[Note: This post has been edited as of 5:20 PM Eastern on 31 May to add a previously and inadvertently omitted footnote. See below.]
It's once again that time of year when the thoughts of Wagnerians worldwide turn toward Bayreuth and the annual Bayreuther Festspiele which this year opens on 25 July with a new production of Die Meistersinger directed by Wagner great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner, daughter of Wagner grandson and present Festspielleiter (general manager) of the Festival, 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner, in her debut production for the Festival.
It's now widely assumed, and is in fact an almost certainty, that Katharina will succeed her father as Festspielleiter of the Festival,* and in artistic terms that bodes nothing but ill for Wagner's works and for the Festival itself as Katharina is a devout and avid Regietheater adherent and the perpetrator of several prior Eurotrash productions of her great-grandfather's works in other theaters, one of which we commented on at some length here.
Regular readers of this blog know in what utter contempt I hold such productions. But not every Regietheater production is Eurotrash as witness, for stellar instance, Wieland Wagner's now (justly) legendary Konzept productions of Parsifal and Der Ring des Nibelungen for the 1951 through 1958 Bayreuther Festspiele (the Ring of the latter of which years I witnessed at firsthand). I in fact welcome such dramatically and aesthetically true-to-the-spirit-of-the-original re-imaginings of the stagings of these and other of Wagner's works. But given that, unique among all the great operas, Wagner's operas are in all their aspects the work of a single creator, there ought to be model benchmark stagings of those works staged just as Wagner envisioned them originally so that those, today and in the future, who've never had the experience of witnessing them be given the opportunity to do so which in fact was among the principal reasons Wagner established the Bayreuther Festspiele. In addition, those who have witnessed such stagings would then forever possess an authoritative point of reference from which to make informed assessments of alternate stagings of these operas.
Today, alas, such benchmark stagings are all but nonexistent. Even the conservative Met's new production of the Ring due in 2010 will be a Konzept production, its now decades-old and not-so-great "traditional" production finally being chucked into the dustbin of operatic history into which, I suppose, it ought to have been chucked some years ago. But, as an institution, the Bayreuther Festspiele has a special obligation to such "traditional" productions; an obligation it has singularly failed to fulfill since the Festival's resurrection after World War II.**
It's easy enough for someone such as myself to sit in front of a computer terminal and type out such snarky critical remarks as those above, and self-publish them on this blog for all the world to read. But what if, by some prodigious feat of necromancy, I received a call from the Bayreuther Festspiele telling me that, if it were my pleasure, I'd be given full, unassailable, and un-meddled-with control of the Festival with all its resources intact, and with full financial backing available to me for anything I chose to do? If I deigned to accept that offer, just what would I do, and how would I go about defining or redefining the Festival's mission, and in what direction would I take it for the future?
Well, I've actually given that extravagant fantasy some serious, soul-searching thought, and the answer is I would, first, reestablish the original mission of the Festival; reestablish its mandate and its very raison d'être: viz., to produce model performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and, additionally, of the entire Wagner canon for the elucidation of opera houses and opera audiences worldwide.
But just what, exactly, does that mean, and what would it entail?
My answer to that question is fairly straightforward, and not nearly as expensive as it might appear on first reading, although it wouldn't be cheap. And that is to produce each Festival year two musically and dramatically exemplary productions of each work given that Festival year using the same cast, conductor, and musical forces for each of the two productions, each production to run in its own alternate cycle, each cycle repeated, say, three times during each Festival year: a cycle of the works given that Festival year staged in strict accordance with Wagner's original stage directions, the productions never changing from Festival year to Festival year except for minor touchups here and there, and insofar as new technical means became available to make more convincing or aesthetically pleasing the naturalistic inscenation envisioned by Wagner; and a cycle of the works given that Festival year staged giving full license and free reign to current-day re-imaginings of the staging of the works, but re-imaginings done in compliance with the A.C. Douglas Prime Directive:
Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically effective translation of the score of the opera into its concrete physical form on the stage so long as what thou doest is at every point consonant with the score — text and music — and contradicts or diverges from it at none,
the productions presented in this cycle changing completely after every fourth or fifth Festival outing or thereabouts as is the current practice.
In this way, and this way alone, can the Festival 1) fulfill its obligation — its mandate and raison d'être — to present as inalterable benchmarks model stagings of the works as Wagner himself envisioned them originally using the very latest and very best technical means available to realize that vision on the stage, and 2) establish its (the Festival's) relevance (you should pardon the term) to the present and for the future by presenting re-imagined Konzept stagings of the works that give voice to and realize on stage the most imaginative current-day interpretations and understandings of the manifold timeless and universal layers of meaning contained within each of these deathless works of art.
Is such a program for the Bayreuther Festspiele an opium-laced, Wagnerian pipe dream? Or is it just flat-out loony.
Not a bit of it. It's entirely practical if initially (underline, initially) a bit expensive, and requires only the will and money to do it.
Would such a program be a moneymaker? I'd bet, giving odds, it would, with the "traditional" cycle booked even more years in advance than the Konzept cycle. Would the institution of such a program initially raise outraged howls of protest from practically all quarters? But of course. This is the Bayreuther Festspiele, after all. But as enlightened a program for the Bayreuther Festspiele as I think such a program would be, I won't be awaiting with bated breath my call to service.
* This apparent done deal may very well be upset or mooted by the authority known as the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth the eight-member board of which by a 1973 agreement holds the ultimate power to name the Bayreuther Festspiele's Festspielleiter the selection of which, if no member of the Wagner family is considered suitable by the board, is to be made by a board-appointed three-person commission drawn from among the directors of Germany's leading opera houses. Hope springs eternal.
** The disastrous Peter Hall-Georg Solti 1983 Bayreuth Ring is an exception. But it was so badly thought out, mishandled, and mismanaged on every front that it were better had it never been attempted.