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Author : Jos Hermans
Vsevolod Meyerhold has been director of the Imperial Theaters for a year when he comes to stage Tristan und Isolde at the Mariinsky Theater in 1909. It will become the most radical pre-revolutionary production, the most important staging of the work since Mahler and Roller's take on it in Vienna in 1903.
Meyerhold came out of Konstantin Stanislavski's school of realist theater, but soon left it, seeking new ways into a form of stylized theater. Already familiar with the ideas of Gordon Craig and Georg Fuchs, Meyerhold now immersed himself in Appia's "Die Musik und die Inszenierung." It confirmed many of the intuitions of his own work in the previous decade, particularly his belief that opera production should follow the music rather than the sung text and verbal instructions, and that scenery, stage architecture, lighting, colors and acoustics should come together to create a unified, living presentation. "Theater and music," Boris Pokrovsky wrote, "existed for him indivisibly, whether he was staging Tchaikovsky, Verhaeren or Ostrovsky. The musicality of his direction was astonishing...He did not substitute music for theater, he turned theater into music."
Since the age of eighteen, he had taken a serious interest in Wagner. In a 1907 essay, he refers to Wagner for the first time, reflecting on his "synthesis of the arts." In his conceptual reflections on Tristan, he takes up again the idea of synthesis: "The synthesis of the arts on which Wagner based his reform of the musical drama will continue to develop - the great architect, painter, conductor and director, members of this development, will creatively enrich the theater of the future, but of course this synthesis cannot be realized without the new actor."
Then, referring to Wagner himself and to Adolphe Appia, among others, he developed his ideas on the aesthetically conditioned, precisely stylized mode of representation, and in the process also found interesting relations of space and time: "The art of opera is based on the agreement that singing will take place; therefore elements of the natural are not permissible in the performance, because the agreement would immediately come into contradiction with reality and thus shake the foundation of its art. The musical drama must be played in such a way that not for a single second does the question arise in any spectator's mind why this piece is sung and not spoken. [...] The music, determining the timing of the stage action, sets the rhythm, which has nothing in common with the everyday. The life of music is not the life of everyday reality. [...] The scenic rhythm, its inner essence, is the opposite of the real, everyday life. Therefore, the entire scenic form of the actor must be an artistic idea, which may occasionally be based on realistic ground, but ultimately appears in a form that is largely not identical with what we see in life. [...] Until the staging, the music creates an illusionistic image, only in time, through the staging it defeats the space. The illusion becomes real through the actors' facial expressions and movements, which are subjected to the musical design; representational in space is now what was previously measurable only in time."
Meyerhold thus clearly distances himself from the staging style of Cosima Wagner's Bayreuth: “The universal acceptance of Bayreuth as the model for the staging of Wagner has given rise to the custom of giving all his works the external appearance of so-called “historical drama”. All those helmets and shields gleaming like samovars, clinking chain-mail, and make-up reminiscent of Shakespearean histories, al that fur on costumes and properties, all those actors and actresses with their arms bared…And then the tedious, colourless background of historicism – which is completely devoid of mystery and forces the spectator to try to fathom the precise country, century and year of the action –clashes with the orchestra’s musical picture which is wrapped in a mist of fantasy. For whatever the stage looks, Wagner’s operas forces one to listen to the music. Perhaps this was the reason why Wagner, according to reports from friends, used to approach his acquaintances during the Bayreuth performances and cover their eyes with his own hands, so that they could devote themselves more fully to the magic of pure music.” Thus a critique, in Russian colouring, that is almost precisely equivalent to Appia.
Together with his stage designer, Prince Alexander Shervashidze, Meyerhold now searches for symbolic images in stylized simplification, which fundamentally mark the spaces of action, but without exhibiting historicist or naturalistic decorativeness. About the first act he wrote: 'Let a single sail, dominating the whole stage, create a ship through the spectator's imagination.'" The second act was distinguished solely by an "immense, steeply rising castle wall" and the "mystical torch," while the third act was "furnished only with the bleak expanse of the horizon and the sad naked rocks of Brittany."
What is hardest to imagine is what was doubtless the heart of the production, namely Meyerhold’s work with the singers. He was crystal clear in what he wanted. Naturalistic acting in opera was bound to be wrong because ‘people behaving in a lifelike manner on the stage and then suddenly breaking into song is bound to seem absurd’. Stylization was therefore ‘the very basis of operatic art’. The actor’s movements had always to be derived from the music. Meyerhold’s conclusion is that the integrated operatic performance which Wagner envisaged could not be achived without the emergence of a new breed of singing-actor in the mould of Chaliapin, and that that called for an extensive choreographic strand in singers’ training.
This Tristan production was, not only for Russia, one of the birth hours of modern theater. And it also set a decisive course for the theatrical reception of Wagner. As much as the performance caused intense intellectual polarization at the time, one could not escape its suggestive effect and its innovative style - and this also thanks to the great artists involved, such as the conductor Eduard Napravnik and the singers Ivan Ershov, Mariana Cherkasskaya ( later Félia Litvinne) in the title roles or Vladimir Kastorsky as King Marke.
Looking back some years later Meyerhold will say that all his productions for the Imperial Theatres had been compromises of one kind or another. It seems probable that Meyerhold had had to make do with a designer who would not have been his first choice, Shervashidze doubtless being insisted on by the theatre as a safeguard against anything excessively modern.
When the production was revived in January 1910, the music director on duty was Felix Mottl, the Bayreuth protégé who had conducted the first performance of Tristan at the Festspielhaus. Concerned that he should not take fright at the unconventional settings, the management arranged that his first stage rehearsal should take place in front of the scenery for the first act of Aida, which was on stage in preparation for that night's performance. But when Mottl was eventually allowed to see the Tristan scenery, he could not have been more enthusiastic. "The Tristan staging is unbelievable!" he wrote in his diary, enigmatically going on to add, "One might well be in Asia."
Meyerhold's production, however, can only be understood as a whole in the context of a new art movement that characterized the beginning of the 20th century in Russia under the keyword "symbolism". Even if Meyerhold's Tristan stands on its own and cannot really be described as "symbolist", it is obvious how this theatrical event was connected in so many ways with new aesthetic positions, which - in addition to many examples from painting and some from music (Ciurlionis, for example, or Scriabin) - were essentially revealed in the literature of the time. Meyerhold had close contact with poets such as Valery Bryussov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely or Alexander Block. It was on modernist writers that Wagner was to have his greatest influence in Russia.
An artistic criterion, which they understood - completely in the spirit of Wagner - far beyond aesthetic categories, as a socially, as a humanly relevant topic, connected them with each other, namely to understand themselves as a spiritual formation, with the help of which the present social reality, felt as constricting and rushing to its end, seemed to be surmountable.
For instance, Ivanov said that Wagner was "the second creator of Dionysian creativity after Beethoven," but also that "over the dark ocean of the symphony, the magician Wagner has spread the gold-embroidered transparent Apollonian mythos sleep." Bely spoke of the "tendency of drama to become a mystery," and summed up, referring to Wagner in the broadest sense: "Drama has sprung from mystery and is to return. [...] And is it not also so in life that a worldwide mystery will be played? " Alexander Block's poetry is inconceivable without the experience of Wagner. Again and again his music and its synesthesia appear as a literary leitmotif, combined with an apocalyptic sense of time, but also with prophetic faith in the future.
Finally, it should be mentioned that constructivist abstraction - from Futurism to Suprematism - by artists such as Mikhail Matyushin, Kazimir Malevich or Wassily Kandinsky was also inconceivable without Wagner's influence and an intensive discussion with him. Kandinsky, for example, in his programmatic paper "On the Spiritual in Art", which, also inspired by Wagner, considered the synthesis or synesthesia of the arts, said of Arnold Schonberg: "Here begins the 'music of the future'". And as an initial experience of his youth he described a Lohengrin performance in Moscow, through which it suddenly seemed to him "that Wagner had musically painted 'my hour'"; by this he meant that synaesthetic phenomenon which had so stimulated him shortly before at the sight of Moscow in the setting sun: "The sun melts all of Moscow into one spot, which, like a great tuba, sets the whole interior, the whole soul, vibrating. No, not this red uniformity is the most beautiful hour! This is only the final chord of the symphony, which brings every color to the highest life, which makes all Moscow sound like the fff of a giant orchestra and forces it. [...] To paint this hour, I thought to myself as the most impossible and highest happiness of an artist. [...] Lohengrin, however, seemed to me to be a perfect realization of this Moscow."
These words are truly symbolic, illuminating as through a burning glass the situation shortly before the outbreak of the First World War: the setting sun and the end of a great symphony. Images and sounds of Wagner accompanied the finale of an epoch in Russia, which had taken such an unheard-of high flight in art and at the same time was staggering towards a social ruin, a social and political catastrophe.
Next installment : The art and the revolution