was, it may be said, a genius who stands in German music in a line with Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.
In the end, Tchaikovsky still maintained a certain distance because his aesthetics were based on a different model : "But in my deep and firm conviction he was a genius who followed a wrong path. Wagner was a great symphonist, but not an opera composer. If this extraordinary man, instead of devoting his life to the musical illustration of figures from Germanic mythology in the operatic form, had written symphonies, we might possess masterpieces worthy of comparison with the immortal creations of Beethoven."
Rimsky-Korsakov radically changed his mind after witnessing many rehearsals and subsequent performances of the Ring by Angelo Neumann. For example, he wrote in a letter that he had "involuntarily come to love Wagner as if he were a woman. Wagner was a great phenomenon in our circle in that season. There was a time when I rejected him, but now I firmly believe in him, as in Apostle Paul". As a composer, he took Wagner's instructions regarding leitmotif technique and instrumentation to heart. His penultimate opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitesh and the Virgin Fevroniya, was even described by contemporaries as the "Russian Parsifal." Alexander Glasunov, who had attended the Ring with Rimsky-Korsakov in 1889, wrote enthusiastically to Tchaikovsky: "I must admit that I have rarely been overcome by such enthusiasm. I do not recognize myself. [...] We were simply in a stupor together with Nikolai Andreyevich [Rimsky-Korsakov]." Afterwards, however, Tchaikovsky noted somewhat indignantly in his diary on March 23, 1889, "Letter from Glasunov. (He is a Wagnerian!) ". And Cui, until then probably the most resolute Wagner opponent of the "Mighty Five", published an extensive and insightful study of the tetralogy after the Neumann ring.
Interestingly, Vladimir Stasov also revised his views of Wagner. Although Stasov remained strongly convinced of Dargomyzhsky's superiority as a reformer of opera, he confessed a great admiration for Die Meistersinger (which was both realistic in its treatment and nationalistic in its subject material, the two prime criteria in art, in his view) and came to respect much of Wagner's symphonic writing.
Many members of the Russian court attended performances of the Ring in 1889. Among them were Alexander III himself and the tsarina. According to Cosima Wagner's friend Countess Marie Wolkenstein, wife of the Austrian ambassador to St. Petersburg, the audience "had grown warmer with each performance until Götterdämmerung was greeted with fiery enthusiasm." In fact, the Ring was such a success that not only did the Imperial Theaters Directorate submit a request to stage another cycle (which Neumann declined), but the tsar himself also asked the company to stage the Ring in Moscow. The tetralogy was also well received in Moscow, even if the box office returns were not as high as in St. Petersburg. The Imperial Theaters were keen for Neumann and his company to return the following year, but all attempts to organize a second tour, both in 1890 and 1891, had to be abandoned. The signing of the Franco-Russian alliance was partly responsible for rendering conditions "less favorable" for Wagner in the 1890s, according to Mikhail Stanislavski: "It was impossible even to mention German, German people and German art. .... Our young people were gripped by Franco-Russian enthusiasm and tried to show their patriotic feelings by attacking Germans sitting peacefully with a pint of beer in the zoo. In those circumstances it would have been utter quixotry even to dream of repeating the experience of 1889 and give another series of Wagner performances."
Another major Wagner guest performance took place in St. Petersburg in February and March 1898. The impresario Georg Paradisi presented Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Meistersinger, Walküre and Siegfried. The conductor for most of the performances was Hans Richter, who had conducted the Ring in Bayreuth in 1876. The outstanding singers again included Therese Malten and the famous Eduard and Jean de Reszke. In 1899, the Mariinsky Theater staged its first production of Tristan and Isolde with Félia Litvinne as Isolde, who remained one of the most important Wagner interpreters in Russia from then on into the 1920s. A new production of Tannhäuser followed a few months later, with Ivan Yershov in the title role, the later legendary Wagner tenor, who soon took on Tristan as well. An excellent Wagner ensemble of its own was now assembled in St. Petersburg. And Prince Sergei Wolkonsky, director of the Mariinsky Theater since 1899, now also had the Ring rehearsed. Between 1900 and 1905, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung and Rheingold were performed. (Until 1914, Rheingold was performed 38 times, Walküre 77 times, Siegfried 41 times and Götterdämmerung 45 times). Eduard Napravnik was conducting again.
Later on, younger conductors such as Felix Blumenfeld, Albert Coates, Nikolai Malko and Emil Kuper took over the musical direction. Entire Ring cycles and other Wagner performances subsequently took place under leading guest conductors such as Arthur Nikisch, Felix Mottl and Wagner's son-in-law Franz Beidler. The Petersburg Ring production was in the hands of Osip Paletschek, while the sets for the individual parts of the tetralogy were designed by various artists. For example, V. Shiryaev was responsible for the first act of the Valkyrie; for the second and third acts, the Bayreuth designs of the brothers Max and Gotthold Brückner and the costume design of Carl Doepler were used. J. Quapp, Pyotr Lambin and Wardek Surinjans also designed Siegfried on the Bayreuth model, while Götterdämmerung and Rheingold exhibited entirely unique, painterly-symbolistic features - these sets were designed by Alexander Benois (Götterdämmerung), one of the intellectual leaders of the important magazine and artists' association of the same name Mir iskusstva (World of Art), to which also belonged the Wagner enthusiast and successful theaterman Sergei Diaghilev, and the painter and theater artist Alexander Golovin (Rheingold).
This allowed the contemporary visual arts of Russia, as represented by the fresh Symbolist movement, access to Wagner's theater. Benois emphatically rejected the conservative Bayreuth theater of the Cosima era for its historicism and naturalism. He sought idiosyncratic imaginative visual solutions. The critic (and translator of Wagnerian dramatic texts) Viktor Kolomijzow found enthusiastic words for Götterdämmerung: "Throughout the production, a great empathy can be discerned, the striving to avoid routine and create something new, original, corresponding to the spirit of the work. [...] Personally, I love all those misty, fairy-tale settings that seem to come out of a dream, [...] They involuntarily take the mind back to the depths of the ages, to the legendary time when ancestors still lived in direct contact with nature shrouded in mystery."
Both artists, Benois and Golovin, were enthusiastic about Wagner's aesthetic concept of the gesamtkunstwerk. Golovin, for example, said the following in relation to his work in Rheingold: "In Wagner's music drama, the synthesis of art, to which Gluck was already striving, found its expression, [...] everything is full of symbolism and at the same time in its rationale lifelike and generally comprehensible in the assertion that the cause of all things in the world is the thirst for gold. [...] The production of Rheingold was for me one of the most interesting projects."
Among the outstanding singers in this Ring production were Félia Litvinne as Brünnhilde (later also Mariana Cherkasskaya), Ivan Yerschov as Loge, Siegmund and Siegfried, and Vladimir Kastorsky as Wotan; Fyodor Stravinsky, the father of composer Igor Stravinsky, was also involved in the performances as a bass until his untimely death in 1902. Yershov's fascinating stage presence was characterized by a critic of the time as follows: "Yershov in the role of Siegfried is Siegfried in reality. [...] Every moment of his rendition is a truth, a life and a beauty."
Significant for the Petersburg production of the Ring is the fact that it concluded - with the premiere of Rheingold - immediately after the events that shook the foundations of the tsarist empire, such as the 1905 revolution and the lost war against Japan. The empire faltered and the twilight of the gods seemed already near. Wagner's Ring had become a harbinger of the times and reflected a voraciously imposed fin-de-siecle mood in the country's sensitized intellectual elite.
After St. Petersburg, the Ring, which had already begun in 1894 with Siegfried, was also completed in 1911 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with Götterdämmerung, albeit with more effort: while Naprawnik needed 15 rehearsals with the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater for Walküre, for example, and 12 for Siegfried, in Moscow it had to be 25 or even 41. Nevertheless, Wagner and his Ring have played a dominant role in the Moscow repertoire ever since. The role of Siegfried was performed by the well-known Ivan Alchevsky (who was also accompanied on one occasion by the Bayreuth singer Ernest van Dyck), an excellent performer, who was praised by Vsevolod Meyerhold for possessing - like Shalyapin and Yershov - the great gift of "guiding the singer out of the operatic theater and bringing him closer to the actor of the spoken theater."
The year 1914 saw two almost parallel productions of Parsifal, which had just been released to stages outside Bayreuth. On the initiative of music lover Count Alexander Sheremetev (he also conducted the first performance), the work was performed on the stage of the People's House and then at the Hermitage Theater with a stage design close to Art Nouveau. Kundry was the already legendary Félia Litvinne. A few weeks later, Parsifal was also performed at the "Theater of Musical Drama." Finnish conductor Georg Schneevoigt (who had also rehearsed Die Meistersinger here) brought the orchestra from Helsingfors (Helsinki). The director was theater avant-gardist Jossif Lapizki.
Next installment : Wagner and Russian symbolism
Great story! Thank you
Let me please share my story of the first Russian Ring:
https://open.substack.com/pub/viacheslavv/p/on-backstage-of-the-first-ring-in?r=27xraj&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post