Sounds & Fury

Bayreuth Goes Video-Live On The Web

For the first time in its history, the Bayreuther Festspiele will, on 27 July, stream on the Web a live video feed of this year's opening performance of its production of Die Meistersinger with Konzept and direction by Katharina Wagner. But there's a catch. A $77 catch to be more precise. That's what it'll cost you to view the feed. Notice, please, we said, "cost you". Given our knowledge of that Eurotrash production, we'll be taking a pass on the opportunity.

Details on the live video streaming of Die Meistersinger can be read here.

His Last Bow

Wolfgang Wagner, 88-year-old director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, has, after 57 years, the first 15 of those years in partnership with his brother, Wieland, (finally) tendered his resignation as Festspiele director effective 31 August reports Bloomberg News:

Wolfgang Wagner, the 88-year-old director of the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth and grandson of the composer, announced he is stepping down from his post after 57 years, ending an impasse over the festival leadership.

His successor hasn't yet been appointed and it is now up to the Wagner family* to agree on who should take over the 132-year- old festival, Thomas Goppel, the Bavarian minister for science, research and art, told reporters in Bayreuth.

[...]

"This wasn't an easy decision," said Stefan Mueller, Wolfgang Wagner's lawyer. "But once it was clear that his two daughters were willing to team up, he thought it was time to leave. Mr. Wagner is convinced that this would be the soundest solution and he thinks it will go through."

Wagner's resignation takes effect on Aug 31. The 13 family members* have until then to come to an agreement on who should take over, Goppel said.

Next up: And the successor(s) is...

Stay tuned.

* Actually, it's not up to the Wagner family, but the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth, the Festspiele's governing board, to choose Wolfgang's successor.

The Soap Opera Takes A New Turn

Here's a development few expected would, without third-party arm-twisting or intervention, ever come about. Reports Top News:

Wolfgang Wagner, 88, the chief for life of Germany's Wagnerian opera festival in Bayreuth, has offered to step down if his two formerly feuding daughters take over the job, a spokesman said Friday.

[...]

Peter Emmerich, Bayreuth Festival spokesman, confirmed Friday to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the elder Wagner had hinted he might retire and that the two daughters could jointly step into his place.

Emmerich said Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier had realised they could work together if the circumstances were right.

The Bayreuth Festival's trust board, which runs the government-subsidized event and formally employs Wagner, is to meet April 29 and the sisters are expected to outline their succession plan then.

And PR Inside adds:

Wolfgang Wagner wrote in a personal letter to donors dated April 8 that he was prepared to support his daughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier as part of a group to succeed him, Germany's 3sat television reported, citing unidentified sources from the foundation that oversees the festival.

It was the first time Wagner had indicated he would support Wagner-Pasquier, 62 — an experienced manager of artistic and musical events who enjoys the support of the foundation — as part of the leadership. The team could also include non-family professionals such as star German conductor Christian Thielemann and cultural manager Peter Ruzicka, Wagner suggested, according to the report.

As ever, the soap opera continues.

Stay tuned.

Kin Beneath The Skin?

You'd never so much as even suspect it, we'd guess, but Samuel Beckett and Richard Wagner really were, in some respects at least, aesthetic kin beneath the skin. Or so playwright, Guardian theater columnist, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux posits.

On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays – often quiet, approaching silence – that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner.... But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers ... there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an anthology of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

Mr. Hunka has lots more to say on this, and while we're not familiar with Beckett's full oeuvre, we are familiar with Godot, and although we confess we never saw any parallels between that extraordinary play and Tristan, a work with which we're intimately familiar, Mr. Hunka has persuaded us that, in some respects at least, they do indeed exist.

We suggest you read this excellent piece and judge for yourselves.

The Shot Heard Round The (Opera) World

We speak, of course, of Peter Gelb’s innovative stratagems for promoting opera to a wider, more diverse public. The sound of that shot has now reached and penetrated even the hallowed halls of the insular, tradition-bound Bayreuther Festspiele.

The Bayreuth Festival intends to break new ground this year with the live broadcast of an opera to a public viewing area, organizers said Wednesday. The move would fulfill the dream of festival founder Richard Wagner, who wanted to open up the world-famous event to as many opera lovers as possible, festival spokesman Peter Emmerich said.

Emmerich left open which performance would be chosen for the live broadcast from the festival hall to a public area in the centre of the Bavarian town.

RTWT here.

Well Whadayaknow

A culture commentator who gets all his Wagner facts and commentary straight. New York Times culture commentator, Alan Riding, in his New York Times Sunday Book Review review of Jonathan Carr’s new book, The Wagner Clan, writes:

Is this how Richard Wagner should be judged: by his stormy life and by the oft abhorrent behavior of his family? Not in the view of true devotees of his music — and they are legion. Every summer, the lucky few with hard-to-get tickets traipse to Bayreuth in Bavaria for the opera festival that Wagner himself created in 1876. They enter the shrine of the Festspielhaus. They visit the composer’s grave. They are even welcomed by his octogenarian grandson, Wolfgang.

On the other hand, how can one ignore that this artist’s stirring music and anti-Semitic views were warmly embraced by Hitler, and that Wagner’s family identified his music with a Nazi regime that even the composer might have opposed?

[...]

Still, in Carr’s view, the past cannot be buried until the Wagner family admits it “made a terrible mistake.” Yet Wagner’s operas remain immensely popular, despite the sins of his family. And perhaps here lies the only shortcoming of “The Wagner Clan.” Carr has not tackled just what makes Wagner’s music so intoxicatingly dangerous. After all, without the music, the Wagners would have been just another family.

RTWT here.

Uh-Oh

The plot of the soap opera that is the Wagner family and the succession of the directorship of the Bayreuther Festspiele takes another jarring — and completely unexpected — turn:

Gudrun Wagner, wife of Bayreuth Opera Festival director Wolfgang Wagner and a key partner in helping him stage the annual event, died Wednesday, officials said. She was 63.

She died Wednesday morning at a Bayreuth hospital. No cause of death was immediately given, said Peter Emmerich, a spokesman for the festival.

"It is with deep emotion and with silent grief that I must convey that this morning my loving wife and close co-worker Gudrun Wagner died fully unexpectedly," Wolfgang Wagner said in a statement.

We suspect this event will force the board of the Festspiele to quickly make some tough decisions it was hoping it might be able to put off till a more opportune time presented itself.

RTWT here.

Unmitigated Chutzpah

The unmitigated chutzpah of this avant-garde, Eurotrash charlatan is simply beyond belief.

In a recent interview in the German edition of Vanity Fair, the director-cum-artist Christoph Schlingensief has expressed an interest in heading the prestigious Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. But as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, the controversial Schlingensief does not want to take the position alone. "Why shouldn't Bayreuth be taken over by a team of artists?" Schlingensief asked. "Why shouldn't I apply [for the position as festival director] with Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy or Doug Aitken?"

For Schlingensief, Barney, McCarthy, and Aitken are the dominant American media and performance artists. Schlingensief — who directed Wagner's Parsifal at the festival in 2004 to mixed audience reactions — is critical of the fact that only members of the Wagner family have applied to take over from outgoing director Wolfgang Wagner. "I link Wagner with life," Schlingensief said. "Bayreuth needs contact with life, that's all. And life is not always commensurable with the Wagners."

Nor with the Schlingensiefs of this world.

Presumptuous, contemptible little cretin.

(The above news item taken from Artforum International Magazine.)

About That Getting-The-Facts-Right Competence Of MSM Journalists Thing

The following grafs, representing more than half of a news story written by one Tony Paterson for the Brit The Independent, are so loaded with half-truth and outright error (and in one graf, gratuitous and invidious innuendo) that it can only be the work either of a total incompetent, or of someone who was pulled from a news desk having nothing to do with classical music to cover the story, and who did his background “research” in a Facebook or MySpace chat room.

The grafs in question follow with the misinformation italicized by me. All Square-bracketed comments are mine.

• A bitter and invariably operatic feud that has divided the family of the German composer Richard Wagner for more than a decade neared its denouement yesterday when three female descendants of the maestro [great-granddaughters Katharina Wagner, Nike Wagner, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier] staked rival claims in a battle to become his artistic successor. [Those claims were staked months ago in the case of Katharina, and years ago in the case of Nike and Eva if the latter two can even be said to have “staked a claim”.]

• Wolfgang Wagner, Richard's 88-year-old grandson and director of the home of Wagner opera — Germany's famous Bayreuth music festival [sic!] — has claimed the role as the composer's rightful heir since he took over the post 40 years ago. [Wolfgang never made such a claim. The role passed to him on the death of his brother and co-director, Wieland, to both of whom the role was passed down from their grandmother, Cosima, wife of Richard, through their father Siegfried, Richard Wagner’s son, and mother Winifred.]

• Members of the powerful Richard Wagner Foundation [Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth], which is partly run by the German government and controls the Bayreuth Festival, were holding a closed meeting in the Bavarian city yesterday to decide on the financially troubled event's future. [The Bayreuth Festival is not now nor has it for the last almost half-century been “financially troubled.”]

• In advance of the meeting, Karl Gerhard Schmidt, the foundation's chairman, took the unprecedented step of calling for Wolfgang's resignation as soon as possible, saying that because of his deteriorating health, the festival was de facto "without a director". [Karl Gerhard Schmidt is the chairman of the Society of Bayreuth Friends, not chairman of the Stiftung.]

• Katharina, who likes wearing black and sports a suitably Teutonic blonde mane, has been groomed for the post by her parents for decades. This year, she made an important debut at the festival, directing Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg [sic], a classically German opera that was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler. [As Katharina is only 29 it’s rather a bit much to say she’s been “groomed for the post by her parents for decades”; Die Meistersinger is hardly “a classically German opera”; and the fact that Katharina is blonde is neither “suitably Teutonic” nor pertinent. Ditto in spades that Die Meistersinger “was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler.”]

• Yet here the complications also abound, for Eva and Nike have been at loggerheads with Wolfgang for over a decade. [They’ve “been at loggerheads” for almost four decades.]

• Katharina insists she is "very well qualified for the job". She took steps to strengthen her position by enlisting the support of prominent conductors and composers. [Katharina enlisted the help of but a single conductor — Thielemann — and no composers, “prominent” or otherwise, of which anyone’s publicly aware.]

• Of the three rivals for the post, only Nike has argued in favour of liberating the festival from the "dictatorship of the [Wagner] gene". But the foundation is obliged by its statutes to give the job to Wagner family members. [The Stiftung is under no such obligation. It’s obliged to offer the position to a Wagner family member only if it considers that family member to be the best choice for the position. It’s otherwise free to look elsewhere.]

So much for the getting-the-facts-right competence of MSM journalists over us loose-cannon bloggers. This grossly ill-informed piece would be a genuine embarrassment for even a local rag. How much more so for a national daily such as The Independent.

Push Is Fast Coming To Shove — Or So It Seems

If this report is accurate, Wolfgang Wagner’s days as head of the Bayreuther Festspiele are fast coming to an end whether he agrees to step down or not. All factions that make up the governing board of the Festspiele (Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth) are pressuring the old boy (he’s 88) to voluntarily resign his lifetime appointment, and make way for new blood even if that new blood is not that of his chosen heir, Katharina Wagner, his 29-year-old daughter with his second wife, Gudrun.

Germany’s cultural power-brokers yesterday piled the pressure on the 88-year-old grandson of Richard Wagner in the hope of persuading him to step down from the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, one of the world’s greatest musical events.

The man at the centre of the storm is Wolfgang Wagner, who has run the festival since 1966. Since the death of the composer the festival, on the so-called “Green Hill” of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, has been managed by a member of the clan.

Mr. Wagner, frail and confused, refuses to surrender the post unless it goes to his 29-year-old daughter, Katharina. The politicians and businessmen who make up the majority of the Bayreuth Foundation, which supervises the festival, begged to differ at a crisis meeting yesterday. Mr. Wagner decided not to attend the meeting and let his lawyer fight his corner in an often passionate and irritable debate.

Although they kept the old man in place — the statutes give him the job for life unless it can be proved that he has lost his faculties — the board called on all contenders to prepare their concepts for the future of the festival. Clearly the intention is to hold a beauty contest and line up a successor whether Mr. Wagner approves or not.

RTWT here.