SIEGFRIED
How is Siegfried doing?
The first act is bestial, you have to get through it, especially physically. The second is wonderful to sing, almost a Schubert song. The third act is not problematic either, at least if one does not exhaust oneself too much in the encounter with Wotan and does not run around the stage like a madman. I never had any problems at the end. Rather, in the first act. In my first staging, the one by Patrice Chéreau in Bayreuth, I had to run around the stage much. That was insane. I normally never sweat on stage but here I was soaking wet with sweat after only ten minutes.
Siegfried is a hothead whose greatest virtue is that he has no clue about anything. The ignorant fool who refers to Parsifal.
Who is only spoiled by people, by knowledge. He can be compared to an animal, a bird, who takes life as it is. And Mime, the guy he lives with, is also a cool guy somewhere, Patrice has shown that so beautifully.
Siegfried can be very brutal with Mime
Yes he can. But he treats everyone like that because he doesn't know anything else, after all he doesn't know human manners. From him, this is not meant to be evil. He kills people like animals tear other animals apart, for him there is no evil in that, not in a Christian, human or philosophical sense. He lives by the laws of nature and becomes vulnerable after learning about civilization and the human spirit. He only makes comparisons with animals during his monologue in the second act. A mother or a father must look like a deer, maybe the father was a wolf. Everything still revolves around the animal.
Among the most gripping and profound phrases I count his musings: do the mothers all die from their sons, then?
Most moving and shocking is the sight of Brünnhilde. His sudden dread was compellingly staged by Chéreau at Bayreuth. Then come the questions and by the end he knows what deception is, knows what humanity is worth. He has become human and at that moment he is stabbed. It's like the apple of the Tree of Knowledge.
PARSIFAL
Ignorance connects Siegfried with that other ignoramus, the pure fool Parsifal. Isn't he too static a figure?
No, In no way. In the first act, he must be a Siegfried tumbling into the grail world. In the second act he comes to an understanding, as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Wagner's musical dramas are all not so much theatre pieces tailored to the action as visible, experienceable philosophy.
To which it is a great mistake to celebrate Parsifal as a religious rite
I find it ridiculous that there is no applause after the first act. Parsifal is an opera and has nothing to do with the church and even less to do with faith. I think the transformation scene and especially the Karfreitagszauber in the third act are grandiose. Music and text are among the finest Wagner wrote.
So the directorial option of showing this grail world as a world in decline is certainly correct
Of course, it is after all our world, waiting for the new Christ, for the Savior, the renewer. The rites have lost their original meaning, they have become rigid.
A society full of aggression too, when one considers how Amfortas is forced to reveal the grail.
This is no longer Christian, but it bears witness to the decay. And then comes the one who gives the ossified ritual back its meaning. And then we come to the recurring motif of all Wagner operas. The entire Parsifal with all its characters actually represents one person: the good, the foolish of the title hero; Kundry: the questioning; Gurnemanz: the holy. All together they form a human being with all its abysses. And like all of Wagner's works, with autobiographical traits. The nature-connected, animal-loving Wagner -Karfreitagszauber. Wagner who doubted the Church and on the other hand was very religious, like, after all, everyone who doubts: Gurnemanz, Parsifal, Kundry. The one who, like Sachs, cannot get the doubt out of his head: Kundry. On the one hand, the pure faith of a Gurnemanz, on the other hand, the malicious, the questioning and at the same time well-meaning of a Kundry. All these components are in Wagner. Every great artist writes autobiographical pieces all the time.
Your Parsifal was very aptly characterized as a fascinating plea for the possibilities of Wagner-belcanto: from this it is noticeable that this last of the heavy roles for Wagnertenor can also be mastered with a slender, very lyrical voice when technically it is as well founded as yours. I do not envy Parsifal directors. When I think of the first act, of Gurnemanz's narration, which one can hardly realize scenically
With Wieland Wagner, this scene was first of all filled with an optical beauty, the lighting was overwhelming : with its somewhat withered yellow in a mixture of gray, green and brown tones and with the giant tree, this was of a wonderful poetic withering. Gurnemanz is an old wise man who tells young people the whole pre-history. Exactly like King Heinrich with Elsa, this old man must have an intimate connection with these young people. They do not have to listen motionless all the time, he can also gather them around him, stroke their hair. When listening, these young people must be like real children. This scene is often shown as an obvious tedious passage. However, a new world should open up in the young people; after all, it is an exciting story that Gurnemanz is telling them.
It is part of Wagner's dramaturgical artifice that every play includes a retrospective of the previous one, as a kind of summary of what has already happened. In the Ring, one finds again and again these monologues and narratives in which the previous history is repeated.
At the time Wagner had to take into account that the parts of the Ring would be performed separately. It was inevitable that the prehistory would be included in the next play so that the audience would understand what was going on. That is a dry, theatrical decision. I am convinced that if Wagner were alive today and could ascertain the performance practice of his works, he would shorten these scenes which, in their context, are nevertheless very delaying.
A final word on Parsifal. Must Kundry die at the end or can she be integrated into the new grail community.
In itself, she must die because she is a part of the bad in man, or perhaps not just a part of the bad but of the doubting, the skeptical, the questioning. In this sense, she must die because the rebirth of the grail creates a new community of faith. She is redeemed. Parsifal restores the exalted community of the grail brothers -whether that is good, one can argue at length. The bad disappears and the good remains.
A romantic glorification?
A romantic glorification of the divine ideal. An idealization of the ecclesiastical caste, of absolute faith without question. All the bad, the inadequate, must die, and in this sense so must Kundry. The community of faith, that staircase between humanity and god, perhaps in the sense of Loyola, is renewed and reborn. Kundry perhaps did not have to die but dissolve.
The bühnenweihfestspiel Parsifal was for Nietzsche treason, a capitulation of Wagner
Nietzsche was nothing more than a philosopher. Everything that came with it later, like Wagnerism and the cult of Bayreuth, he could not bear. For him it was betrayal of philosophy, of the artistic idea. Nietzsche's philosophical idea went so far beyond that that no consensus could be reached between the two. The break was therefore inevitable. What Nietzsche held in terms of radicality to the end went far beyond Wagner. Parsifal was unacceptable to Nietzsche, Wagner's reconciliation with Christianity was unacceptable to the philosopher Nietzsche.
Did then follow the break with Wagner and the turning to the reality of Carmen?
In the first instance this was a reaction out of wounded pride. In addition, it was undoubtedly the lightness of the Spanish Mediterranean that fascinated Nietzsche at a time when he was already very ill. Nevertheless, here was a starry friendship between Nietzsche and Wagner; both knew until their deaths that they belonged together. Broken by the radicality of Nietzsche's thinking and also because of the fact that Wagner finally made no room for Nietzsche because he appropriated everything he needed. In fact, everything Nietzsche wrote about Wagner is correct and when one is familiar with Wagner's swollen, pompous, pathetic nature, then Carmen forms a counterweight, a kind of alternative.
CRISIS IN THE THEATER
Do you believe that the future of the theater and the German theater system in general looks bleak?
The cause of this crisis is a lack of vitality: the theater, the opera is actually dead. The last important opera was created fifty years ago. We are performing a museum piece. What our culture had to say was, I think, already spoken. I am not just saying this in imitation of Oswald Spengler, because it is certainly my conviction. Everything has already been said. It is not only the crisis of our opera culture that we are re-enacting the legacy of a few hundred years in ever new interpretations and are saturated. Nothing new arises, nothing that lives. Half a century ago, around fifty operas were still being composed every year in Germany. Twenty-five of these were performed, four or five were successful, and usually none or one of them survived. That was the normal course of events. Today a famous line-up is brought together and an old subject is presented with new music. I find this a great paradox. Modern opera composers usually choose a piece by Shakespeare or an ancient, Greek tragedy. Usually they do not bring contemporary subjects to the stage. Of course, they are timeless parables and general human themes, nevertheless, in my opinion, contemporary, topical themes are lacking in today's opera, since only every two or three years is a useful opera written. That is far too little to keep the genre alive. We are maintaining a museum.
Which can also be very vital. But even of the surviving tradition, our theaters offer only a small spectrum, a limited repertoire of 80 to 90 pieces. Are not the singers too, especially the star singers, guilty of this impoverishment and limitation of our opera repertoires? Out of laziness, out of mere pragmatic considerations about the usability of a new part to be rehearsed?
Perhaps it is. But the problem already begins because the musical material is hardly available. Publishers should be looking for hidden material, but there is no incentive to do so. Playing a part for days on end is an abomination to me: I need variety. If you look at my work calendar, you will see that I do not offer three or four roles in repetition, but seek a compromise. This also includes the realm of entertainment, which many blame me for. I am open to challenges, as are many prominent colleagues, just think of Fischer-Dieskau or Hermann Prey. But it is not easy to get hold of unknown material. If a serious publisher were to make an offer, I would naturally consider it. A conversation would then be possible. Most artists are open to it; there are only a few of them, who constantly reel off their eight to ten roles around the world.
We talk about the precarious situation in which the German theater system - still the best and the most productive - finds itself today. The bureaucratization, the rigidity of the apparatus, complicate artistic work to an alarming degree.
Financial constraints hardly exist, our theater houses are heavily subsidized. The bloated administrative system is at the root of the crisis. If it continues in this way, the theater will eventually perish because of it. Because today everything, except the theater itself, is important in the theater. There is hardly anything left over from the abundant subsidies for the actual artistic tasks.
Do you see a bleak future ahead?
Not a bleak one, but a deep-cutting correction of the entire system, which I still hold to be the best. There is nothing comparable abroad. Only it was set up after the war so that every town had to have its own town theater. In the coming years, there will be forced closures or mergers of theaters, because things cannot go on like this. We have an exuberantly dense theater landscape in Germany. Artists, singers and the ballet, who are the only ones who are barely unionized and therefore outlawed, will have a hard time of it. The stronger organized groups become, the smaller the space for independent artistic creativity.
Let's ontinue with gloomy, down-to-earth forecasts and balances. Opera as a museum: the very timeliness and vitality of museums has been remarkable recently, with visitor numbers rising markedly and never been higher.
However, there is a difference whether you hang a painting or sing Tristan. It all hangs together. Hardly any new operas are composed because the genre is exhausted. Related to that is the fact that there are no more teachers of singing and also no more singers, at most a handful. It's not just about the German succession. In Italy and America things look no better, for even the great American continent has less and less to offer. When opera was still viable, Hamburg, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Königsberg, etc. had singers who could sing Tristan, and at least two Isoldes or Brünnhildes, admittedly not all top quality, but still reliable in quality. Today, at the world level, there are maybe five singers who sing Tristan, no more, and maybe a few more Isoldes. This is a clear sign of decline. Because of this scarcity, a young singer, gifted in this field, is immediately overwhelmed with offers and ultimately ruined. The sign on the wall is clear. The hero genre used to have maybe five or six top singers, but nevertheless around twenty who would bring a heroic role to the stage. And if there are no more Tristans - and this is equally true of Turandot or other high-dramatic parts - where will you look for them? And how many Othello's are there anyway? I think that in the not too distant future these pieces will only be performed in very large opera houses, because there will no longer be singers who can handle these difficult roles.
A singer nowadays is under more pressure as a result of busy travel schedules and professional stress.
A singer from the previous generation, who had to work on our current stress level, would probably give up after a year. Fortunately, the body adapts to many things, and can handle much more, than is generally assumed. But the clock cannot be turned back. The young singer generation today tends to be satisfied with a short career. That is the great danger: they cannot deepen the singing in a technical sense, let alone the mental dimensions of their major roles. That requires a long process that takes at least ten years before they fully master the material.
An opportunity for the viability of the genre lies in the creative rethinking of the surviving masterpieces, in the new interpretation from our point of view.
This has been happening for a long time. The question is whether it will help us move forward. After all, we observe the crisis of interpretation in which we find ourselves, showing pre-manufactured mannerisms out of desperation, is continued. Every new direction is nothing more than a surrogate for unwritten new work. When a genre is alive, there is no need to frenetically strive for a "new outlook." The affected theater is only a consequence, an expression of this desperation. Out of sheer desperation it becomes more and more inflated, hypersensitive, more delusional, more hysterical, more neurotic. A theater of the personal neuroses of theater makers, an attack on the nerves of the spectators. On this level I am pessimistic, because for what I understand by opera, I see no continuation, no true renewal at this time. There is only falsification. But then again, there have been centuries of stagnation. Reflection on our culture started a few centuries ago. Every culture is connected with religion; when this has become powerless, it is also over with the culture. The attempt at renewal through contact with other cultures and religions is only a stylistic moment, patently an example of the decline of a culture. Because one no longer understands one's own religion or is out of touch with it. Just think of Hesse, a wonderful expression of decadence, of a crisis of faith.
GRAMOPHONE RECORDS
What is your attitude towards this medium?
Ambivalent
Because it is too sterile?
I wouldn't say so. It can be fun to make recordings. But the fiddling and manipulation afterwards hardly have anything to do with the actual work in the studio. Things are presented to you and you shyly ask yourself: where am I, where has my voice gone?
Don't you listen to the final result of a recording in the studio?
No. Afterwards, they tinker with it for months, and the singer is always put in the damn corner in favor of the orchestra. My best recordings are live broadcasts, which can't be fiddled with much. They are the most successful as far as the voice is concerned. Recordings are undoubtedly very important. I have some that are, I think, very good, and many that are not so successful. But I really can't destroy them, even with the less successful you have to be able to live with them. You just have to try to learn from it and do better next time.
Which of your own recordings do you appreciate the most?
I like the Parsifal and Tannhäuser under Solti, the Meistersinger under Karajan, Mahler's "Lied von der Erde" under Bernstein and of the solo recordings several are good and others less so. This simply has to do with the fact that there are titles that suit you better, and others less so. "Der Freischütz" under Kubelik, as far as I'm concerned, I don't think is that great. The role of Max doesn't tell me much either. I hope that " Lohengrin" under Karajan is successful, and that "Tristan" under Carlos Kleiber, DGG) catches on well. Then follow the Siegfried roles in the new recording of the Ring under Marek Janowski, BMG)
Do you listen to your own recordings?
Yes, I listen to them, usually with a certain distaste because of the manipulations I already mentioned. You're in the studio and it all sounds fantastic. And then you hear the first pressing and you freak out. I repeat: so much is changed at the expense of the voices in favor of the orchestra that you can often only despair. I believe Birgit Nilsson once sued a record company because her voice could barely be heard. And if you can't hear a Nilsson anymore, give it up. I favor live broadcasts, they best correspond to the actual sound image.
The word "manipulation" is in the air. Are festivals and theaters also manipulated by the media and powerful lobby groups?
Completely, it is the total manipulation. It is about artistic performance, but equally about business, of firms, conductors and singers. Everybody wants to do business. And the market situation has deteriorated greatly for records, sales figures are a nightmare for firms. Today, record companies can only exist by the grace of large corporations, because only these can afford a subsidiary that is usually in the red. Some have been bought by producers of hi-fi equipment, others have had to merge with powerful companies. Hence a far too pronounced business aspect to the whole thing. There is no money today for recordings, where recording time is of lesser count than artistic quality, as it used to be. Even a Solti must be content with having time limits imposed on him. Not because one necessarily wants to think commercially, but because the economic compulsion is so great.
Thus the commercialization of art is becoming stronger and stronger.
It becomes harder and harder. In this case, art is a pure market object. For a production to really pay off, nowadays you have to make a record and a film, a multimedia performance.
And the free space for artistic considerations, also in the choice of works, is getting smaller and smaller.
That's why we have the same works over and over again, the umpteenth "Traviata"; the umpteenth "Trovatore"; etc... Within capitalism there is no escape, from these compulsions, nor in communism. Once, the total saturation point is reached. The record companies expect a revival through digital technology, rightly so I think. With this technology that makes high artistic and sound quality possible, everything has to be produced again. As an artist, you need a certain commercial background, assured by popularity, to be able to push through purely artistic considerations. For young artists it makes the breakthrough increasingly difficult, often almost impossible.
Much also depends on the courage and perseverance of the responsible producers. Apparent "outsiders" can also achieve commercial success on the basis of their artistic quality.
In the record companies there are still people who know how to muster this courage in the service of artistic value, even if no commercial success seems likely to follow. But then again, the big parent firms control the record companies and at the annual balance sheet only the profits count. Even a firm like DGG needs the personal support of a "Mr. Siemens." As long as someone in the firm's management is willing to take the financial luxury post culture for granted, you have room to maneuver. But it all hangs by a very thin thread.
A difficult situation for the record companies who, I think, do not consider themselves culture bearers without reason.
They are trying very hard, there are encouraging examples. On the other hand, the economic problems of the record companies also have to do with the fact that in the arts we also have to deal with lobby groups that are setting their expectations higher and higher. Orchestra and choir: if they make overtime, it goes into the hundreds of thousands. And as far as artistic responsibility is concerned, you could blame the theaters for not envisioning how they can realize it. After all, they get subsidies. They are not forced to think commercially. And what do they do? They play a completely commercial repertoire. Their mission should be to dare more, commissioning compositions, rediscoveries.....
Theaters, whose internal interest groups are busy forcefully sawing through the branch on which they sit. In the name of the social state...
which has long since exceeded its limits, in terms of the acceptability of performance, in certain domains. Someone has to come and start again with a clean slate, who has the courage to take tough decisions, to close down a theater if necessary and then start all over again. Who is not in favor of social achievements, even in the theater? But somewhere there is a limit. The workers in a theater really don't have to die of exhaustion, you know.
Source: : Imre Fabian im Gespräch mit René Kollo, Orell Füssli, 1982. Translation: Jos Hermans