Word has reached me there's a story making the rounds of the German press to the effect that the engagement of Christoph Schlingensief by Bayreuth Festival chief honcho Wolfgang Wagner to design and direct the Festival's just-premiered new production of Parsifal was instigated and relentlessly championed by Herr Wagner's 26-year-old daughter, Katharina, herself a producer and director of her great-grandfather's operas, and rumored to be slated to mount a new production of Die Meistersinger for the 2007 Bayreuth Festival, and, further, to succeed on his retirement her now 84-year-old father.
If all true — and it all sounds all too true to me — this is not good news. Katharina is a dyed-in-the-wool Eurotrash devotee who is herself already responsible for a truly loathsome Eurotrash Fliegender Holländer done in Würzburg in 2002, and just the thought that she is influencing productions at the Bayreuth Festival even while her father still maintains the reins there is chilling. Even more chilling is the prospect of her succeeding her father as head of the now 128-year-old Festival.
What makes that accession a very real even if not certain possibility is the encouraging reception and acceptance more and more afforded Eurotrash productions by the influential critical press. One has only to read the majority of the German press's reception of the new Schlingensief Parsifal — from all descriptions as grotesque a piece of Eurotrash as one might wish for or fear — to be convinced of the truth of that statement.
And that encouraging reception and acceptance of Eurotrash by the critical press is not limited to the European press, nor a new, just-this-year phenomenon. Here, for instance, is an article written for Andante two years ago by Anne Midgette, music critic for the New York Times, on the subject of Regietheater (Director's Theater), more often than not the more technical and polite name for Eurotrash, using as example the above mentioned Katharina Wagner production of Holländer.
Wrote Ms. Midgette:
[A] one-line description doesn't do justice to the [production's] concept, and the many details that backed it up. No, there weren't any sailing ships here, and there wasn't even any redemption; the Holländer is beaten to death by xenophobic skinheads. But sitting in the theater, you saw that, yes, Senta could easily be the misfit in high school who dresses funny and obsessively listens to strange music on her Walkman. Ms. Wagner, 24, found a way to have the opera make sense in the terms of her generation. The inner logic she created for the piece held water; and it was closely linked to the music. Nearly all the German critics, like me, arrived prepared for disaster (Ms. Wagner had never staged an opera before), and nearly all of them - with the exception of the F.A.Z. and a couple of other smaller papers - found, as did I, that it was valid.
Excuse me? Valid? And "closely linked to the music" (whatever Ms. Midgette here means by that)? Valid as what? Certainly not as a realization of Richard Wagner's dramatic and aesthetic vision as set forth in the text, music, and mise en scène of Holländer. I submit that those who attend a production of a Wagner opera or music-drama are entitled to see and hear a realization of Wagner's vision — Richard's, that is, not Katharina's.
Let me remark quickly at this point to immediately and preemptively blunt the classic and invidious retort of those Eurotrash aficionados and defenders who sneeringly characterize as reactionary the views of people such as myself that I am not saying that a valid realization of Wagner's vision need be clothed and made manifest in the traditional garb of 19th-century Wagner productions, or that Wagner's own staging and stage directions be adhered to dogmatically, slavishly, or at all. What I am saying (and have said before, and often) is that no matter how contemporarily clothed and made manifest the production might be, it must at its core be a realization of Richard Wagner's vision — his Konzept, as expressed in text, music and mise en scène, not the Konzept of the director or producer of a current production.
Let me also quickly remark that Ms. Midgette might seem to have the advantage of me in that she actually attended the production in question whereas I did not. But one need not have actually attended this production to know with absolute certainty that a Holländer where "there [aren't] any sailing ships," and where "there [isn't] even any redemption," and where, in the end, "the Holländer [the character] is beaten to death by xenophobic skinheads [at the instigation of Senta's in this production brutish, pimp father]," and where "Senta could easily be the misfit in high school who dresses funny and obsessively listens to strange music on her Walkman," is not, by even prodigiously progressive-minded stretch of the imagination, a realization of Richard Wagner's vision. That Konzept is wholly Katharina Wagner's, and like all Eurotrash directors she, without hesitation or compunction, hijacks, vandalizes, and does lethal violence to a work of genuine art for her own self-involved and self-important reasons and purposes.
(Things are actually much worse, and more mind-bogglingly imbecile in this production than the above more-than-one-line description suggests. In this production Senta is a victim of a brutal, macho society, beaten up by her current boyfriend Erik, and sold by her pimp father to the Dutchman. And it all takes place in a world peopled by corrupt, violence-prone machos, sitting around in a red-light-district bar(!) in baseball caps and open shirts with only two things on their minds: power and money, while Senta walks around dressed up like a Barbie doll to please her macho, pimp father, Daland.)*
Might I suggest to Ms. Midgette, and to others in the critical press as well, that before they next think of praising a Eurotrash Wagner production they first consider that, although there would be no dramatic or aesthetic gain or benefit whatsoever from doing so, and while, depending on how skillfully it's done, it may do no real or fundamental violence to a conventional Italian opera like, say, Tosca with all the necessary time and place changes made to the sung text to have it take place in, say, turn-of-21st-century New York instead of turn-of-19th-century Rome — a 21st-century New York where, say, Cavaradossi is a programmer of software games, Scarpia a powerful and exploitative electronics venture capitalist, and Floria Tosca herself a flaming rock star and all that implies — the same sort of approach cannot be taken with any of Wagner's canonical works (those works from Holländer forward), and most particularly and most especially none of the great masterworks after Lohengrin. If nothing else, taking that sort of approach with a Wagner opera results in making concrete and "freezing" a particular aspect or reading of the work, thereby robbing it of the very thing — the essential characteristic — that establishes it as the transcendent work of art that it is: its power to resonate in multiple domains, and at multiple levels of meaning, all at once. Additionally, all Wagner's works, even one as early and immature as Holländer, have an organic one-ness of text, music, and mise en scène that will brook no deconstructionist diddling without becoming grotesque caricatures of themselves at best, and perverse and grotesque corruptions of their creator's dramatic and aesthetic vision always.
* Production details culled from reviews appearing in the Agence France-Presse, and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
It's The Music, Stupid!
Peggy
