Sounds & Fury

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In a piece for Canada's The Gazette that covers several items, The Gazette's classical music critic, Arthur Kaptainis, writes:

New from the normally reliable Amadeus Press is Wagner Moments, a compilation of testimonials by various celebrities, great and small, about Wagner and his operas. The book is too packed with middlebrow bilge to merit a recommendation (you would never know from her listless observations that Margaret Atwood is a famous author).

One revealing contrast, on opposite pages, is between a lyrical excerpt from the autobiography of C.S. Lewis and some off-the-cuff commentary from Michael Levine: "I have always found the whole subject of Wagner daunting and slightly irritating. All that high art scares me. It still does. I mean, how could anyone say that the Ring cycle is The Greatest Work of Art? ... Oh, please ... The works are long and bombastic and Wagner himself was, well, way too cocky if not extremely offensive ...."

Levine then half-heartedly concludes that "Wagner was attempting to paint a picture of the human soul." What makes all this noteworthy is not the content but the fact that the speaker was entrusted with the design of Canadian Opera Company Ring productions that opened the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto last September. They were ugly, cheap and incoherent.[*]

The No. 1 qualification of the modern opera director or designer? Disdain for opera.

Someone who meets those needs handsomely is Katharina Wagner, the composer's 29-year-old great-granddaughter. She made her directorial debut at Bayreuth last summer with a staging of Die Meistersinger that included topless dancers and a caricature of Wagner in his underpants.

Katharina is organizing a putsch to take over the festival from her 88-year-old father Wolfgang, who likes her and is willing to leave. Her accomplice is Christian Thielemann, music director of the Munich Philharmonic and thus something of a natural rival of Bavarian State Opera music director Kent Nagano. Indeed, these conductors formerly competed for funds in Berlin. All the same, Thielemann has mentioned Nagano as one of the guests he would like to bring to Bayreuth — assuming he gets the job.

Which he might not. Katharina's cousin Nike and half-sister Eva, both 62, are also bucking for the Bayreuth throne.

"I don't want to be uncharming," Katharina said, drawing attention to the fact that Bayreuth schedules are drawn up years in advance. "But it's a fact on the grounds of age (they) would not have the possibility to develop their own profile. As soon as they were given free rein to make their own mark, they would be way beyond pensionable age."

I think the Wagners should start blogging.

So should Arthur Kaptainis.

We love it!

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* See this post for a sample.

A Dragon By Any Other Name

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:43 PM Eastern on 30 Aug. See below.]

It's hardly a matter of any moment, and it's but a small slip-up, but here's what happens when you send a critic in another field (in this case, The New York Times's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman) to do a music critic's job, although at the Times these days it happens often enough and much more egregiously when you send a music critic to do a music critic's job — most particularly if the music critic happens to be the Times's chief music critic:

Every opera season demands a scene-chewing scandal to feed fans' appetites for outsize drama, and this summer that niche has been filled in Europe by the new production here [at the Bayreuther Festspiele] of Wagner’s Meistersinger. Tuesday was its final performance, and it was a mess, as advertised, but at least it was a diverting mess.

Its director is the comely 29-year-old Katharina Wagner, favored youngest daughter of the 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner (Richard's grandson), who for decades has been clutching the reins of power at the Bayreuth Festival like a gnomish Alberich hoarding his gold.

Although the gnome certainly hoarded his gold, it was the dragon, not the gnome, you were going for for use in this particular trope, Mr. Kimmelman. But we get the picture nevertheless.

The gnome-for-dragon business notwithstanding, this is an otherwise fine piece and worth your while reading despite these two bits of utter rubbish:

[Katharina's] approach is not, in the abstract, without merit, Beckmesser having always seemed a proto-Jew to Wagner, awaiting modern redemption; the opera’s end comes across as the screed it always seemed. But the production requires jettisoning all logic and humane sensibility. Characters whose interactions are unusually subtle for Wagner become props. [emphases mine]

RTWT here.

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Update (2:43 PM Eastern on 30 Aug): More on this at La Cieca's Parterre Box.

Unhappily, Not A Fluke

It would appear that the outside possibility that this was a mere fluke is, unhappily, not the case as witness this just in from Mostly Opera:

I am finally here [at the Bayreuther Festspiele] — after more than 20 years of wanting to go. I'll be reporting extensively — am now in the middle of the third Ring.

[...]

And the tickets!!!: Not so difficult to get. Actually it's been far easier to get tickets here in Bayreuth this year than almost anywhere I have been in the past years: 2 hours queing before Rheingold at the box office and you get tickets for the entire Ring. Better seats than people that have been waiting 10 years....And Parsifal. And Meistersinger. An exceptionally high number of people have returned their tickets this year, they told me at the box office....

We trust the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth gets the message loud and clear, and acts accordingly when they meet this fall at which meeting they almost certainly will have to deal with the pressing question of the succession to the directorship of the Festspiele the final decision concerning which lies solely within their authority. We suggest the time has come to look outside the Wagner family for a replacement to succeed the ailing current director, the 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner, who, at his pleasure, holds his position for life, and in whose hands the Festspiele has over the past 41 years of his sole stewardship gone off-message, off-purpose, and slid slowly down the tubes in terms of musical quality of performance.

Nicht Gut

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:45 AM Eastern on 12 Aug. See below.]

The following appeared on an opera forum to which I on occasion contribute. It was posted early this morning by a longtime and compulsive operagoer; a Bayreuther Festspiele freak and expat American who's been resident in Germany for some years now.

Came back to Bayreuth earlier this week on a lark and immediately got a ticket to the third performance of "Die Meistersinger"- only ten people in the line; I was number 7 and paid 28,50 Euro [USD39.00].

Yesterday morning I got the complete "Ring" - cycle II and have "Die Walküre" in an hour or so. It has never been so easy!

This sort of thing is almost unheard of, and bodes nothing but ill for the future of the Festspiele.

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Update (11:45 AM Eastern on 12 Aug): Apropos the above, the following was just posted to the Opera-L eMail list. It's the closing graf of a firsthand report on Katharina Wagner's new Bayreuther Festspiele production of Die Meistersinger which report can be read in full here.

Notices had been placed around the Festspielhaus saying that "due to the unusual nature of the staging there will be no curtain calls after Acts 1 and 2". This was nonsense, and just a ploy to avoid the audience booing until the end! At the conclusion, the booing was overwhelming when Katherina Wagner and her 'team' appeared and it continued for some time. Unlike earlier performances, the Sachs (Franz Hawlata) received a good reception, but Eva (Amanda Mace) was soundly booed (I can’t see her being invited back unless she can manage to sing in tune), as was the conductor (Sebastian Weigle) - a little unfairly I thought. Walther (Klaus Florian Vogt) received a rapturous reception – well deserved. We heard that many people had returned their tickets to the box office, and although the Festspielhaus seemed full we did see a few people leaving after the second act. If Katherina Wagner does become the heir to Bayreuth, tickets may be easier to obtain! [emphasis added]

The Bayreuther Festspiele Bids Farewell To Schlingensief

Just one more itty-bitty Wagner item for your delectation. The Bayreuther Festspiele bid a fond and vocal farewell to the Christoph Schlingensief production of Parsifal. Read about it here.

2007 Bayreuther Festspiele Opening Ring Cycle: A Few Brief Comments

Due to prior commitments, I was able to listen to only the first 45 minutes or so of the Bayreuther Festspiele opening Ring cycle's Rheingold (minus the pedal-point and horn prelude), and missed Act I of the Siegfried altogether, but heard both the Walküre and Götterdämmerung complete. And if one thing has emerged from that listening it's that, notwithstanding an unexplainably botched showing at last year's opening Ring cycle, Christian Thielemann is, hands down and far and away, the best Wagner conductor working today, and can be counted among and is the equal of the greatest Wagner conductors of whom we have recorded record. As I've written elsewhere, Thielemann — an authentic possessor of what I've termed the "Wagner Gene" — possesses an intuitive understanding and grasp of the Wagnerian language and Wagnerian rhetoric that's simply flawless. His Wagner readings recall the Wagner readings of the Wagner Gene possessors of times past — Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Krauss, and Solti — with an added touch of that elegant sense of orchestral color and ensemble that was von Karajan's, and over these past seven days the Festspiele orchestra responded to his direction faultlessly with some of the most powerful, sensitive, and expressive playing I've heard from that ensemble in recent years. All told, a sterling reading of the four scores of the tetralogy. Would that the singers' performances had been half as sterling. With the single exception of Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka's Sieglinde, which role she sang at last year's Festspiele, and which performance showed her to be a Sieglinde for the ages, the rest of the tetralogy's cast were competent at best, and disappointing much of the time. No, I'll not engage in any detailed postmortem on that matter. Not worth my time — or yours.

All that's needed now is the surfacing of another Flagstad or Nilsson, another Melchior, and another Hotter, and we're all set to record for posterity a Ring for the ages.

Alas, not going to happen.

Clueless

What's wrong with this picture? It's a brief graf excerpted from an AP story written by one, George Jahn, concerning the battle for succession at the Bayreuther Festspiele.

For true believers, a trip to the [F]estival is a pilgrimage, despite long waits, uncomfortable seating and a repertoire restricted year after year to varying combinations of seven of Wagner's 10 mature works.

Casts a pall of untrustworthiness over the entire piece, does it not?

All In The Family

Here's a fairly comprehensive article on the battle for the directorship of the Bayreuther Festspiele. Excerpt:

Things are tense at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, opened in 1876 by Richard Wagner and still in the hands of the composer's family, or, rather, one faction of it. The war of succession, more twisted than anything Wagner dreamt up in his music dramas, is soon to reach a climax.

Even Bayreuth's normally discreet mayor, Michael Hohl, an ex-officio member of the Richard Wagner Foundation, which controls the succession, has admitted that "discussions have become loud" and that the succession issue is on the agenda for this autumn.

[T]he most likely, though by no means certain, winner of the festival director's crown is Katharina Wagner, the composer's 29-year-old great-granddaughter, who has staked her claim to the job by directing the controversial new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to inaugurate this summer's festival.

Speculation has long been rife as to who will succeed Wolfgang Wagner, the 87-year-old patriarch - a grandson of the composer - who maintains a desperate grip on the festival. Now in frail health, he has held the Bayreuth reins for the past 56 years, first with his brother Wieland, and then alone since Wieland's early death in 1966.

[...]

Wolfgang's chosen successor is Katharina, his daughter and only child by his second wife, Gudrun. Not long ago he favoured Gudrun herself, his collaborator at Bayreuth over the last quarter of a century, with the option of Gudrun passing on the chalice (poisoned or otherwise) to Katharina.

But with Katharina emerging as a stage director in her own right, and now having expressed her interest in the top job, the dynastic succession may pass straight to her.

Verdict's In

Well, the verdict's in, at least in the English-language press, and it's not pretty (see this post for a digest of the reports and reviews). Virtually every reviewer and critic panned in no uncertain terms Katharina Wagner's Bayreuther Festspiele debut with her Konzept production of her great-grandpapa's music-drama, Die Meistersinger . No surprise, of course, that this new production is the grotesque thing that by all reports it manifestly is. The surprise would have been had it been otherwise. Oddly enough, and unlike Wagner's other music-dramas, Die Meistersinger, because of its real-world grounding, is the one Wagner music-drama that can actually sustain a reworked postmodern staging in order to be realized in contemporary terms without the music-drama being made to appear a grotesque caricature of itself. One shudders to contemplate what with absolute certainty will obtain if (when) Katharina gets her hot little hands on any other of her great-granddaddy's music-dramas (she's welcome to the operas except, of course, Holländer which one could with some justice consider a proto-music-drama even though at bottom it's still ultimately an opera).

Would that Katharina had been born Katharina Bellini or Katharina Donizetti or Katharina _________ (you fill in the surname of any other composer manqué of opera as genuine dramma per musica). She could then indulge freely her self-important, self-involved Regietheater proclivities directing the works of her opera composer ancestor without meaningful harm being done either to the works or to their audiences. To the contrary. Her ministrations might well actually do them some good.

And Now For The Press Postmortem On The Production

[Note: This post has been updated (11) as of 7:07 AM Eastern on 3 Aug. See below.]

Here's the first of what we suspect will be a fairly long list of press reports and reactions in English to Katharina Wagner's Konzept production of Die Meistersinger for the 2007 Bayreuther Festspiele:

After the first two acts of "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg", composed by Richard Wagner and directed by his 29-year-old [great-granddaughter] Katharina, some were critical of her modern and unconventional reading, while others gushed with enthusiasm.

"Fantastic," said one American woman as she emerged from the hallowed "Festspielhaus" theatre following the first act of the three-act "comic" opera.

"Surprisingly good," enthused Carl Julius Brabant, an octogenarian who said he has been coming to Bayreuth since 1951.

RTWT here.

And stay tuned to this post for further updates.

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Update (7:21 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): And another from the same source:

The first-night audience of the 96th Bayreuther Festspiele, which began with Katharina's eagerly anticipated new reading of "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg", jeered and whistled when the willowy blonde took her bows after the final curtain came down.

While the applause had been fairly friendly after each of the first two acts of Wagner's only "comic" opera, the political and social elite attending the glitzy opening night were outraged by the third and final act, with its depictions of nudity and sexuality, showing Nuremberg's guild of singers, or "Meistersinger", romping around the stage with outsized penises.

"It had absolutely nothing to do with 'Meistersinger'," raged Herbert H., 64. "It was all so gratuitous. It wasn't true to the text at all."

RTWT here.

Opening Day

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 4:50 PM Eastern on 25 Jul. See below.]

Today is the opening day of the 2007 Bayreuther Festspiele with a new production of Die Meistersinger directed by Wagner great-granddaughter and potential heir to the directorship of the Festival, Katharina Wagner, kicking off the festivities. The audio of the performance will be streamed live on a number of outlets beginning at 9:55 AM EST. Click on the appropriate entry in our schedule on the right sidebar for full details.

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Update (12:46 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): Leave it to a pro like Alex Ross to find a really chock full of information and pics site relating to this.

Update 2 (3:07 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): Here's a revealing video of a rehearsal for this new production of Meistersinger; revealing even if one can't understand German. On the evidence of the video, the Konzept, from the little I can grasp of it from this brief fragment, appears not altogether ridiculous to me. Here are some stills.

Update 3 (4:50 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): And now for the obligatory critique of the performance musically.

«yawn»

Chorus wasn't bad, though, and Vogt as Walther, although his German tenor is too light and Italianate-sounding for the role, was pretty good. I trust Herr Weigle, however, has employment on the podium in other than Wagnerian venues. (Late Note (26 July, 3:41 AM Eastern): Alex Ross also has some postmortem thoughts on the performance musically in an update to this post.)

For press reports and reaction to the production, see here.