FIRST CONTACT WITH WAGNER
Before you were invited to conduct Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1966, what contact had you had with the works of Wagner?
I had not been an especially avid listener of Wagner, either on disk or in the theatre, where it was quite rarely played. I remember seeing a production of Die Meistersinger in Lyon in 1943, with André Cluytens, and in 1952 a production of Tristan at the Paris Opera, remarkable for its voices, in particular Kirsten Flagstad and Max Lorenz, who was a famous tenor at that time, but the orchestra, conducted by Georges Sébastian, was really not very good. As far as staging goes, it was ghastly, with horrible Merovingian sets ... As a matter of fact, these were the only Wagner operas that were played in France at that time. The repertoire of the Paris Opera was frightful: Carmen, Aida ... When you compare it with what was being done in the theatre during the same period, it was really despairingly worthless. That's why my generation didn't care to go to the opera, because it was generally bad. But it has changed a lot, and I always say that opera was not saved by the singers nor by the conductors, but rather by the theatre directors. Naturally, later on, some people rebelled against their omnipotence, and their out-of-context inventions, but they did succeed in bringing young people back to the opera. Because true fanatics go to the opera in order to see something, and there are few fanatics of the orchestra among them, and that is what I find most tragic in the end: people rave about the voices, but if the orchestra doesn't play very well, people don't consider it very important. That's an aberration for me. Of course there is the vocal phenomenon, and you have to recognize that there are people who, like those skiers who can go down a hill at 100 km/h, can hold a high C or C sharp for a very long time without breaking. But that's a question of physical performance more than anything else.
During your formative years, did Wagner the composer trigger anything in you, in the same way that Debussy and, soon after, Webern would?
No, not at all. Wagner could not have been part of my pianistic culture. As a result, from that Romantic era, I was familiar with neither Berlioz nor Wagner - or at any rate very little Berlioz, very little Wagner - while I knew Chopin and Liszt very well ... Culture is that which is put at one's disposal.
Then from the time of your studies at the Paris Conservatory, between 1943 and 1945, and right up to the moment that Wieland Wagner contacted you for Parsifal, there is a gaping hole?
No, because Olivier Messiaen was a great adept of Wagner; he was more passionate about him than I was at that time. I remember that he analysed Die Meistersinger for us. He then had us compose in that style. So I studied the style of Wagner with him. The first time I saw the Ring was with Wieland Wagner's staging of it, which was still being presented at Bayreuth in 1966, when I came for Parsifal. I even spent one evening in the pit in order to understand what you could hear there, because when you're conducting, you hear the singers, whereas from the back of the orchestral pit, you can't hear them well at all. And before that year, I had never seen Parsifal.
But at that time, given the circumstances, you wrote a number of important essays on Wagner, in which you assert that Wagner is an essential turning point in Western music.
Wagner is difficult to replace, but he was followed immediately by Mahler, Strauss and Debussy. You cannot say that it was a lost inheritance.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS ..
You are known to have considered conducting Die Meistersinger after the experience of the so-called ‘centenary’ tetralogy with Patrice Chereau. Wolfgang Wagner had offered it to you, and he even tried to tempt you by showing you a photocopy of the manuscript...
I examined the veritable manuscript at the Museum of Nuremberg. They brought it out from the archives, and I saw it. It's very impressive to be confronted by that, naturally. I love reproductions of manuscripts, I like to own them. I'm not talking about originals, which must remain in libraries, where they belong to everyone, and not to any single person ... I'm not at all a collector of manuscripts, but of facsimiles, yes.
It was thanks to Wolfgang Wagner that you were able to conduct the tetralogy for the centenary of 1976-80, and Parsifal today. You must be very grateful to him.
He really struggled to keep this institution alive. As far as I am concerned, his faithfulness to his brother was exemplary.
It was Wieland who had proposed the Ring to you ...
Absolutely, and it was Wolfgang who followed through on this promise, despite the difficulties. He was extraordinarily loyal, and he gave his total support. But it was in response to Wieland's request that I started work on Parsifal in 1966. That being said, I can only congratulate Wolfgang's management. Without him, the theatre would have been taken over by some foundation or by the state by now.
So, no regrets about not having conducted Die Meistersinger?
No, no regrets. Otherwise, I would also have to regret never having conducted the original version of Boris, and many other things as well.
And in any case, you wouldn't have been very interested in doing either the Flying Dutchman or Tannhäuser ...
No, naturally. Die Meistersinger is what I would have been interested in doing.
I heard you conducting the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan with the Vienna Philharmonic in New York in 2001, and I really had the impression that something exceptional was happening, and I can tell you also that I met Maurizio Pollini at the reception that followed that concert, and he said to me: ‘I've never heard it like that that, and I'll never hear it like that again.’
Yes, the orchestra had a superb sonority ...
You're being modest. It didn't make you want to conduct Tristan in a concert version?
No, in concert version, that doesn't interest me.
Because there again, the theatrical dimension is important ...
Very important.
You did nevertheless conduct Tristan once in your life, a fact that few people are aware of, at the Osaka festival in 1966, with the Bayreuth cast, and sets and stage direction by Wieland Wagner ...
Wieland was already dead, alas! The contract was signed, the singers were excellent, but not the orchestra, who were far from it; and as for myself, I had no experience whatever.
I had the opportunity to see a pirated video of this performance. You got through it pretty well. How many rehearsals had you had?
No more than three or four. The orchestra had been prepared in advance because I was not able to arrive earlier. I was in a bit of a delicate situation. Were I to have done Tristan since then, I would only accept it if the conditions were more satisfactory.
WORKING WITH PATRICE CHEREAU
With the exception of Wozzeck, you never had the opportunity to work directly with Wieland Wagner. On the other hand, for the Ring, your relationship with Patrice Chéreau was direct. How did you reconcile the demands of the music with the demands of the staging?
As I always do when I work with someone coming out of the theatre world: I tell him frankly what works and what does not work musically. Patrice is someone who is very quick to act, and he realized at once the problems that could arise from, for example, the tempi. That is why I like to sit in on the rehearsals right from the beginning, because if the stage director has been working in a certain direction and you tell him two weeks later, ‘oh no, that's not going to work!’, he can get really exasperated, whereas, if you tell him earlier, he has time to imagine other solutions. But I also try to see whether, on my end, it could be possible to change a given tempo or the profile of a certain phrase. We talk to each other; it's as simple as that.
I remember a rehearsal with piano of the first act of Siegfried which I was sitting in on. The piano was playing at a devilish tempo, but when the orchestra arrived, there were lots of ‘little notes’ which you insisted on hearing, and so you slowed it down: you calmed down the playing style. Patrice Chéreau was in fact obliged, in that case, to ask the actors to hold back a bit on the momentum which they had been giving to it.
That's the problem with rehearsals with piano. With the piano, you go much faster, and the singers don't give the maximum of their voices. I am very wary of that, and if I attend, I intervene: ‘Careful, that won't work!’. That's why I like giving tempo indications at the beginning of the rehearsals which, in principle, will be kept. I don't like interfering with the staging either. I'm quite aware of the fact that there are moments in which the stage director prefers to be alone, because he wants to explain himself to the singers, and if there is a witness present, it can be annoying for the artists. That is why, from time to time, I skip, for example, two rehearsals, and I return for the next one.
Did the extremely animated style of Patrice Chéreau's Ring, in contrast with Wieland Wagner's hieratic style which you were familiar with, modify your conception of Wagnerian music drama?
No. I was simply pleased that someone like Patrice was involved, because he was much more innovative with the theatrical dimension of Wagner than I was for the score.
Really?
Yes, much more. Because with the score, you are extremely limited, it creates a much more constraining framework than the dramaturgy itself.
But still, you brought out some things which had never been heard before ...
No doubt, but I could not have been more inventive than him. You can take a certain position to justify a specific question of balance or of tempo, etc., but the musical text is there, there is no way to escape it. Whereas in the dramaturgy, a character can say something in 15,000 different ways, he can turn towards a different character, look at him or not, all of which are things which are not indicated in the text. All of that comes out of the inventiveness of the director, who has a field of action which is much freer than in the music. The invention of a stage director is much stronger, much greater, than that of a conductor conducting a work.
And what is theatre? Theatre is a proposal at a certain moment, but which does not imply a stylistic point of view. That is completely different from a score, which obliges one to adopt a stylistic point of view. That is why I never object to a stage director's decisions: he is obliged to use his imagination. The only thing is, imagination can be, not reined in, but oriented more firmly in one direction than in another, depending on the music. When dawn sets in in Gotterdämmerung, with the horns, after the scene between Hagen and his father Alberich, you can't have lightning flashes or violent colours! At that point, the visual aspect must be quite calm, it must present something which changes slowly. At that particular moment, the music is a constraining factor.
CONDUCTING WAGNER
Would you say, like Wagner himself, that the number one problem with conducting his works is the tempo?
Yes, because tempo is essential in all music. Wagner speaks about tempo in Beethoven, about how the expression of phrases finds its truth in the proper tempo. That is the reason for his quarrel with Mendelssohn about tempi. What's more, in the theatre, the text is enormously important: it must be comprehensible. Besides the problem of tempo, the other problem which arises is that of the volume of the orchestra. It is often said about Wagner, ‘It's always heavily orchestrated’. I feel that that is some sort of legend. True, there are passages which, like the first scene - which remains the most difficult one - from the third act of Siegfried, between Wotan and Erda. At that point, it really gets moving, as orchestral musicians say: you can't fail to give it the character which it needs, but at the same time, the volume risks overpowering the singers. For me, it is one of the scenes in which the balance is hardest to pull off. He wrote this scene upon returning to the composition of Siegfried. He was very excited, so he really went all the way with it! But there really are very many passages, even in the Ring and Parsifal, in which you don't have that kind of difficulty, and in which, especially in Bayreuth, you can balance things and not force the singers to sing at the height of their power. For me, it's not only a question of the comprehension of the text, but also one of the means of expression which must not be made rigid by the power, it must be kept more supple.
When you were conducting Parsifal in 1966, were you conscious of the fact that you were bringing what we could call a new vision from the point of view of the musical conception of the score? Was there something that, fundamentally, you wanted to emphasize, or perhaps to make a break with?
To be frank, I must tell you that I've never been very concerned with performance tradition, because, when I begin work on a score, I look above all at the text. I might become interested in what has been done before me, but not overly so. For Parsifal, I did nevertheless listen to a recording of Hans Knappertsbusch, because I knew that I was his successor, and that he was an icon in Bayreuth. So I needed to be aware of what he had done. But I was at times surprised by the slowness of his tempi. When there is, in German, the word feierlich [solemn], it was always very slow. And I feel that the word ‘solemn’ does not necessarily mean ‘go slowly’. Wagner does not bother to indicate every tempo fluctuation, in the way that Debussy, for example, does in Pelléas: ralentir, céder, reprendre, etc. But in Wagner, it slows down at times, without any change in the tempo marking. Now if you slow down constantly, you end up with a sort of all-embracing sleepiness. What interests me above all is the flexibility of tempo. It is always said: ‘Parsifal is a ceremony.’ Yes, at times, but it isn't a ceremony all the time. The second act is not a ceremony. I examined the durations of the different performances since the premiere. Wieland Wagner had warned me that the tempi had effectively slowed down since 1900, that is, long after the death of Wagner, the longest version being Toscanini, out of a kind of respect which is difficult to understand. But with Clemens Krauss in 1953, the total duration starts to shorten, and I heard a recording of Karl Muck which was not particularly slow either. But in general, there is a certain tradition of slowness in Bayreuth which I found quite incomprehensible. Wieland Wagner told me a story about how, at the premiere, since at that time there were no microphones for communicating with the stage, Wagner used to appear behind the conductor through a little opening, and, apparently very nervous, he would constantly say to Hermann Levi: ‘Faster, don't drag!’ There was therefore, right from the beginning, a tendency towards solemnity, which did not correspond exactly to how Wagner conceived of it, according to this familial anecdote.
You stand out as someone who pays attention to what Nietzsche called, but negatively, Wagner's minutiae: the details...
Yes, I find that Wagner is someone who, not only in Parsifal, but also in the Ring, chooses his written procedures with great care in order to create an extraordinary balance within the orchestra. It is remarkable to see how this can be neglected, in the name, allegedly, of great expression, of the large-scale form. But for me, the large-scale form never meant that details must be fatally neglected. What is difficult in Wagner is to have detail and the large-scale form at the same time.
Do you think that the composer of Le Marteau sans maitre was particularly predisposed to notice that particular aspect of Wagner's writing?
Yes. But in fact, I do that everywhere: when I conduct Berg, when I conduct Schoenberg. If you conduct the pieces from opus 16 with poor balance - they are even harder to pull off than Wagner - you cannot understand the music anymore: I'm thinking in particular of the principal melodic line in the last piece. If, in Wagner, the balance is very good, you can understand something because there is a harmonic context which is amenable to it. But that's not a reason to neglect all of the details which I find so admirable. So, I was used to this sort of thing, and to look at them as a composer and in contexts which were even more difficult to clarify than in Wagner. Obviously, this went against the grain of some people's habits. I remember a repetiteur, for Parsifal, who said to me, ‘We've always done it like’. I responded, without acrimony, ‘I'm sorry, but we will do it differently’. That's why I don't pay attention to what is called ‘tradition’, because a tradition is in general the dust which collects on our gestures which were, probably, interesting and justified in the beginning, but which later become totally unjustified: they become repetitions which approach caricature. As a matter of fact, a tradition cannot be transmitted, because you cannot create your own tradition. Curiously, that is a trait which is common to Wagner and Stravinsky: they both tried to create a performance tradition, whereas each performer takes up a score from scratch, and creates it in his image, without distorting it, but I think that the approach is always new. A score says something to you precisely because it becomes your own.
THE ART OF TRANSITION AND THE FLUIDITY OF MUSICAL DISCOURSE
You have often been sensitive to what Wagner said to Mathilde Wesendonck about the art of transition. Do you make a connection between what Wagner said there and two categories which are absolutely essential in your musical thought, temps lisse and temps strié ?
Yes, it is a key letter, which reveals the clarity he had towards himself, because that discovery puts him in the first rank of 19th-century composers. Not only because he invented a new dramaturgy, but also because he really understood the evolution with respect to the continuity of musical events, and the fact that the transition is a crucial phenomenon in this domain. And he also speaks about this in his last conversations with Liszt, in December 1882, as Cosima noted in her diary: ‘If we write symphonies, Franz, then let us stop contrasting one theme with another, a method Beethoven has exhausted. We should just spin a melodic line until it can be spun no farther; but on no account drama!’ This idea was taken up by others - probably unconsciously, since Cosima's diary was only published in 1976/7, but it is an idea which is taken up by Schoenberg. One always compares Berlioz and Wagner, but if there is one profound difference between the two, it is precisely that, because Berlioz still belongs to the 18th century, whereas Wagner truly represents all that is most advanced in the thought of the 19th century, and that, for me, is truly exceptional. That is why I cannot help but place him right at the top.
When you were quite young, you wrote that ‘music is a nonsignifying art’. Are leitmotive a problem for you?
Not at all. I consider them absolutely indispensable. Without them, we would constantly get lost. But it depends how you perform them, of course. Of course if you play them like fanfares, as what Debussy qualified as ‘signposts’ ... Some of them, at times, are a little too visible ...
The lance, the sword ...
Yes, when they appear alone. But as the work evolves, they become completely integrated into the musical fabric. And what is interesting in the Ring, especially when, because of the rehearsal schedule in Bayreuth, we do Rheingold right after Gotterdämmerung, is to see how the vocabulary has totally integrated these leitmotive. In fact, Wagner plays on their memorisation in order to integrate one into another at a later stage, sometimes in completely unexpected ways, simply through the use of, for example, an interval, and that is phenomenal: the ductility of the leitmotive.
What is striking in what you say - and as you know, the word ‘Leitmotiv’ was not invented by Wagner himself, but by Hans von Wolzogen, because the term used in one of the essays from the end of his life is ‘Grundthema’ – is the emphasis, yours as well as his, on their morphological aspect.
Yes, absolutely. And Berg has a word, which is also very good, which is ‘Erinnerungsmotiv’, a reminder-motif, which allows things to be recalled. And after a certain time, they do effectively become motifs for memory more than anything else.
But your own aesthetic orientation predisposes you towards regarding leitmotive from the point of view of the intrinsic workings of the material, and not from a semantic point of view, like in Lavignac or Deryck Cooke.
Yes, absolutely. All my life I've tended towards that. When you hear, for example, the leitmotif of Lohengrin, it appears as a sort of foreign body in the action of the opera. Just like the idée fixe in Berlioz. But in the Ring, the further on he gets, the more Wagner integrates the motifs into the musical fabric.
Which is what explains the fact that, after 1883, Wagner would have doubtlessly pursued his career in the field of the symphony ...
Yes. I believe also that he couldn't have gone much further than Parsifal, because he had exhausted the cycles that he had started. The Grail cycle and the Ring cycle were now closed cycles. After that, all he could do was create separate works, and I don't think that that attracted him very much.
But he might have written another version of Tannhäuser, no doubt because of the stylistic distortions created by the waves of successive revisions ...
Yes, that's right, he was disturbed by that.. Seen with hindsight, the lack of unity is very curious. I compare that a little, even if it is stylistically unrelated, to the Stravinsky of the Rossignol: there is a first Stravinsky who is very close to Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy, and then suddenly, when he gets to the second act, it's pure Stravinsky. There is of course a link with the action: it is the point at which the villagers discover this wonderful bird, and then we arrive at the palace. The sophistication of the musical language, as compared to traditional language, is not so disturbing, seen sixty years later. In Tannhäuser, there are explorations like that. It's as if Brahms were to write cadenzas to concertos by Mozart. We say, ‘Oh, it's interesting all of a sudden, this stylistic intrusion’.
Does lack of unity bother you?
No, in the end it doesn't bother me. Too often we take the position of the purist in these matters. Why recapture the purism of what would have been the style of Wagner before the revisions? What I find interesting in Tannhäuser are those times in which there is a hint of Tristan ...
Wait a minute, do I sense that you're becoming postmodern?!
Oh no! If Wagner had behaved like one of today's postmodernists, he would have inserted some Rossini into the middle of Tannhäuser! ! !