A Grudging Admission And Recommendation

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:57 PM Eastern on 5 Jan. See below.]

It's the start of a new year, and so it perhaps would not be entirely out of place to begin the year with a bit of editorial cleansing, so to speak.

In our years-long quixotic campaign against Regietheater-as-Eurotrash opera productions generally, and Regietheater-as-Eurotrash productions of Wagner's music-dramas in particular, we've frequently savaged as the mother of all Regietheater-as-Eurotrash Wagner productions the so-called Centennial Ring produced by the French Dynamic Duo of Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez for the 1976 Bayreuther Festspiele. Although nothing has changed our thinking about this production, we do have to admit grudgingly that in our zeal to condemn all such Regietheater-as-Eurotrash productions, we tendentiously omitted saying anything about this production that didn't focus on its absurdity even though we noted privately to ourself a few things about it which were admirable in themselves (Chéreau's direction of the singer-actors, for instance [Ed. Note - 1/5/09: see Update below]), and recognized some few years after the fact that production's seminal importance in the long-term, Big Picture view of the staging of Wagner's music-dramas. This recent post by blogger Patrick Smith of The Penitent Wagnerite affords us the opportunity to come clean, so to speak, concerning those tendentious omissions as we confess our grudging agreement with most of what Mr. Smith has to say in his more soberly considered view of the Chéreau-Boulez Ring. This, for instance,

You're depriving yourself of a valuable Wagnerian experience if you don't give the [DVD of the] Boulez/Chéreau Ring a view. It is simply impossible to understand Wagnerian staging in the second half of the twentieth century without seeing Chéreau's production. I might go so far to say that the 1976-1980 cycle was the last really interesting one at Bayreuth. Peter Hall's production was a failure even at the time, and Georg Solti couldn't save it (for a lot of reasons, not least because of casting holdovers like the odious Manfred Jung). Harry Kupfer's production is even weirder than Chéreau's, though Barenboim turns in a musical contribution that is more idiomatic and full-throated, so to speak, than Boulez's (and Tomlinson simply embarrasses McIntyre, as do some other singers to their counterparts). Kirchner's has been, more or less, forgotten (though it has its moments of being reminiscent of Wieland Wagner's Neu Bayreuth). I can't be bothered to remember the last couple of directors, though it was a shame when Lars Von Trier pulled out of the Ring.

[...]

You can say what you will about the trend of Wagnerian staging post-1976, but make no mistake: the most recent epoch (excepting really offensive productions like Schlingensief's Parsifal) is most assuredly denoted "post-1976." It is, of course, fairly easy to punt on the Boulez/Chéreau Ring, though — in my opinion — Levine's DVD set is dull as dishwater, even by traditional standards, and I understand that. Siegfried is the weak link, with Rheingold and Götterdämmerung (sans the "epilogue," which I can and might discuss later) coming out strongest. The thing is, as I keep saying, musically and dramatically, it's unidiomatic. It's also a little obvious in places, which isn't good for effective theater outside the mystery or morality play genres. It is however both important and instructive.

We especially agree with this concerning Boulez's reading of the score:

Boulez flies through the cycle and clarifies the orchestral architecture to the point where every sinew and nerve, so to speak, of the piece is visible. Let me put it this way, imagine putting a magician or an illusionist in a white room, surrounded by bright lights and cameras, and then asking him to show you his tricks. There would be no illusion to it, because you can see every nuance of every move. Clarifying and simplifying Wagner's orchestration does just that. The illusion to be created by Wagner's orchestration is lost. Also, I might note that Richard Wagner was a composer of no mean talent: if he wanted skeletal renderings, then he would have arranged for them.

Or, as we put it previously concerning the failing of another conductor of Wagner, Karl Böhm:

Wagner's musico-dramatic and symphonic contrapuntal genius is almost always realized in the massing, rarely in details of inner line (Meistersinger is an exception to this as in all else), and Böhm's transparent and razor-edge-precise readings of Wagner wherein the revealing of inner line is prominent are therefore just plain wrong (i.e., un-Wagnerian). They're wrong because while precision and the revealing of inner line in the music of, say, Mozart or Beethoven is to reveal the very soul of the music, precision and the revealing of inner line in Wagner's music serves only to reveal how the sorcerer accomplished his magic. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all, as any self-respecting sorcerer will attest.

Although far be it from us to incite anyone to attend or purchase DVDs of Regietheater-as-Eurotrash Wagner productions (it serves only to encourage the perpetrators), we think Mr. Smith's thoughtful post deserves an unbiased reading.

RTWT here.

---

Update (1:57 PM Eastern on 5 Jan): For an eye-opening postscript to the above, see this S&F post.