Eurotrash Redux

(Note: This post has been edited to add a footnote and an appendix, and to correct certain errors in the original text, as of 10:59 AM Eastern on 21 May.)

A few years ago, a brave and adventurous opera-loving friend of mine left his home in the wilds of the all-American Southwest, and headed for the wilds of Berlin, Germany and the Wagner Festtage armed with tickets for performances of all ten (count 'em!) of Richard Wagner's canonical operas to be given serially over a two-week period at the Deutsche Staatsoper with Daniel Barenboim conducting, and with productions by the postmodern director Harry Kupfer. Although a lover of opera, my friend had never before seen any of Wagner's works staged, and, indeed, was generally unfamiliar with the libretti and music of these as well, his opera experience being confined mostly (but not entirely) to the operas of the Italian repertoire as is generally true of the majority of opera lovers.

And I trembled for him.

I trembled for him not because I thought he'd be out of his depth coming from the soap operas of the Italian rep with their largely melodramatic plots and organ-grinder music, but because without my having seen any of the Kupfer productions I knew the stagings would be thoroughly grotesque, perfectly idiot, essentially divorced from Wagner's own stage directions, and, much more to the point, divorced from the essential vision of Wagner's libretti and music. Such are all postmodern stagings of Wagner's operas of which I've knowledge — which stagings have earned the well-deserved appellation, "Eurotrash" — with their willful and wrongheaded revisions for social and political "relevance," and their invariable hijacking of Wagner's works as vehicles to promote and put on display the Konzept and "personal vision" of the director.

I don't want to be misunderstood here. As I've pointed out on this blog previously, I'm no traditionalist or pedant arguing for the importance of staging, or the need to stage, Wagner's operas in accordance with Wagner's own stage directions. Arguably some of the most profound stagings of Wagner's operas ever were the spare, abstract productions of his grandson Wieland, a theatrical genius in his own right, in the 1950s through the early-1960s, and they were anything but in accordance with Wagner's own stage directions.

No, I don't argue on traditionalist grounds. What I argue for is the importance of staging, and the need to stage, Wagner's operas in accordance with the essential vision embodied in Wagner's libretti and music. In other words, in accordance with the essential vision of the music-dramas themselves. If a director wants to put his own Konzept and "personal vision" on stage let him compose his own operas for the purpose, and leave Wagner's alone. Where Wagner's operas are concerned, it's Wagner's Konzept and vision as expressed in libretti and music that are of importance, not the director's.

You may wonder just how grotesque these postmodern atrocities can be. Let me again on this blog, but here in more detail, take as example that mother of all postmodern Wagner productions, the 1976 Bayreuth Festival (Centennial) production of the Ring, conducted by Pierre Boulez, and directed by the Wagner-ignorant Frenchman Patrice Chéreau, a man who had no knowledge of Wagner's great tetralogy beyond its name before his hiring by the Festival's long-time director, the aesthetic and musical blockhead, Wolfgang Wagner (grandson of Richard, brother of Wieland, and, since WW II, the Festival's guiding "back-room" business genius). So Wagner-ignorant was Chéreau, in fact, that at first he thought the Ring simply an ordinary opera — a single opera(!).

When Chéreau was done his work, in place of Wagner's epic, Nature-dominated, world-encompassing cosmic drama, we were given a squalid little quasi-Marxist morality play (as I once characterized it on a previous blog of mine) on the evils of power- and money-greedy capitalism and its exploitation of the masses in which, for instance, in Das Rheingold, the great primal river Rhine becomes a late-19th- / early-20th-century water reservoir and hydroelectric dam, the child-like and delightful Rhinemaidens, cruel and immoral street trollops, and the male gods, top-hatted, exploitative, late-19th- / early-20th-century power- and money-grubbing barons of industry (the three succeeding music-dramas — each treated as a separate, isolated work, thereby effectively destroying the organic unity of Wagner's tetralogy, the tetralogy's timelessness and universality already destroyed by Chéreau's Das Rheingold — each employed other historical references: Italian Renaissance aristocratic for Walküre, proto-space-age-industrialist for Siegfried, and post-WWI-pre-WWII for Götterdämmerung).

It's precisely the sort of idiot business one would expect of an avant-garde Frenchman (well, O.K., any Frenchman), but, sad to report, it was a then quarter-century-dead Irishman who at bottom was to blame. Chéreau, clueless from the beginning, had to rummage about for some ideas for his new production, and found G.B. Shaw's tendentious socialist tract, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (Shaw's socialist reading of the drama of the Ring). The ignorant Frenchman took the bloody silly thing seriously and swallowed it whole, and then, like a good fundamentalist, regurgitated it on stage in all its literalist glory as Wagner's(!) Ring.

And none of this is even to begin to speak of conductor Pierre Boulez's reading of Wagner's score which so appallingly and willfully disregarded or misunderstood what Wagner had there written that three-quarters of the Bayreuth orchestra walked out on him in rehearsal in protest, and only a direct appeal to them by Wolfgang Wagner to the effect that their walkout threatened the very economic survival of the Bayreuth Festival brought them back. Even so, the entire orchestra refused to join Boulez on stage at the end of the premier performance as is traditional, but instead pointedly remained seated in their regular seats hidden below stage in the Festspielhaus's famous "invisible" orchestra pit.

That's how grotesque these postmodern atrocities can be.*

So, how, then, did my opera-loving, Eurotrash-innocent, Wagner-naive friend fare at the Festtage? Here's the report he filed after his first-ever live experience of Tristan und Isolde:

Just back from Tristan. Oy. I am drunk, demolished, destroyed, melted, eviscerated, smashed und smoked. My underwear is nuked. And I don't even wear underwear. But it's all nuked, fried, baked, boiled, blasted, und beschlugendstidendest. Liebestod. I died. I am dead. But I'm resurrected. As Wagner. The vampire. He lives. In me. Bastard. Genius. He's emptied me out. And filled me up. With music-drama. Knew I shouldn't have drunk that potion.

Sigh

[...]

The production sucked. Idiot Kupfer. Fool. Boob. Pinhead. Moron. Vandal. But Wagner squished him. Like a steamroller over an ant or cockroach. Wagner triumphs. The bloody vampire. The blessed, deathless vampire. I'll spot him a pint of my blood any day, knowing I'll be repaid in full, and then some. Tomorrow Meistersinger. Then Parsifal. And then... and then?

Oy.

Seems I needn't have trembled for my friend at all. He not only nailed that son-of-a-bitch Kupfer right off, and without any help from me, but understood Wagner's great work in spite of the idiot production.

But then, knowing my friend as I do, it's no more than I should have expected of him. I'm not, however, as sanguine about other Wagner innocents exposed to these self-involved, self-serving corruptions of these great works of art, and so post this caution — another in what's become a sort of series here — for as the saying goes: forewarned is forearmed.

---

*For brief descriptions of other grotesque Eurotrash Ring productions, read on.

A German correspondent of mine several years ago forwarded some choice morsels concerning the then new Staatsoper Stuttgart production of Wagner's Ring. The special claim to fame of this production was that each of the four music-dramas had a different director who brought his own personal Konzept to the music-drama assigned him.

Following, the morsels.

Das Rheingold (Director: Joachim Schlömer)

Setting: In a train station (could be in Chicago), sometime in the 1920's. Through the clear glass of a large window (of the train station) we see, in the bubbling water of what could be a large marine aquarium, the Rheintöchter teasing Alberich. One of the Rheintöchter, in an attempt to tantalize him, pulls out a thick, burgundy lipstick from her purse, opens it, and begins to smear it on Alberich's lips against his will.

Die Walküre (Director: Christof Nel)

The end of Act I: We see Sieglinde, dressed in a negligee, and Siegmund, wearing one of those synthetic wind-breaker jackets and deck shoes. Sieglinde holds Nothung [a sword] wrapped in a bed sheet. The hilt of Nothung is pointing out backwards from underneath Sieglinde's arm, while the blade is pointing upward in front of her at a 45-degree angle. Siegmund, in the sword extraction scene, pulls it out slowly. Reeeally slowly. The director, in the program notes, explains that in Walküre, "it is all about pulling it out. Sticking it in, and pulling it out."

Act II: Wotan, dressed in red T-shirt and jeans, is lying on a ladder with its lower end resting firmly on the floor. Its upper end is lying atop the lower portion of a window frame of an abandoned factory building.

During Wotan's furious departure from his daughter Brünnhilde (right after he tells her that she must obey him or else face penalty), we see him giving her a long, sexual and lustful kiss on the mouth before forcefully pushing her face away from him as he leaves.

Act III: The Magic Fire music close: Brünnhilde is sitting at a simple, wooden square table, dressed in a night gown, while Wotan, dressed in a dark, pin-striped suit, his hand on the rear handle of one of those floodlights (the kind used in theaters and/or by movie companies) points the floodlight in Brünnhilde's direction as he closes with, "Wer meines Speeres Spitze fürchtet, durchschreite das Feuer nie!" ["Whosoever fears the tip of my spear shall never pass through the fire!"]

Siegfried (Director: Jossi Wieler)

The opening of Act I: Mime is in a modern kitchen, dressed in an apron, peeling potatoes while seated at the kitchen table. When the opening anvil forging music begins, he starts banging his medium-sized kitchen knife on the rim of a pot in which the potatoes are to be cooked. In the sword-forging scene, we see him throwing furniture about the room. Siegfried, with long blond hair trailing down as far as his buttocks, makes his entrance wearing a grey T-shirt with "Sieg Fried" written on it in large, black lettering.

Later, in the forest scene in Act II, we see Siegfried blowing his horn in front of a barbed-wired fence similar to the kind which typically surrounds prisons or military sites, with signage stating the there is "Danger!" nearby. The fence is lit with white flood lights, the rear of the stage is pitch black.

Mercifully, my correspondent forwarded no morsels from the Götterdämmerung directed by arch Eurotrash vandal, Peter Konwitschny. I suspect my correspondent's courage simply failed him.