Sounds & Fury

The New York Post Does Bayreuth

According to New York Post opera critic James Jorden (aka "La Cieca" of Parterre Box), he's been credentialed to cover this summer's Bayreuther Festspiele for the Post. No surprise there. Whatever else the management of the Festspiele may be (all dreadful), they aren't stupid. Who better to credential from the MSM to cover the 2013 Festspiele than an inveterate champion of and cheerleader for Eurotrash, even of the most egregious sort. After all, this summer will see the Festspiele premiere of the new Ring directed by that notorious Eurotrash vandal Frank Castorf. Consequently, the Festspiele will need all the MSM critical support it can muster.

Congratulations, James! You've earned it.

The "Creative Soul" Of The Opera Director

As it typically does whenever the subject of Regietheater is discussed in an online opera forum, the arguments on both sides of the aisle tend to get, shall we say, a bit uncompromising. No surprise there. For better or worse, it's the nature of the beast. We reprint below a short exchange from the most recent such argument in which we were involved simply in order to make it part of the S&F record.

A forum member wrote, in part, the following in response to a 2010 S&F entry ("It's The Music, Stupid!") that apparently had been cited on the forum within the context of an ongoing argument concerning Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater:

[S]ome directors are deliberately trying to stage an opera in a way that is at odds with the music. They don't want you absorbed in the story, they want you to actively question the work. [...] I simply cannot agree that directors should abandon attempts to apply their ideas and concepts to a work. That is the creative soul of the occupation.

To which we responded (here reprinted with language somewhat polished):

No, that is the "creative soul of the occupation" of a Eurotrash/Brechtian Regie, not that of an honest opera director. The "creative soul of the occupation" of an honest opera director resides in his attempt to discover, to the utmost capacity of his gift, the most vivid and compelling way to realize onstage the full sense and spirit of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions). Attempting anything beyond that involves the opera director operating within territory he has no business even so much as stepping foot into much less messing about with.

And so ought it to be in saecula saeculorum.

Beczala's "Black List"

Today, on a venerable online opera forum, a member linked this interview (in German) wherein the well-known Polish tenor Piotr Beczala declared his refusal in advance to be part of any opera production by certain Regietheater Regies (which, for obvious professional reasons, he declined to name) with a reputation for staging Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater productions of the established operatic repertoire — his "Black List", as he called it.

This brave declaration was hailed roundly by an overwhelmingly large percentage of the responding membership of the forum but was just as roundly pooh-poohed by the usual suspects, one of whom is a member of the certified classical music "smart set", a set identified in this recent S&F entry. Wrote this usual suspect:

But Leontyne Price says never sing on principal, only on interest. So difficult to keep up with all these pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of the ability to make a pretty noise in the throat.

To which we responded:

You mean as opposed to all those pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of their desperate, urgent need to justify and make acceptable their parasitic hijacking of the original works of others, or the theorizing of those great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of an artform consists of a view of that artform that's long been jaded by their having been obsessive-compulsively addicted to that artform for reasons other than art? I of course dismiss the theorizing of academic types as their theorizing on an artform is provoked and corrupted by things external to art and is therefore ipso facto worthless.

Usual Suspect's immediately following sally attempted the less snarky, more sober approach, managing only to dig himself into an even deeper hole:

I see nothing particularly brave in what Beczala said. Essentially he states he will refuse to work with "crazy" directors who try to "reinvent" the opera without bothering to define what constitutes either craziness or reinvention.... I would call it brave, for example, if Beczala had named names, said, "I worked with Fritz Krank in Graz on a terrible 'Traviata' in which I had to sing my cabaletta nude in a children's swimming pool filled with Jello." But he offers neither names nor concrete examples of what he considers "crazy." (What he says about a crocodile in "Lohengrin" is hypothetical and therefore pointless....)

To which we responded:

Since when does being hypothetical equate with being pointless? And in the case of Lohengrin, Beczala's hypothetical crocodile is perfectly on point given the recent infamous Bayreuth Eurotrash Lohengrin — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — with its army of rat-costumed Brabantians complete with tails.

In any case, the man is setting forth a principle and his stated rejection of any staging of Lohengrin — actual or hypothetical — in which a crocodile takes the place of the swan illustrates that principle in a way perfectly comprehensible to all — to all, that is, other than cheerleaders for and staunch fans and defenders of that malignancy known as Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater.

We await (but do not expect) any further argument.

Stay tuned.

Letter From Bayreuth

At the 1960 Bayreuther Festspiele, mezzo soprano Frances Martin made her operatic debut as Ortlinde (one of Brünnhilde's eight Valkyrie sisters) in the Wolfgang Wagner production of Die Walküre. We suspect most of you will not have heard of Ms. Martin before (we hadn't, but, then, that's as per usual for us where singers are concerned as regular readers of S&F well know) but, as explains baritone Donald Collup, this occasion was the result of an invitation by Friedelind Wagner to attend master classes at Bayreuth in the summer of 1959 where Ms. Martin was the only student that summer offered a contract to sing at the Festspiele the following summer.

As can be imagined, this was a stellar event in the career of the young (34-year-old) mezzo, no matter how small the part, and she chronicled the experience in a long letter home to her parents in Atlanta, Georgia which letter Mr. Collup has used as the basis of a delightful and informative YouTube video he produced, the soundtrack of which has the now 86-year-old Ms. Martin reading that letter she wrote some 52 years ago. The video follows instanter and we trust you'll find it as entertaining as we did.

Kaufmann On Regietheater

This video of a Jonas Kaufmann interview (don't be dissuaded by the French title; the interview is conducted in English) wherein Kaufmann expresses his thoughts on Regietheater is a most intelligent discussion of the subject (with due allowance made concerning Kaufmann's careful laudatory comments about the current Hans Neuenfels Eurotrash staging of Lohengrin at Bayreuth — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — in which Kaufmann sang the eponymous role). And we don't say that merely because Kaufmann's thoughts on Regietheater closely parallel our own; in particular as expressed in our July 2010 S&F entry titled "It's The Music, Stupid!".

Well, on second thought, maybe we do.

Staging Wagner: From Wagner To The Birth Of Eurotrash

We used the occasion of our Sandy-enforced from-the-world-isolated downtime (we were without electric power from Monday a week ago to Monday last; it's sobering to be confronted so directly by just how utterly dependent on electricity is modern everyday life) to read a book we purchased some four years ago but never got around to reading titled Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy (Yale University Press, 2006) and a most informative read it proved to be. The book surveys the high points of the history of Wagner stagings, mostly in Germany with a side trip to Russia, from the Romantic naturalism of Wagner's own staging to the Brechtian "critical" realism of the so-called Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of Patrice Chéreau of 1976 and as such traces the history of the emergence of what we today refer to as Regietheater; a development which was the product of pressures social, political, and aesthetic.

What we found especially interesting was the huge influence upon this slow but sea-change shift in the staging of Wagner's works of the theoretical writings of the then mostly obscure Swiss "theatrical visionary" Adolphe Appia at the turn of the century; an influence that can be observed in all manner of opera stagings of even the present day. Appia was a devout Wagnerian and it was Wagner's works that provoked and impelled the formation of his theories of mise en scène. He was convinced that Wagner's devotion to 19th-century realism (or rather illusion of the real) in his stagings of his own works was not only misplaced but effectively worked to sabotage and betray those works.

Appia was right and Wagner should have realized his misstep himself for after Tristan he no longer referred to his music-dramas as examples of Gesamtkunstwerk but as "deeds of music made visible," a belated recognition by him of the primacy of the art of music in music-drama which, contrary to his original theoretical formulation of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner finally realized can never be on an equal footing with the other arts but will always reign supreme among them. It was precisely this that Appia seized upon. His solution to the problem of mise en scène in the staging of Wagner's works is complex but is grounded in the conviction that the music, not the text, should always be the controlling factor in determining the mise en scène and that that mise en scène should always be suggestive rather than literal and formed to great extent by light modeling and shaping solid structures and the space defined by them as well as the living bodies (i.e., the singer-actors) that interact with those structures and move about within that space. On Appia's stage, scene painting on drops and flats and the like was, for the most part, consigned permanently to the dust bin of theatrical history. (As we read about Appia's theories we could not help but experience a delicious stab of self-satisfied pleasure when we saw how similar was our own modest thinking in the matter of staging Wagner's music-dramas as set forth in our 2005 S&F entry titled "Staging Wagner's Music-Dramas" which can be read in full here.)

What we also found especially interesting was how honest and essentially Werktreue were the early Regietheater stagings of Wagner's works in the sense that none, it seems, attempted to supplant the spirit and sense of Wagner's original theatrical concept by the imposition of the director's own but instead worked to achieve a heightened and more revelatory realization of the drama embodied by the music through the spirit and sense of that original theatrical concept using the music itself as the controlling guide.

The first of these Wagner stagings in a major theater to break, at least in part, with the traditional way of staging Wagner's works as established at Bayreuth by Wagner himself and after him by his wife Cosima who ruled Bayreuth for some 23 years after Wagner's death is generally acknowledged to be the Gustav Mahler/Alfred Roller Tristan of 1903 at the Vienna Court Opera where Mahler had reigned as the theater's conductor and general director since 1897. It proved a great success but didn't manage to extend its influence beyond productions mounted at the Court Opera. The next steps were taken by the Russian director Vsevolod Myerhold with his 1909 Tristan for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky with his 1918 Lohengrin for the Theater of the Council of Working Deputies (the former Zimin Theater), I. Prostorov's Rienzi of 1923 for the same theater, and, much later, the legendary Sergei Eisenstein with his 1940 Walküre for the Bolshoi.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, the great conductor Otto Klemperer had become director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927 and there, with stage designer Ewald Dülberg, staged in 1929 a Fliegende Holländer that pretty much jettisoned Wagner's original theatrical concept for its own and jettisoned as well the principles of Appian mise en scène in favor of the principles of so-called "critical" staging as devised and promoted by Bertolt Brecht; principles that are the very antithesis of everything Wagnerian; principles producing stagings calculated to force an audience to think rather than feel during a performance; to adopt an actively critical attitude toward what's being performed onstage before their very eyes. This production set the keynote, as it were, for the post-war, Brecht-influenced German productions meant to counter the hugely successful and essentially Werktreue New Bayreuth productions of the Appia-influenced Wieland Wagner in the 1950s and '60s; Brecht-influenced productions such as the 1970 Ring of Ulrich Melchinger, the 1972 Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, and the 1973 Ring of Joachim Herz from which the 1976 Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of the Frenchman Patrice Chéreau took its cue (something of which we were previously unaware).

Thus was born Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater; Regietheater that's today the norm rather than the avant-garde exception.

(We hasten to make clear that the immediately foregoing declaration is ours and NOT that of the book's author Patrick Carnegy who not only holds that Konzept Regietheater is a perfectly legitimate enterprise but actually applauds its practice.)

For those with a more than passing interest in the staging of Wagner's operas and music-dramas we warmly recommend Wagner and the Art of the Theatre for its informed historical survey of the high points of that staging's development from its beginnings up through 1976 and a small bit beyond. We think you'll find the time spent reading its 400 easy-reading pages time well spent.

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

The excellent Wagner-dedicated website The Wagnerian has up a chapter excerpt from author David Littlejohn's 1992 book The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera titled "Whatever Became of the Breastplates?" that comments in brief on stagings of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from Wagner's own staging at Bayreuth in 1876 down to the present day (or rather, the present day as of 1992). For Ring newcomers especially (but by no means exclusively) the chapter makes for most interesting reading and closes with the following thought, even more salient today than when it was written:

Chaos, as Wagner himself sometimes suggested, is likely to be the rule, rather than the exception, in our world (and in productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen that try to reflect or comment on that world) until another cruel divine order emerges to force things back into unity. Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of Eastern European communism are surely on the drafting boards already, now that Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of capitalism and fascism are becoming routine. Be grateful if you have the opportunity to see a contemporary Ring that is as compelling to look at as it is to listen to; thoughtfully (not narrowly or spitefully) of our time; on the whole generous to Wagner, rather than mean-minded and reductive; one that makes provocative sense, and still seems to grow out of the music, which is (fortunately) larger than all of these postmodern Konzepts put together.

Read the full text here.

Would That It Were Actionable At Law

A sometimes heated skirmish erupted on a venerable online opera forum during the past two weeks concerning the seemingly evergreen subject of "traditional" opera stagings versus Regietheater stagings the skirmish involving all the usual forum suspects on each side of the argument; a skirmish that began with this (relatively) innocent comment by Yours Truly in response to a post by another forum member:

Your list of production failures during Gelb's tenure may all have been ill-conceived or inept productions, and most (but not all) might be legitimately classified as Regietheater, but NONE of those productions could legitimately be classified as Eurotrash (Regietheater and Eurotrash are NOT synonymous terms; all Eurotrash is Regietheater, but not all Regietheater is Eurotrash). One of the remarkable things about Gelb's tenure is that Met audiences have been spared and saved harmless from the contemptible grotesqueries of Eurotrash, a pervasive malignancy that today infects opera stages worldwide. For that, at least, U.S. opera fans and Met operagoers ought to be grateful.

My repeated use of the term "Eurotrash" in this and in my following posts in the skirmish and my contempt for such stagings provoked one forum member to label me a "narrow minded [person] who live[s] in the past" and another to declare me "a psychotic bigot". You know. All the par-for-the-course stuff as these skirmishes go and to be expected.

As a participant in the skirmish, I at one point wrote the following concerning the distinction between Regietheater and Eurotrash:

Any staging where the director in some way or ways reimagines the original creator's vision and concept by, say for simple instance, moving the location and/or time of the action to a different place or period, is, by definition, Regietheater. The director has altered the original creator's instructions regarding those elements and substituted his own for whatever reason; good, bad, or indifferent. Only when the director substitutes his own VISION AND CONCEPT in place of that of the original creator's as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions) does Regietheater descend into the malignancy that we today label Eurotrash, the very worst examples of the type being those where the director's vision and concept are, at bottom, a deconstruction of or critical commentary on the work to hand, a la, say (to use the current Bayreuth examples with which I'm most familiar), the Bayreuth _Parsifal_ of director Stefan Herheim, or the Bayreuth _Meistersinger_ of Katharina Wagner, or the Bayreuth _Lohengrin_ of Hans Neuenfels. These are all out-and-out Eurotrash and Eurotrash of the most malignant sort.

I'd seen detailed written physical descriptions and voluminous production photos of the staging of the Parsifal and had seen the full productions of both the Meistersinger and the Lohengrin as both were streamed live on the Web by the Bayreuther Festspiele and so felt fully confident classifying them all as out-and-out Eurotrash although I confess that confidence was momentarily shaken (but only momentarily) in the case of the Neuenfels Lohengrin when I read with utter dismay and something approaching utter disbelief The New Yorker's Alex Ross declare that staging "an austere, elegant, darkly enchanting piece of theatre" and a "great Wagner performance" that "made a particularly deep impression" on him.

Needless to say, that Eurotrash classification of mine didn't sit well with the Regietheater champions on this forum the chief of these even taking the trouble to give his take on Neuenfels's Konzept for the staging of Lohengrin. The take was quite intelligent, actually, but in making it this champion for Regietheater seemed totally oblivious to the fact that he was making not his case as a champion for Regietheater, but the case for Eurotrash Regietheater's most intransigent enemies among which I number myself. For whatever Neuenfels's staging of Lohengrin may be, there is one thing it most decidedly by any stretch is not: a staging of WAGNER'S Lohengrin. This Lohengrin is not Richard Wagner's Lohengrin but Hans Neuenfels's Lohengrin hijacking Richard Wagner's music and text for its own purpose, and that's a very definition of what it means to be Eurotrash. It also, at very least, makes the promoter and presenter of this production, the Bayreuther Festspiele, guilty of fraud.

Would that it were a class of fraud actionable at law.

Betrayal

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 11:43 PM Eastern on 15 Dec. See below.]

Norman Lebrecht of the blog Slipped Disc points to an article in the Neue Musikzeitung wherein Matthias Jena, the Bavarian trades union (DGB) chairman which union represents the workers at the Bayreuther Festspiele, accuses the current Festspiele management and board of directors of forgetting the history of the Festspiele and the ideals of its founder Richard Wagner by limiting the availability of tickets and pricing them out of the reach of the ordinary German working man. "Today's festival management and board of directors have buried the legacy of Richard Wagner on the Green Hill," said Herr Jena.

Indeed they have, and not just in the matter of tickets. They've betrayed the Festspiele's very raison d'être: to present model performances of its founder's stageworks as he conceived them.

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Update (11:43 PM Eastern on 15 Dec): We've had an interesting — and curious — response to our above entry from a member of one of the opera forums to which we posted a link to the entry. Wrote this member:

Not only has the Festival Management remembered its own history, to judge from the recent 'Parsifal' they are trying to come to terms with it. Whatever you might say about the current crop of productions, they are -- with the exception of the dreadfully dull and dreary 'Tristan' -- boldly innovative. If that is not in accordance with the ideals of the founder of the Festival, then I do not know what is.

To which our response was:

"Boldly innovative"(!)? Is that what you call the current _Parsifal_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_?

Well, I'll allow they may indeed be innovative, but they're not, by any stretch, *Wagner's* operas and music-dramas. What they are are Herheim's _Parsifal_, Baumgarten's _Tannhäuser_, and Neuenfels's _Lohengrin_, all using Wagner's hijacked music and text. From what we know of Wagner, do you imagine he would have sanctioned *any* of these using his name, never mind his music and text, were he able today to voice his feelings, not to even speak of considering them in accordance with his ideals?

Well, the question is, of course, moot. But from everything we know of Wagner and his ideals (which is considerable), far from sanctioning these grotesque Eurotrash outrages he'd be more than likely to reach for the most damaging weapon at his disposal, his pen, and give these self-involved, self-serving, self-indulgent vandals and hijackers the thrashing of their lives.

An Offer You Can't Refuse

Over the years, we've had occasion to comment on the justly celebrated 1953 Bayreuther Festspiele Ring conducted by the justly celebrated Wagner conductor Clemens Krauss calling it perhaps the greatest Ring of which we've recorded evidence. We've said (and say) this even though the recording was done in mono and our decade-old Gala Records CD pressing suffers from a transfer that muddies and blurs much of the orchestral sound, and even though the original miking presents the singers (perhaps, in toto, the most stellar cast ever assembled for this epic work including Hotter, Varnay, Resnik, Vinay, Windgassen, Greindl, Neidlinger, Stolze, and Kuen, all in their prime) on top and up front with the orchestra under as if it were merely accompaniment as would be appropriate for most Italian opera but is grossly inapposite, even perverse, for Wagnerian music-drama.

Since we purchased our Gala pressing of this performance a couple other small-record labels of which we're aware have come up with remastered pressings of their own and, from what we've heard of them, they're somewhat better than our Gala pressing but a bit pricey and so we declined to lay out the bucks (always in short supply around here these days).

A few months ago, we received an eMail from one William Hong, an engineer and devoted Wagnerian and one of S&F's longtime readers, informing us that, as a labor of love, he was in the process of working on a remastering of the Krauss Ring of his own and asking us whether we would be interested in hearing the results when it was completed. We assured Mr. Hong we would and to please notify us when the files would be available for download.

That notification came last week and we forthwith downloaded the four 320kbps MP3 .zip files (one .zip file per music-drama), and spent some few hours listening through the entire cycle and were blown away. The remastering is first-rate — a HUGE improvement over our Gala pressing in every respect. We asked Mr. Hong whether he had any intention of marketing the set commercially and were informed he had no such intention but would gladly make the set available at no cost to all who wanted a copy for their personal use. He also informed us that he also had available CD-length file formats suitable for burning for those who would prefer to have the cycle on CD.

So, if you're interested in obtaining a copy of this laudable remastering of the Krauss '53 Bayreuth Ring for your own use you may contact Mr. Hong to obtain the links to the files by eMailing him at notungschwert@aol.com and requesting same.

It's an offer you can't (or, rather, shouldn't) refuse.

Trust us.

The Bayreuther Festspiele "Rat" Lohengrin Streams Live Today

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 7:57 PM Eastern on 15 Aug. See below.]

The Bayreuther Festspiele is streaming live on the Web its Hans Neuenfels Eurotrash staging of Lohengrin today. Ticket price: about $21 US. No, we haven't seen this staging nor do we intend forking over some $21 for the privilege of doing so but would back with our last bippy our judgment — a judgment based ultimately on a detailed description of the physical staging along with numerous production photos — that it's Eurotrash (see this July 2010 S&F entry for our commentary on this staging). If, unlike us, you've a taste for such things, the stream goes online at 9:45 AM Eastern, and curtain-up is 10:00 AM.

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Update (11:05 AM Eastern on 15 Aug): Missed the live webcast did you? Here's the whole thing, albeit in serial videos.

Lord preserve us!

Update 2 (7:57 PM Eastern on 15 Aug): Someone on a venerable opera forum in which we participate felt compelled to express the following about this staging:

Does the concept of the transformation of the citizens and knights of Brabant into rodents work on a symbolic and theoretical level? Was the use of rats as a topos for this production carefully considered by Neuenfels and costume designer Reinhard von der Thannen, or was it merely a clever almost adolescent attention-getting device guaranteed to foment controversy and therefore become memorable?

Rats? What points of reference might the opera-goer have for these creatures? What allusions might the rats evoke in his mind? Robert Browning's 'Pied Piper'? Camus' absurdist novel _The Plague_? Lovecraft famous horror story 'Rats in the Walls'?--all with of images of revulsion and repugnance? One has to wonder if Neuenfels, van der Thannen, and conceptual collaborator Susanne Øglænd were not aware of the iconic images of rats in Fritz Hippler's jarring film 'Der Ewige Jude' and their profound connotations.

Are the rats merely a clever bit of novelty in a sometimes tired opera? Is the symbolism just a bit too transparent? Or is Neuenfels in fact forcing us to re-examine the opera in an entirely innovative way through his use of the [Brechtian] technique of 'defamiliarization'?

To which our response was:

That's all entirely beside the point.

No matter what the answers to your several rhetorical questions, the fact remains that Neuenfels's rats and Konzept have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with *Wagner's* Konzept and his opera _Lohengrin_ except, perhaps, as a commentary on or deconstruction of that Konzept and that opera, and that makes Neuenfels's Konzept and its staging a virtual definition of what it means to be Eurotrash — Eurotrash of the most contemptible and loathsome sort.

And *that's* the point.

And indeed it is.

2011 Bayreuther Festspiele Tannhäuser

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jul. See below.]

The 2011 Bayreuther Festspiele opened yesterday with a new production of Tannhäuser by Brechtian Regie Sebastian Baumgarten.

And what was the Konzept underlying this Regietheater Tannhäuser? Why, ecology, of course. Got to make this fussy old German Romantic opera "relevant", y'know. And what did this "relevant" Tannhäuser look like? Here's Bloomberg's Catherine Hickley:

[Baumgarten's] staging transposes Wartburg castle to an organic waste recycling plant and features a pregnant Venus living in a cage with giant tadpoles and furry, ape-like nymphs. The recycling-plant set, designed by Joep van Lieshout, remains largely unchanged through the opera’s three acts. It comprises a big green tank of nutrition (we’re told it’s a celery product), a blue tank of biogas (made from human excrement) and a long red storage cylinder of alcohol (distilled celery juice.) The program notes contain a detailed diagram explaining how this represents the full energy cycle from food and alcohol, through digestion and waste back to gas and energy.

Sounds like the proper setting for Eurotrash.

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Update (2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jul): The three-act set (yes, the graphics are part of the set):

Director Chosen For The Bayreuth Bicentennial Ring

Katharina Wagner, co-director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, confirmed her choice of director for the Festspiele's 2013 bicentennial production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen today, 2013 being the bicentennial of Wagner's birth.

And who might that director be? Frank Castorf. And who might Frank Castorf be? A German theater director who, since the early '90s, is also the artistic director of Berlin's Volksbühne theater, Germany's second largest state-owned theater, that's who. And just what sort of director might Herr Castorf be? This from The New York Times, c. 2007:

Under his direction, actors ignored huge portions of the classical texts they performed, stripped naked, screamed their lines for the duration of five-hour productions, got drunk onstage, dropped out of character, conducted private fights, tossed paint at their public, saw a third of the audience walk out as they spoke two lines at an excruciatingly slow pace, may or may not have induced a theatergoer to drink urine, threw potato salad, immersed themselves in water, recited newspaper reports of Hitler’s last peacetime birthday party, told bad jokes, called the audience East German sellouts and appeared to but did not kill a mouse [onstage].

Yes indeed. Herr Castorf sounds just about right as Katharina's choice.

And the beat goes on and the hits just keep on comin'.

Mark Twain At Bayreuth

We've been to Bayreuth only once (a guest of one of our father's business associates): in the late '50s where we saw part of the Wieland Ring (his original staging). We really couldn't appreciate what we were seeing then as at that time in our life we thought Wagner a vulgarian, his operas (that's what we called all his stageworks at that time making no distinction between his operas and his music-dramas) even more contemptible than Italian opera. From that experience we can attest to the following by Mark Twain (c. 1891), perhaps the most perfect, the most poetic description we've ever read of the experience of the "old" Bayreuth (i.e., "old" as opposed to the Bayreuth of the 21st century):

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time — the best preparation for music, spectacle, or speech conceivable.

[...]

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

[...]

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde." I have seen all sorts of audiences — at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals — but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention, absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.

[...]

This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven. But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.

Bayreuth, Take Note

Since forever, the bare-bones seats of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus have been both a source of perverse pride and a test of audience endurance. It needn't be either. Time for a rethink and a redoing.

Bayreuth, take note.

Nazi, Schmazi. His Heart Is In The Right Place.

Filmmaker Lars von Trier may be a self-described Nazi if only in (tasteless) jest, but his directorial heart and thinking are very much in the right place on the question of staging opera. Here is von Trier's thinking on the matter as it relates to his self-aborted attempt to stage Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for the 2006 Bayreuther Festspiele which thinking will sound more than just a little familiar to regular readers of S&F:

Siegfried, Wotan, Fafner, Brünnhilde and the rest of them are real and alive and inhabit a real world. First and foremost they are NOT symbols or illustrations or decorations or abstractions. They all have their psychologies, and via them the conflicts and thereby the empathy and emotions of the audience arise.

[...]

It may be fine to make Wagner’s amazingly human Gods populate English industrialism or the Third Reich, but it doesn’t improve things. We don’t need parallels! Actually, parallels are directly confusing! Leave parallels and interpretations to the audience! As the recently deceased opera buff Gerhard Schepelern so persistently reminded me, “The director must not try to be cleverer than the work!” No, he must be the servant of the original intentions he finds in the words and music, and the harder the task, the more persistent he must be. If Fafner is meant to inspire terror, the director is firmly obliged to apply all his abilities to invoking terror. If Siegfried is a hero (however psychologically complicated) he must be presented as such, no matter how unfashionable, ungrateful and politically incorrect it may seem. If the Ring contained and contains humour, it is this humour that the production must bring out and not the prejudiced wit of a casual director.

If we want Wagner, we want Wagner. And that’s that. Anything else is pusillanimous.

Indeed.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to Opera-L member Rich Lowenthal for the link.)

Lucky Thing

In 2001 the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier was engaged by Wolfgang Wagner to stage the Bayreuther Festspiele's 2006 presentation of Der Ring des Nibelungen. In 2004 von Trier bolted the engagement declaring that the Ring "exceed[ed] his powers" and that he felt incompetent to fulfill his obligation.

Turns out, lucky thing for the Festspiele. Witnesseth this latest from von Trier:

RTWT here.

Can you imagine the inevitable reverberations had von Trier actually fulfilled his engagement at the Festspiele?

Built By Amphion's Lyre

That Richard Wagner as a composer of opera was a consummate genius is something that for over a century is beyond all dispute and debate except by those of the lunatic fringe who have perpetual and ignorant objection to Wagner on other grounds. Not so well known is that by all the best firsthand accounts, Wagner was a consummate genius as an actor and stage director as well. And I think we have to add yet another consummate genius award to Wagner: as a designer of opera houses the Bayreuther Festspielhaus being eloquent testimony to that genius as the governing design concept of the building was Wagner's own. Here's Wagner himself on the Festspielhaus as it began to be built:

To explain the plan of the festival theatre now being built in Bayreuth, I believe that I cannot do better than begin with the need I felt first, namely, that of rendering invisible the technical hearth of the music: the orchestra. For this one constraint led step by step to the total redesigning of the auditorium of our neo-European theatre. Those of my readers who are familiar with some of my earlier writings will already know my thoughts on the concealment of the orchestra, and I hope that even if they had not already felt this for themselves, a subsequent visit to the opera will have convinced them of the rightness of my feeling that the constant and, indeed, insistent sight of the technical apparatus needed to produce the sound constitutes a most tiresome distraction. In my essay on Beethoven [Beethoven, 1870] I was able to explain how at thrilling performances of ideal works of music we may ultimately cease to notice this reprehensible evil as a result of the force with which all our senses are retuned, resulting, as it were, in a kind of neutralization of our sense of sight. With a stage performance, by contrast, it is a question of attuning our sense of sight to precisely apprehending an image, which can be done only by distracting it completely and by preventing it from noticing any reality than lies in between, such reality including the technical apparatus needed to produce the image in the first place.

Gee, What A Surprise

Were you thinking of adding the just released DVD of the (relatively) new Bayreuther Festspiele Die Meistersinger to your collection for whatever reason?

Best read this first:

Gee, what a surprise.

On the other hand, if you want a ready-to-hand reminder and warning of the artistic lows to which the 21st-century Bayreuther Festspiele has descended and is likely to maintain under the stewardship of the sisters Wagner, both of whom think this sort of Konzept staging is the bee's knees and the Staging Of The Future, then perhaps this DVD is worth your acquiring.

We can hardly wait for the release of the DVD of the new Hans Neuenfels 2010 Bayreuther Festspiele Lohengrin (aka, the "Rat Lohengrin").

Is She, Or Isn't She?

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 7:30 PM Eastern on 6 Oct. See below.]

This story broke late yesterday, and spread rapidly throughout the MSM worldwide:

Israeli Orchestra Breaks Boycott To Perform At 2011 Bayreuth Festival

The Israel Chamber Orchestra is set to become the country's first ensemble to perform at the annual Bayreuth Festival, a month-long event showcasing the operas of Richard Wagner.

The decision, announced Tuesday, goes against a long-time tradition in Israel of not performing works by Wagner, who was a vocal anti-Semite and whose writings later influenced Adolf Hitler.

"The decision was not to break a taboo," Erella Talmi, chairwoman of the orchestra's board of directors, told Israeli Defense Forces Radio on Tuesday. "The decision was to accept an invitation that showed a new openness."

Katharina Wagner, co-director of the festival and great-granddaughter of the composer, had extended the invitation to the Israel Chamber Orchestra in an effort to stir up what has for decades been an elitist event. [Deutsche Welle]

Today comes this lone report from Israel's major daily, Haaretz:

Wagner's Great-Granddaughter Cancels Israel Trip Week Before Arrival

The great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, Katharina Wagner, has canceled a visit to Israel next week, fearing criticism in Israel and abroad. Katharina Wagner is the head of the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, which was founded by the composer in 1876.

[...]

Katharina Wagner's visit to Israel has been kept secret for the past year, and tensions surrounding the trip have been high. Wagner had planned to call a press conference on October 13, during which she was to extend an invitation to the Israel Chamber Orchestra to open the Wagner festival next July. She had planned to precede the announcement of the invitation with comments from German Chancellor Angela Merkel in honor of the occasion.

Reports of the visit, however, were leaked in the Israeli press, and soon reached the media in Germany, Austria and around the world. Reactions to the news were mixed: Austrian newspaper Der Standard quoted Israeli journalist and Holocaust survivor Noah Klinger as saying that such a step would be seen as "capitulation" after years of boycotting Wagner's work.

In light of the leaks regarding the invitation, the organizers of the festival held an emergency meeting in Bayreuth on Tuesday night, during which the decision was taken to cancel Wagner's visit to Israel; it seems unlikely that this decision will be reversed, barring a last-minute development.

So, is Katharina going to Israel to extend the invitation or not?

Stay tuned.

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Update (7:30 PM Eastern on 6 Oct): Music journalist Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times sets matters straight. Katharina had planned to go to Israel to make announcement of the concert, but now will not. The concert, however, will be presented as planned — not at the Bayreuther Festspiele as originally reported, but in Bayreuth’s town hall which, Mr. Wakin reports, was its planned venue from the very beginning.

RTWT here.