Sounds & Fury

Board Of The Ring

There's little call and no demand for a new online discussion board devoted to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, much less one devoted to a single work, Der Ring des Nibelungen. That notwithstanding, with the impending opening of an eagerly (some would say anxiously) awaited major new production of the cycle by Robert Lepage for the Metropolitan Opera the premiere of the first installment of which, Das Rheingold, will be presented on 27 September, and the premiere of the second installment, Die Walküre, scheduled to be presented seven months later on 22 April of next year, it occurred to us that Ring aficionados might find useful a central location to discuss the work and this new Met/Lepage production. Toward that end we've just set up a new online discussion board, Board Of The Ring, for that very purpose. It can be accessed at the following URL:

http://boardofthering.freeforums.org/

We invite all interested parties to visit Board Of The Ring, register (registration is free, fast, and painless), and contribute their thoughts (or questions) on both Der Ring des Nibelungen and the new Met/Lepage production.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Disheartening, Not To Say Perverse

[Note: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug. See below.]

After reading numerous verbal descriptions and viewing numerous production photos of the new Eurotrash production of Lohengrin at this year's Bayreuther Festspiele — the sometimes-called "Rat Lohengrin" due its costuming of the chorus in rat costumes complete with full rat-head and rat-face masks — we felt it time to say goodbye to the 134-year-old Festspiele. As we then wrote:

[I]t's been a long and checkered career for the Bayreuther Festspiele, both artistically and otherwise, since its establishment in 1876 and today the oldest music festival extant, and perhaps it's now time to remember fondly its past days of artistic excellence and glory, and bid a final farewell. After all, nothing lasts forever.

Among our reasons for bidding the Festspiele farewell was our conviction that,

[T]he new co-directors of the Festspiele — Wolfgang Wagner's two daughters, Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier — are not only little inclined to satisfy the demands of that...requirement [viz., the disavowing of Eurotrash Regietheater stagings], but seem intransigently committed to flying in the face of that requirement, as was their father before them, in the false and perverse belief that it is just such stagings that will guarantee the future outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Festspiele.

As if to confirm that conviction, we today read the following reports from two European news sources concerning the late Christoph Schlingensief, perpetrator of perhaps the most Eurotrashy piece of Eurotrash to ever sully the stage of the Festspielhaus:

The Richard Wagner opera festival [sic] was winding up on Saturday for this year with a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg [sic] with the festival dedicating the final performance to theatre director Christoph Schlingensief. [...] "Schlingensief has set a lot in motion," opera festival spokesman Peter Emmerich told the German Press Agency dpa. As a result, all the festival employees and performers wanted to pay tribute to him on Saturday. [The Earth Times]

And,

[Schlingensief] fought and won the right to put a dead hare on stage at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, the Richard Wagner opera extravaganza, when he staged Parsifal there in 2004. Although viewed with a mix of praise and disdain, his production was credited with giving the staid festival a much needed lift.

Paying tribute to him this week Katharina Wagner, the festival’s co-director, said, "His Parsifal was a turning point for Bayreuth, from both the interpretational aspect and the way of working. After Schlingensief had been here, everything became more open, more flexible." [The Arts Desk)]

Truly disheartening, not to say perverse.

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Update (1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug): There occurred on a venerable opera forum the following exchange between another member and us in response to our above entry. We quote it here verbatim and without further comment. The other member's two comments have here been italicized, and our response to each posted immediately below each comment.

This seems to me a (not to say perverse) misreading of what amounts to an in memoriam. Nobody involved here is praising the "product" of Schlingensief's "Parsifal" production unreservedly.

The Bayreuther Festspiele gesture as articulated by Emmerich and Katharina was indeed intended as an _in memoriam_ for Schlingensief. And that's *precisely* what made it so perverse as it chose to memorialize a stage director who declared proudly two years after the fact (and therefore no advance avant-garde hype) that it had been his intent with his Bayreuther Festspiele production of _Parsifal_ to "reconcil[e] Nietzsche with Wagner by negating Wagner's silly Buddhist dream."

If it wasn't perverse of the Bayreuther Festspiele to memorialize such a creature, then perverse is a word bereft of any meaning whatsoever.

However, part of the mission of Bayreuth is experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically, and an essential element of the idea of experimentation is [the] concept that one can learn more from a bold failed attempt than one can from a more conservative success.

Yes, part of the Bayreuther Festspiele mission is "experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically," and it's a laudable enterprise. But when the Festspiele chooses to hire Eurotrash vandals and thieves such as Schlingensief and Neuenfels who have NO intention of "present[ing] Wagner theatrically," but whose sole intention is to present their own respective "vision" theatrically by hijacking what Wagner wrote and twisting it to their own purposes, it in no way fulfills the goal of that laudable Festspiele enterprise, but is instead a gross perversion of it, and precisely that which makes (made) their stagings the unmitigated Eurotrash they indisputably are.

Sure Bet

Here is the lede sentence of a Guardian article on Katharina Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival that appeared in the Music section of the paper: "Wotan, father of the gods, has just kissed his daughter, Brünnhilde, to sleep and left her to burn alive." We posted a comment that read: "That's one helluva lede sentence for a Wagner-related piece. Which ignoramus is responsible for that grotesque absurdity? The author [one, Kate Connolly] or her editor — or both?"

Five will get you five-hundred that richly deserved snarky comment — the very first to be submitted on that piece — never sees the light of day.

Christoph Schlingensief Ist Tot

Christoph Schlingensief, notorious among Wagnerians for his grotesque 2004 Bayreuther Festspiele Eurotrash Parsifal, is dead of lung cancer at age 49 according to a report by The Earth Times. We'll refrain from making further comment in conformity with the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

A Response To Philip Kennicott

Were a patient presenting with symptoms of amnesia to submit his case to a neurologist, the diagnosis would almost surely be one that involves some degree of organic brain damage, temporary or permanent, but one for which no corrective surgical or chemical treatment is yet available. Were that same patient to submit his case to a psychoanalyst, the diagnosis would almost surely involve the psychodynamic phenomenon of repression that may or may not be susceptible to correction by an intense and rigorous psychoanalysis.

That sort of specialist diagnostic bias was the very first thing that leapt to mind on reading the article written by Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott published in the September 2010 issue of Opera News titled, "Ring Ideal". Were that article written by anyone other than someone with Mr. Kennicott's professional credentials, we would have simply shrugged our shoulders and shaken our head at the purblind specialist bias displayed in almost every paragraph of the piece, and taken no further note of the matter. We Wagnerians are pretty much inured to biases on the part of non-Wagnerians. But given Mr. Kennicott's credentials, and given as well the opera-world prominence of the publication in which the article appeared, that's not possible in this case, and so the following response.

Mr. Kennicott's thesis that,

Like the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, the Ring cycle exists as if by miracle. But unlike those wonders of the world, the forces that sustain it are entirely ephemeral, subject to the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy. Wagner's Ring could disappear in a matter of years, or decades, if the zeitgeist turned sour,

depends on several premises, most of them dubious at best, and most due Mr. Kennicott's manifest purblind specialist-biased view of the work to hand (be it remembered, please, that Mr. Kennicott is a culture critic, not a critic of classical music and opera even though both come within the purview of his umbrella specialty).

For instance, there are these following notions put forward by Mr. Kennicott who, astonishingly, like any hack writer with a pop understanding of both Wagner and the Ring, considers the Ring "an over-scaled work [that] might have [been] nibbled...down to size a century ago, if Wagner and his minions hadn't so thoroughly intimidated the conductors, impresarios and fans who carried its torch into the future."

According to Mr. Kennicott,

• "There doesn't seem to be a single trend in the cultural ether that bodes well for the long-term endurance of this fifteen-hour work. Today, even respectable novelists strive to comply with the book-club-friendly 300-page limit, and films are toxic at the box office if their directors can't tell a story in less than 100 minutes. Allegory is also out of fashion, perhaps even archaic. Clarity, accessibility and irony define most new aesthetics of storytelling."

• "The nexus of nineteenth-century intellectual passions that give the Ring its overarching coherence have mostly dwindled into dust. Revolution has lost its luster in an age when unified economies bring the world into ever closer though never perfect communion."

• "Wagner's Ring, more than 130 years after its premiere, still benefits from the dutiful largesse that well-trained audiences used to feel in the presence of the avant-garde."

• "[I]s [the Ring] really analogous in its riches to the birth of modern consciousness in Shakespeare or the comprehensive psychological atlas of Proust? [...] Two forces in particular...have kept the Ring alive. There is the reactionary fidelity to Wagner...[and]...the almost equally longstanding willingness of artists to break with that fidelity and reinterpret the work, as if the Ring were always about something else...."

The above notions (and there's one more to follow that arises from the same purblind specialist bias — and it's a doozy — which we'll address momentarily), are all notions that could be held only be someone who 1) hasn't paid proper attention to the Ring, or 2) imagines that the drama of the Ring is made manifest in and transmitted via its text (libretto), or 3) has no comprehension or grasp of what lies below the immediately accessible visible and audible surface of the work, or 4) any combination of the foregoing.

To keep this entry within our self-imposed blog entry word-length limit (a limit it will nevertheless exceed by a bit in any case), we won't here rebut further the above notions point-by-point, but move on to that doozy of a notion we above referred to, for, as if the above notions were not wrongheaded enough, we then have from Mr. Kennicott the monumentally purblind grand notion that,

[T]here is an Achilles heel to the Ring, a weakness that could suddenly deflate the singular and inspiring power it has retained despite all its absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who stage it, sing it and watch it.

Keep your eye on Siegfried. If the status of Siegfried begins to change for the worse, the whole Ring could come crashing down with him. He is the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element. For decades (especially since World War II), he's been both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes. As long as we can suspend judgment about the character of Siegfried, the Ring can go on. But if, in the future, audiences reject him, Götterdämmerung [sic] for the Ring could come at the end of Die Walküre.

It's not just that he's the central figure of well more than half of the Ring cycle, or that everything, musically and dramatically, leads to his birth and death. And it's not only that he embodies the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man — the anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form. Siegfried, the young man who forges, seeks, seduces and betrays, is also Wagner's dramatization of the artist. In Siegfried (and his forebear Tannhäuser), Wagner articulated a vision of artistic license. In Siegfried, the notion that the genius can be forgiven anything is enacted — and it is precisely that code of free conduct that has protected Wagner, and his works, from hostility that would have sunk any ordinary opera. For as long as audiences play the Siegfried game — suspending judgment, loving and hating him, but never banishing him — Wagner's Ring will continue to thrive despite the great tide of forces that oppose it.

[...]

[Siegfried] was supposed to be the great instantiation of freedom, absolute freedom, anarchic and beautiful and capable of bringing down the old corrupt orders. But we live in an age deeply uneasy about the side effects of that freedom, whether manifested in political instability, social disruption or environmental degradation. We must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other, ever more circumscribed in our old liberty to consume at will, move about at will, despoil and destroy at will. Can Siegfried be relevant in the age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism? Does dragon-slaying have any poetic resonance in an era of oil spills that can destroy in a few weeks an entire ecosystem?

The problem child is now the elephant in the room, and it will be hard for Wagner-lovers to continue the old apologia. Siegfried must be reinvented if the Ring is to continue in its old form. Otherwise, he will begin to seem ever more repellent, ever more irrelevant. And the Ring will no longer be sacrosanct and exceptional. It will be merely a product of its time, its characters both familiar and foreign, like the cardboard kings of opera seria and the unhinged hysterics of bel canto. [...] That doesn't mean the Ring will disappear. But it will become what it has always been, despite the mostly successful efforts of its partisans to claim otherwise. It will be an opera, just an opera — a lot longer, but essentially the same as any other.

There are so many things wrong with almost all of that, and almost the entirety of that wrong due a gross (and given the author, just this side of an unbelievable) failure of fundamental understanding, that we hardly know where to begin to demolish it.

Let us begin with this little bit of nonsense.

Mr. Kennicott speaks of "[The Ring's] absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who...watch it."

What "absurdities"? There are none unless, like a philistine, one rejects the entire fictive core and edifice of the work. What "longueurs"? There are none unless one approaches the work as if it were "just an opera [that's] essentially the same as any other," which is indeed an absurdity. And, What "punishing demands on those who watch it"? There are none unless one insists on traversing the work's entire fifteen-or-so hours via DVD at a single sitting, in which case the "punishing demands" are made not on one's attention and involvement, but on one's derriere.

In short, these are all baseless objections that could be hurled at the Ring only by one thoroughly antipathetic to the audacity behind the creation of the tetralogy and what it's fundamentally about which most emphatically is NOT the trials and woes and tragic end of Siegfried, notwithstanding that's what Wagner had intended originally. What it's about are the trials and woes and tragic end of Wotan, Siegfried's grandpapa (it's not for nothing Wagner renamed the final music-drama Götterdämmerung), who is clearly "the cycle's most problematic figure, its most volatile element," and who forever (not merely "for decades (especially since World War II))" has been "both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes," not Siegfried, and who is the central tragic hero of the cycle, even when he's not physically present onstage; the character about which "everything [in the Ring] musically and dramatically" revolves, leading ultimately to his and the world's end. For by the time Wagner's single, three-act, French-style Grand Opera, Siegfrieds Tod, became the four-music-drama cosmic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, Siegfried had become little more than a naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent hotshot, and a mere helpless pawn caught up ineluctably in the prior machinations of Wotan, the Ring's central tragic hero. Anyone who managed to miss that or who has dismissed it, willfully or otherwise, has, as we've above suggested, not been paying proper attention to the work at the very least, or, worse, has taken his understanding of the work from what's been written about it rather than from addressing what's made manifest in the work itself.

Today, as in times past and into the foreseeable future, we readily look with an at least understanding if not altogether admiring eye on the Siegfried of Siegfried. He's dramatically just what we expect and want him to be and we'd be hugely disappointed were he anything other (and I here pass over largely in charitable silence the preposterous notion that anyone other than a PC-contaminated ideologue or an outright Wagner ignoramus would see in Siegfried "the worst political and personal traits that bedevil Wagner's reputation as a man," and imagine Siegfried as displaying Wagner's "anti-Semitism evident in Siegfried's treatment of Mime, or the blithe and hollow murder of Fafner in dragon form"). It's a cardinal failure of Wagner's that, when writing Götterdämmerung, he refused adamantly to let go of that Siegfried, and by that refusal fairly made nonsense of the idea of Siegfried as a heroically tragic "free hero". Siegfried's death is in fact pathetic rather than heroically tragic as the Siegfried of the Ring as we have it possesses no genuinely tragic dimension whatsoever, his majestic and deeply moving Trauermarsch notwithstanding. If we as audiences "play the Siegfried game" at all, it's a game of pretending we can take the Götterdämmerung Siegfried seriously as the heroically tragic "free hero" Wagner intended him to be instead of the naïve, boisterous, reckless, not-too-bright adolescent pawn Wagner made of him, a failure we examined in some detail in our February 2005 entry, "The Trouble With Götterdämmerung".

And so the "singular and inspiring power" of the Ring depends not one whit more on how we respond to the character of Siegfried as Wagner has drawn him than it does on how we respond to any other of the principal characters other than Wotan himself, as Siegfried is but a helpless pawn in Wagner's colossal drama despite his onstage time, not the lynchpin tragic hero of the piece, and therefore no "Achilles heel to the Ring" even were one to grant Siegfried's imagined lack of "relevance" to "an age of teamwork, recycling and volunteerism"; an age in which "[w]e must, by necessity, become ever more dependent on each other." In fact, in such an age, tales of fearless dragon-slayers, reckless adolescent pawns or not, are more relevant than ever and resonate more powerfully because they serve to remind us what it means to be a genuine, fearless individual in a world of herd animals. If the Ring does indeed have an "Achilles heel" it resides solely in its huge cost to mount properly, and in its requirement of absolutely first-rate performers of a special sort, from conductor down to the most minor of singer-actors.

But, then, Wagner knew all about all of that, and in spite of it persevered to create his deathless and timeless masterpiece — deathless and timeless even in the face of "the vicissitudes of fashion and the economy" — rather than capitulate to the insistent demands of a reality comprised of mortals made of lesser stuff and infinitely lesser genius.

It's The Music, Stupid!

Let us imagine for a moment that the text of Wagner's Lohengrin was the book of a play rather than the libretto of an opera. A rather unpleasant thought, actually, as that libretto would make for a fairly dreadful play as would the libretto of most any opera. But let's hold that objection in total abeyance for the nonce so that we may investigate a somewhat different if ultimately intimately connected matter.

Now let us further imagine that along comes an avant-garde-type stage director who decides that this well-known, celebrated play of Lohengrin has possibilities and hidden, embedded meanings never even so much as suspected by its famous, celebrated author, but which he, the stage director, insightful, deep-thinking, creative, avant-garde stage director that he is, sees all too clearly. And so he sets about restaging this celebrated play from the ground up somewhat along the following lines.

"Our society is a loveless one," reflects our creative, insightful, deep-thinking director. "We are a dull, indifferent, and numb lot we are, and so find ourselves traveling blindly down a one-way street leading to a no-way-out situation. Aha!", our director cries. "This is what the play of Lohengrin is really about! I'll symbolize our loveless society by setting the action of the play within what will look for all the world like an antiseptically-white, coldly-lit laboratory, and symbolize our dull, indifferent, numb selves by dressing the chorus as a legion of swarming lab rats. If nothing else, it'll give the chorus something to do with their costumed bodies instead of just standing there and delivering. Perfect!

"But every once in a while," further reflects our director, "we dull, indifferent, numb entities get a one-time chance to better ourselves, to become better people, to become more human, to come closer to a utopia of perfect humanity. Aha!", our director cries once again. "This one-time chance I'll symbolize in Lohengrin himself! But there's a catch. This new level of humanity we can achieve only through complete, unconditional trust in its possibility. At first we do think it possible and do trust unconditionally, and, so, at the end of Act I, I'll have the lab rats peel off their rat skins to show that, underneath, they're actually wearing, like innocent, trusting young people, bright yellow dress coats. But I must be careful to see to it that they still retain their huge rat claws and paws, for, at bottom, they're really still lab rats. Then, in Act III, shortly before Elsa asks Lohengrin the forbidden question, I'll have a black coffin filled with swan feathers emerge between the sheets of Elsa's and Lohengrin's marital bed symbolizing the corrosive doubt which the evil Ortrud has insinuated into the consciousness of the innocent Elsa, and which doubt, in the end, will come between Elsa's and Lohengrin's love, and make their sharing a life together a thing impossible even to contemplate. Oooh! This is getting good!

"Now, how to finish the whole thing off...? Wait! I know! When Lohengrin is supposed to transform the enchanted swan back into Elsa’s lost and presumed dead brother, Gottfried, I'll instead have Lohengrin reveal a huge egg out of which there will emerge a hideously ugly, monstrous, newborn baby. Then I'll have the baby get up and tear its own umbilical cord into pieces which he'll then throw at the legions of the now healed who have gathered together to witness Lohengrin's leaving, but who are now all collapsed on the floor. And the pieces of the umbilical cord must look exactly like rats' tails symbolizing that when when Lohengrin, who symbolizes the one-time chance, leaves, everything, including the now healed once lab rats, will go back to being just what it and they were before Lohengrin's arrival!

"Damn! That's really good. It will all épater the hell out of le bourgeois, and garner for me a virtual tsunami of outrage from the audience, thereby confirming my restaging an unqualified triumph! I'm so fucking brilliant I sometimes scare myself."

The above little scenario was concocted by us using staging particulars and the never-fail Regie's intellectual rationale justifying and explaining the staging's whys and wherefores, all of which we adapted from a firsthand report by a person who attended the Generalprobe (dress rehearsal) for yesterday's Hans Neuenfels Lohengrin at the Bayreuther Festspiele. We found the thinking behind the above Konzept most interesting in that, original authorial intent entirely aside and unconsidered, as absurdist a Konzept as it quite clearly is, the truth of the matter is that if Lohengrin really were a play, that Konzept would not be out of bounds in terms of directorial discretion, and, depending on the execution, could actually end up a valid new take on an old play based on even older material. A fairly wild take, certainly, but the attempt a legitimate enterprise that notwithstanding.

Problem, of course, is that Lohengrin is not a play but an opera, and the principal thing that makes opera different from plays is that in opera the composer, not the scribbler of words, is the dramatist, which means the drama resides in the music, not the libretto, which libretto's critical function is to act as armature for the drama, which further means that such wholesale messing about with that armature while failing to realize or even understand the contradictions and absurdities that entails vis-à-vis what the music is saying at every point in the drama is to produce ultimately not a valid new take on the opera, but the absolute assurance of its utter collapse as a unified dramatic work of art, not to even mention consideration of such piddling matters as original authorial intent which is another but intimately related matter, and one that cannot — must not ever — be passed over or given merely lip service.

In this S&F post, we quoted Katharina Wagner's days-before-the-performance remark that Bayreuth's new production of Lohengrin would have "rats [that] will be let loose on a set designed to resemble an animal research laboratory," and instantly declared that new production to be Eurotrash. The "progressive" types who are fervent champions of such trash as they consider it a brave and creative new way of seeing and thinking about old ideas, immediately loudly bray "Foul!" for our impertinence not only in our passing summary condemnatory judgment on a production sight unseen, but doing so on the evidence of but a mere single descriptive sentence about that production.

Well, the fact remains that with most Regietheater opera productions (but by no means all; the LAO Achim Freyer staging of the Ring is a perfect example in point as it's impossible to pass any sort of judgment at all concerning it without first having seen the entire cycle at firsthand in the theater, much less after merely reading descriptive sentences about it or inspecting photos of the production), an accurate descriptive sentence or two about the staging of a production is often all that's necessary to condemn the production as Eurotrash, and be able to do so with absolute assurance of the rightness of our judgment. When we're told, for instance, that a production of Parsifal presents a third act that takes place in a 20th-century railway station complete with a steam-belching choo-choo, and that the Knights of the Grail are there all attired in WWI uniforms complete with gas masks, and that the act ends with Parsifal walking off into the sunset (or was it sunrise?) along the railroad tracks hand-in-hand with a still-alive Kundry, we need to know nothing more about that production in order to, with complete certainty in the rightness of our judgment, condemn that production as flat-out Eurotrash. The music will not permit such a staging — again, never mind such piddling matters as original authorial intent as made manifest in the score (music and text).

Just so the case with this Hans Neuenfels Lohengrin. It's flat-out Eurotrash because the music will not permit such a staging. That the dozens of photos of the production thoroughly bore us out in our judgment was no surprise, nor was it cause for back-patting or hurling about I-told-you-so's. We knew with absolute certainty that such it must be and could not be otherwise because the music told us so.

With opera, there's just no getting around it. In the end, what controls and shapes the drama, and determines what is and what is not permissible in its staging, is not the text, and certainly not the unique "vision" of the stage director (i.e., his Konzept). First, foremost, and always, it's the music, Stupid!

Not Quite Q.E.D., But Ominous Nevertheless

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 7:25 PM Eastern on 25 Jul. See below.]

In a 19 July S&F entry questioning the current outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Bayreuther Festspiele, we suggested that venerable institution, the oldest music festival extant today, had in fact outlived its outside-Germany relevance and importance due the 44-year cumulative artistic damage, both musical and theatrical, that's been done to the Festspiele under the general directorship of recently deceased Wagner grandson Wolfgang Wagner, and suggested three requirements the fulfillment of which would be necessary for the Festspiele to regain its famed pre-war artistic excellence and glory. One of those suggested requirements was,

[T]he jettisoning and firm disavowal of Eurotrash Regietheater stagings which today and for several decades now have disgraced the Festspiele's stage and everything the Festspiele stands for — or, rather, should stand for — according to the imperatives of the Festspiele's founding genius, Richard Wagner.

We were not sanguine about the possibility of the demands of that requirement ever being met under the new co-directorship of the Festspiele of Wagner half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, declaring that both sisters,

...are not only little inclined to satisfy the demands of that...requirement, but seem intransigently committed to flying in the face of that requirement, as was their father [Wolfgang Wagner] before them, in the false and perverse belief that it is just such stagings that will guarantee the future outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Festspiele.

We now learn from this Guardian article that, "Katharina Wagner has let slip [that] rats will be let loose on a set designed to resemble an animal research laboratory" in the Festspiele's new staging of Lohengrin, the Festspiele's only new staging this year.

Not quite Q.E.D. as this clearly Eurotrash Regietheater staging was given a green light while Wolfgang was still general director of the Festspiele and there was little the sisters could have done to alter it even had they wanted to, but it's an ominous sign nevertheless.

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Update (9:12 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): Intermezzo has photos.

Update 2 (6:01 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): More pics from Opera Chic

Update 3 (7:25 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): And here are 12 more pics.

Wagner's "Poems"

On an online opera forum populated for the most part by TOFs (True Opera Fan — like a teenage movie fan only worse; much worse) which we've made unnamed reference to a couple times before here on S&F, a member (whom we'll call Mr. AI) wrote a long and thoughtful post concerning the dramatic possibilities of bel canto opera (which Mr. AI insisted on referring to by the term, "ottocento opera") that included this graf:

As far as I am concerned the same questions can be asked about the hoary, silly contrivances of Tosca, the ridiculous ugliness of Turandot, neither redeemed as I hear them by their music, Faust, a snore of treacly tunes with none of the sublime wit and insight of Goethe, Werther (ditto and more). Isn't Wagner ridiculously long winded, inflated and loud with an often bizarre sensibility dressed up in weird symbolism and deadening Stabreim (does one REALLY want to understand Parsifal, it's view of women, it's bizarre treatment of the already bizarre Christian myth, its sado-masochistic sentimentality, does it signify beyond the cult exemplified by AC Douglas)?

To which another member (whom we'll call Mr. SM) responded:

Yes Wagner, often touted as far superior dramatically to the inept or silly dramas of the ottocento [bel canto] operas definitely had major weaknesses as a poet and dramatist. Without the power of the music they would be pretty worthless. Tannhauser in my opinion has absolutely the worst, most idiotic and sickeningly hypocritical libretto of any opera I have ever come across, Cammarano's libretti for Lucia di Lammermoor and Trovatore are masterpieces of dramaturgy in comparison.

Our response to Mr. SM's post — which response contains little that will be new to regular readers of S&F, but which response we post here strictly for the purpose of making it a part of the S&F archive — follows.

So as not to impair my, um, reputation as a Wagner "cult[ist]" (as Mr. AI would have it)...

I quite agree with your assessment of _Tannhäuser_, Mr. SM. But singling out this early work is really not playing quite fair.

First off, _Tannhäuser_ is an opera, not a music-drama, and Wagner here, as in all three operas of his ten-work canon (i.e., _Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_), was, in large part, a Wagner mimicking established forms and operatic conventions -- a Wagner on his way to becoming Wagner. The music-dramas, however, are a different matter altogether.

Informed native German speakers tell me that, as stand-alone text, the libretti for Wagner's music-dramas (which Wagner in fact referred to as "poems") are fairly dreadful both poetically and dramatically. But given how Wagner worked, that's *precisely* what one would expect them to be as stand-alone texts. They're merely the armature about which the drama is constructed -- an armature designed to provide the concrete narrative and factual detail which music alone is incapable of expressing, and which armature never competes poetically or dramatically with the music which is the principal carrier and transmitter of the music-drama's poetic and dramatic core. Wagner, who originally thought his "poems" to be first-rate as poetry and dramatic text in themselves, discovered that for himself after completing the first music for the _Ring_: the music for _Das Rheingold_, his first music-drama. Wrote Wagner in a letter to his confidant August Röckel, "I have now come to realize just how much there is, owing to the whole nature of my poetic aim, that becomes clear only through the music. I now simply cannot bear to look at the text [of _Das Rheingold_] by itself anymore."

While it's true that the texts of the music-dramas were written complete prior to Wagner writing the music, it's NOT correct to say that Wagner wrote the music to match that finished text, which is the usual process, more or less, when composer and librettist are two separate individuals. As Wagner was writing his texts ("poems"), he, line by line, heard always in his inner ear the shape and sense of the music that would belong to those lines even though he'd not written so much as even a single measure of the actual music. It's no surprise, then, and not for nothing, that the text and music of Wagner's music-dramas are, more than the text and music of any other opera of my experience, so fundamentally and organically intertwined, and therefore cannot be separated and be expected [each on its own] to still make their unified original sense.

As to Wagner as dramatist -- or, rather, as music-dramatist -- he is absolutely nonpareil with the single exception of Mozart who, it's a deeply-felt conceit of mine, would have outstripped Wagner as music-dramatist had he lived long enough to write the music he longed to write but refrained from writing in order to ensure his earning his daily bread and cheese. And far from Wagner's music-dramas being "long winded, inflated and loud ," as Mr. AI would have it, Wagner was perhaps the most economical composer of _drammas per musica_ who ever lived, the length of his works dictated by the depth and complexity of their musico-dramaturgy, and "loud" only when loud was dictated by the musico-dramatic context of the drama itself.

ACD

Perhaps It's Time

This Sunday, 25 July, marks the opening of the 2010 Bayreuther Festspiele, and the advance press coverage in the mainstream media, both here and abroad, is resoundingly...all but nonexistent. All but nonexistent as well are scheduled radio broadcasts of the performances, live or recorded, with the lone exception of the opening-day live broadcast of Lohengrin, the Festspiele's only new production this year, with newly-risen superstar German tenor Jonas Kaufmann making his Bayreuth debut in the title role, which performance a number of radio stations are covering live.

Has the Festspiele outlived its outside-Germany relevance and importance, or is it rather the cumulative artistic damage, both musical and theatrical, that's been done to the Festspiele over the past 44 years under the general directorship of recently deceased (2010) Wagner grandson Wolfgang Wagner subsequent to the untimely death of his brother, the brilliant director and stage designer Wieland, in 1966, or a combination of the two, or something else entirely?

We don't know the real answer to that question, but we'd be willing to put our money behind the proposition that the Festspiele has lost its outside-Germany relevance and importance DUE the cumulative artistic damage, both musical and theatrical, that's been done to the Festspiele over the past 44 years under the general directorship of Wolfgang Wagner, and bet further that it will require an artistic upheaval, both musical and theatrical, of momentous proportions to restore the Festspiele to its pre-war artistic excellence and glory and outside-Germany relevance and importance.

And of what would such an artistic upheaval consist? The requirements are three in number.

First, luring back to the Festspiele world-class singer-actors appropriate to the roles — a major problem as few such singer-actors exist, today as in times past. Second, luring back to the Festspiele Wagner conductors of the first water — again, a major problem as few such conductors exist today, most present-day conductors unsympathetic to or outright repulsed by the hyper-Romantic rhetoric Wagner's music both requires and demands. And finally, the jettisoning and firm disavowal of Eurotrash Regietheater stagings which today and for several decades now have disgraced the Festspiele's stage and everything the Festspiele stands for — or, rather, should stand for — according to the imperatives of the Festspiele's founding genius, Richard Wagner.

There's but a limited amount that can be done to satisfy the demands of the first two requirements, but a huge amount that can be done to satisfy the demands of the third. Sadly, even ominously from our standpoint, the new co-directors of the Festspiele — Wolfgang Wagner's two daughters, Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier — are not only little inclined to satisfy the demands of that third requirement, but seem intransigently committed to flying in the face of that requirement, as was their father before them, in the false and perverse belief that it is just such stagings that will guarantee the future outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Festspiele.

Well, it's been a long and checkered career for the Bayreuther Festspiele, both artistically and otherwise, since its establishment in 1876 and today the oldest music festival extant, and perhaps it's now time to remember fondly its past days of artistic excellence and glory, and bid a final farewell. After all, nothing lasts forever.

Traditional v. Regietheater Opera Stagings

When speaking of contemporary productions of non-contemporary opera (i.e., those works created prior to the mid-20th century or so), there invariably arises argument that faces off so-called "traditional stagings" against Regietheater stagings of these works; argument that typically becomes quite heated on both sides, a commonplace and characteristic trait of such argument of which, as regular readers of S&F are quite aware, we're by no means innocent. We think that if one were to poll these regular readers, they would, almost to a man, declare we favor "traditional stagings" and come down adamantly against all manner of Regietheater stagings, and would like nothing more than to see the latter consigned ignominiously and forever to the trash bin of opera history.

We take full responsibility for such an apprehension as we haven't always made clear enough (or clear at all) our position on "traditional" versus Regietheater stagings, so, let us here and now and on the record, so to speak, try to set things straight as it concerns our thinking on this matter.

First, what is meant by the term "traditional staging" is not always clear to us. Sometimes it seems meant to signify an opera production staged in literal obedience to the original creator's stage directions, but employing modern-day stagecraft to make the stage picture convincing to contemporary audiences, and at other times seems meant to signify an opera production staged not only in literal obedience to the original creator's stage directions, but a production staged in literal obedience to the way the work was staged originally (as far as that's discoverable), even to the use of naturalistic painted flats and the like if talking about a pre-20th-century work. Except as a one-off novelty, that latter approach is, of course, perfectly ridiculous; the former, perfectly respectable if rather unimaginative.

And then we have Regietheater staging which is a whole other animal altogether, and at its two opposite extremes can be either illuminatively imaginative, which is to say illuminative of the sense of the opera creator's original concept as made manifest in the score (an exemplar of which in the Wagnerian world would be the Wieland Wagner Bayreuth staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen of the 1950's), or unabashedly deconstructionist and illuminative only of the Regie's own concept, the sense of the original creator's concept a thing of only passing concern (an exemplar of which in the Wagnerian world would be Patrice Chéreau's 1976 Bayreuth staging of the same work), this latter treatment more commonly (and justifiably) known as Eurotrash. Between those two polar extremes are those now myriad Regietheater opera stagings that tend more toward the one extreme or the other, and with varying degrees of success in terms of realizing the sense of the original creator's concept as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions).

For the record, we wish to declare here and now that while we find traditional stagings of opera in the above first sense of the term to be innocuous enough as they do not obtrude themselves in any way on that which is of first importance in opera (viz., the music and text), and while we recognize the importance and irreplaceable value of such stagings in introducing newcomers to a work, we much prefer Regietheater opera stagings of the above first sort. It seems to us that absent such stagings our great 400-year legacy of opera will more or less quickly degenerate into a collection of museum pieces, and by virtue of that alone, drift ineluctably toward and ultimately beyond the margins and beyond the concerns of contemporary culture.

Not a good thing; not a good thing at all.

Disinterest Or Ignorance?

On the venerable online opera forum we've had occasion to refer to several times recently, a member posted the following question: "Why the 'Renunciation of Love' [motif] when Siegmund [in Wagner's Die Walküre] prepares to pull out the sword [from the ash tree growing at the center of Hunding's hut] and is about to christen the sword 'Nothung'?"

It's a fairly common question asked by those who've paid more than cursory attention to Die Walküre as the sounding of that leitmotiv at that particular point in the music-drama seems perversely inapposite. We've had the question asked of us some two dozen times over the years, and therefore our answer runs pretty much on autopilot. Here's the answer we posted to the forum:

The so-called "Renunciation of Love" motif is here sounded by the orchestra both as tragic ironic comment, and as dark portent of how Alberich's Original Sin (i.e., his forswearing of love) will work to affect the lives of all who live, even the most innocent. It's one of Wagner's most brilliant masterstrokes in the whole of the _Ring_.

Now, that answer is not only clearly, but blatantly in error. How we managed to type that is simply beyond our understanding. But type it we did, posted it to the forum, and then promptly hit the sack for the night. It wasn't until we awoke next morning and checked for any responses that we caught the error. We immediately typed a correction, but when we attempted to post it, it was rejected by the forum server as we'd already used up our posting limit for the 24-hour period, and so our uncorrected in-error answer remained there for all to see for the next 20 hours or so, after which time we posted our corrected answer with our apologies which corrected answer read:

The so-called "Renunciation of Love" motif is here not sounded by the orchestra but sung by Siegmund both as tragic ironic comment, and as dark portent of how Alberich's Original Sin (i.e., his forswearing of love) will work to affect the lives of all who live, even the most innocent, the motif intoned unwittingly by Siegmund, not by the orchestra. It's one of Wagner's most brilliant masterstrokes in the whole of the _Ring_.

What makes this incident remarkable is that not a single member of this 2000-plus-member forum — a forum whose opera-savvy members are known for their, um, aggressive correcting of even the most trivial mistake on the part of other members — made comment on this non-trivial error.

Well, three possible reasons for this lapse came immediately to mind.

1: No one was interested enough in the question and/or our answer or in any post by us to read our post, and simply skipped over it.
2: No one persevered or was interested enough to read this fairly long post through to its very end which is where our answer was located as the rest of the post dealt with other matters having to do with Walküre.
3: No one who read the post through to its very end and read our answer had the slightest clue the answer was grossly in error.

While it's true this forum is populated overwhelmingly by TOFs (i.e., True Opera Fans — like teenage movie fans, only worse, much worse), and the chatter has overwhelmingly to do with songbirds, mostly of the Italian opera sort, we would like to believe the reason for this lapse was either our No. 1 or No. 2 above, and not our No. 3. But, still, we can't shake the nagging suspicion that's not the case at all.

If so, sad.

Are Batty Opera Productions Not Always A Bad Thing?

A discussion along several fronts concerning the permitted bounds of interpretive license in the performance of works of classical music and opera took place recently (is still taking place, actually) on a venerable online forum, one of whose members wrote in part:

All I mean is that I don't think the world ends because ... somebody stages Wagner's Ring in a space station, a bus station, or an abbatoir [sic]. [...] Battiness is not always a bad thing.

Well, this person's response was not altogether, um, batty considering the way it was put ("I don't think the world ends...," etc.). But, still, it's rather shortsighted, not to say mostly wrongheaded.

Our response posted to the forum read:

Perhaps not. But what happens when that battiness is the rule rather than the exception? What happens when, as is the case today, there exists almost no production extant in any major opera house worldwide that's even remotely faithful NOT to that vague and meaningless phrase, "the composer's intentions", but to the composer's intentions AS MADE MANIFEST IN THE SCORE (music and text) — which is to say, faithful to the work itself — to use as a reference point to assess just how batty a production really is?

A batty production every once in a long while can be engaging as a novelty on its own terms. But when battiness is the rule rather than the exception, when that battiness is presented as representative of the composer's intentions AS MADE MANIFEST IN THE SCORE, it's time to call a halt to the practice, and not merely not tolerate it, but condemn it for what it is: a vandalization and hijacking of an artwork of transcendent genius, written by a creator of transcendent genius, for the purpose of satisfying the self-important, self-involved, self-serving ends of a by-comparison creative midget.

As this topic began originally on an online forum, we think it only appropriate to ask S&F's readers what they think. Accordingly, we open comments on this entry for a week for any response you may wish to make.

What Ends At Götterdämmerung's End, And What Begins?

It started with a deceptively innocent question addressed to our good self from DE on a Wagner newsgroup which read: "[Wagner wrote in a letter to Liszt,] 'Mark well my new poem [his libretti for the four music-dramas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen] — it contains the world's beginning and its end.' So what is it that ends at the end of 'Götterdämmerung'? And what begins?"

Good question, actually. And so ensued the following exchange between ACD and DE which we reprint below in edited form for our readers' convenience (the full thread can be read here).

From ACD:

The answer is: the world ends at the end of _Götterdämmerung_ — that is, the world that existed subsequent to the last measure of the prelude to _Das Rheingold_, but with the promise that it will begin again, and begin again with the _Rheintöchter_ just as at the rise of curtain on Scene 1 of _Das Rheingold_, a gift purchased by Brünnhilde's return of Alberich's ring to the Rhine. This is made eloquently and unambiguously clear to us not by the text (which is silent on the matter), but by the music alone, just as Wagner intended.

This promised same new beginning should never be understood in the sense of one of the infinite number of same new beginnings postulated by Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, but a same new beginning in the sense of a fresh start with fresh possibilities that, although it begins the same as at rise of curtain on Scene 1 of _Das Rheingold_, will this time, with any luck, not develop in a way similar thereafter.

SFO's New Die Walküre

From all the mouthwatering reports we've read (and we do mean all, all from the hometown, or at least home-state, press and blogs), the San Francisco Opera's brand new production of Die Walküre is an all-around brilliant success musically with conductor Donald Runnicles (the SFO's former M.D.) on the podium, and with Nina Stemme as the Brünnhilde, Mark Delevan as Wotan, Dutch soprano Eva-Marie Westbroek as Sieglinde, Christopher Ventris as Siegmund, Raymond Aceto as Hunding, and Janina Baechle as Fricka. The Konzept production — the so-called "American Ring" shared with the Washington National Opera which ran out of money last year and couldn't complete its cycle — is by American director Francesca Zambello, and, judging from the written descriptions and the available not-at-all-mouthwatering production photos (and, unlike Achim Freyer's Regietheater staging for the Los Angeles Opera's Walküre, that's all that's required to make a judgment in this case), it's (surprise!) your standard, risible Eurotrash Regietheater rubbish (the staging, for the most part, given a thumbs-up by all the usual suspects) having little or nothing to do with Wagner's Die Walküre except by some application of intellectual effort to make the abstract, if hardly worth the trouble, tenuous connection, complete with the Eurotrash requisite sophomoric symbolic social and environmental commentary cum de rigueur modern-day settings, leather trench coats, business suits and ties, and épater le bourgeois grotesqueries (Act III parachuting Valkyries this time, for imbecile instance).

Damn bloody shame, really. If this production is as splendid musically as it was universally reported to be (and we have no doubt it is as Runnicles is a more than competent Wagner conductor), it deserves better — way better — in its staging.

Here's a typical review.

The Persistence Of Easy And Comfortable Fictions

Over the past few months, in the virtual flood of words in both the mainstream classical music press and the classical music blogosphere concerning Los Angeles Opera's new production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, two fictions surface repeatedly, either singly or both, and either directly or by implication: the inordinate length of Wagner's music-dramas (i.e., his mature-period works), and the curious fiction that if one objects seriously to postmodern deconstructionist stagings of Wagner's operas and music-dramas, then one must be a "traditionalist", or a "literalist", or, worse, a "reactionary".

There's nothing particularly new or fresh about either of those two fictions when speaking of Wagner's music-dramas (or of his operas, too, for that matter) or of their postmodern deconstructionist stagings, but the seemingly in perpetuum persistence of those two fictions is truly remarkable given how utterly at odds with reality both are.

The truth of the matter is that Wagner was one of the most economical composers of opera who ever lived, and his music-dramas are neither so much as a measure too long, nor a measure too short. Like Goldilocks's porridge, they're just right. A Wagner music-drama may appear long compared with the operas of most other composers when measured by the clock, but one of the salient characteristics of those music-dramas — all of them — is that they literally alter one's sense of time in the experiencing, and not only are they not experienced as too long, but, often times and quite commonly, if the performance was first-rate, at music-drama's conclusion one wants to hear it all over again – instanter! That's part of Wagner's considerable magic. It's not for nothing he's been referred to as the Sorcerer of Bayreuth.

And then there's the thoroughly imbecile business of labeling all those who find postmodern stagings of Wagner's works to be atrocities of greater or lesser degree as "traditionalists", or "literalists", or "reactionaries". Well, one needn't be a "traditionalist" or "literalist" or "reactionary" to find most postmodern stagings of Wagner's works to be atrocities. By any clear-eyed aesthetic and critical criteria, most in fact are, no matter how brilliant certain of those stagings might be when considered in themselves isolated from the underlying works the stagings of which they're supposed to be. Not only do such stagings willfully disregard the score, both music and text, to suit their own agenda if need be, but often fly flagrantly in the face of the score's fundamentally defining dramatic logic, settings, and intent. How could such stagings not be atrocities? If one will argue that such postmodern stagings operate to make the underlying works more sensible and meaningful and, you should pardon the loathsome term, "relevant" to modern audiences, one should understand that in making such an argument one betrays one's utter contempt for the genius of the works' creator — in Wagner's case, one of opera's and music's most transcendent geniuses — and one's utter contempt for modern audiences as well.

Trust us and history and depend on it. Wagner's music-dramas are in no need of such outside "help", nor are modern audiences for those works. Both manage supremely well absent the almost always disfiguring interference of self-serving, self-important postmodern meddlers, and forever will.

Bet on it — giving odds.

Wagner certainly did.

Oh, That It Prove True!

If this arresting, dramatically on-target staging of Siegfried, Act III, Scene 2 (although the image was not so identified) is representative of the staging concept behind the entire production, then our fears concerning the Met's new Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen expressed in the footnote to this S&F post would, most happily, seem to be totally unfounded.

Oh, that it prove true!

Fry On Wagner

If you've ever been curious about what modes of thought go on inside the heads of possessed Wagnerians, the recent BBC Four documentary, Stephen Fry On Wagner, will go a considerable way toward giving you a handle on the matter. There's nothing new here to be learned by informed Wagnerians either about Wagner or what possesses possessed Wagnerians, but others may find in this hour-long program much that's enlightening about both.

Fry has long been a favorite of ours, and he's most engagingly and revealingly self-confessional here, and the film is a very well put together record of his first trip to the Bayreuther Festspielhaus ("the Wagnerian's Mecca") where he's made privy to some of the backstage preparations for that year's (2009) Bayreuther Festspiele (including brief clips of the current Bayreuth Tristan und Isolde; yet another Bayreuth Eurotrash Regietheater production).

Unhappily, the BBC Four streamed video of the documentary can't be viewed directly by those outside Britain, but some enterprising soul has put it up on YouTube in six segments which can be viewed beginning here. We don't know how long these videos will be available on YouTube as we suspect they were put up without first securing permission from BBC Four, but they're available now, so watch 'em while the watching is good.

Here is the first of the six segments:

Los Angeles Opera's James Conlon

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:44 PM Eastern on 30 May. See below.]

In a lengthy S&F post of February 2009 titled, "The Upcoming Los Angeles Opera Ring", we asked ourself this question concerning LAO music director James Conlon:

How competent is Mr. Conlon to conduct the Ring as staged music-drama as opposed to orchestral excerpts?

and answered it by writing:

Our provisional answer ... is not a happy one. Nothing of what we know of Mr. Conlon's work leads us to believe he's up to the formidable task of conducting a staged Ring with anything more than mere technical excellence. Needless to say, that's not nearly enough, but we're willing to believe that he may rise to the challenge once confronted.

As of late this afternoon, we have a less provisional, more definitive answer to the question (or, rather, as definitive an answer as can be gotten from an MP3-quality webcast* of an LAO-approved recording of a single live performance of the LAO's new production of Das Rheingold auditioned over a typically crappy computer sound system). And that answer is that Maestro Conlon's reading displayed a thorough knowledge of the score, which score he conducted with admirable technical excellence, drawing technically flawless performances from both orchestra and singers alike (we were especially impressed by the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, and most especially by the orchestra's brass section which performed splendidly, and the horns most notably so). But as we previously remarked, that's not nearly enough where a Wagner music-drama is concerned.

So, what was amiss with this performance of Das Rheingold? To state it in short: Maestro Conlon's conspicuous lack of an intuitive sense of Wagnerian rhetoric. This performance was polished entirely too smooth throughout. One might even go so far as to say the performance was sedate (or as sedate as a technically excellent performance of this work's music is capable of being); a troubling quality most distressingly apparent in the lynchpin episode of Wotan's theft of Alberich's ring.

The question then remains, Can one really fault a conductor merely because he lacks an intuitive sense of Wagnerian rhetoric? The first answer that wants to escape our lips is, Yes, one can when the performance of a Wagner music-drama is being assessed. But when we think back on the technical excellence of this performance which was proof positive the conductor knew the score thoroughly and was able to communicate its requirements to the performers, then we're not at all sure such a conductor should be faulted merely for his lack of what is, after all, a specialized and peculiar gift; one that's essentially innate and can neither be taught nor learned in the ordinary sense of those words, which gift we long ago dubbed metaphorically the "Wagner Gene".

It's a question difficult to answer fairly and neatly, and so one must be content to spell things out in one's assessment of such a conductor as we've above done, and leave the reader of that assessment to draw his own conclusions regarding the matter.

* The webcast was by Los Angeles public radio station KUSC, "the largest and most listened-to public radio and non-profit classical music station in the country" which is webcasting recorded live performances of each of the four music dramas of the LAO Ring each Saturday at 1:00 PM (EDT), this Saturday having been the first in the webcast series which series will continue over the next three Saturdays.

---

Update (2:44 PM Eastern on 30 May): Several eMail missives have admonished us for saying nothing about the individual singers in this recorded performance. We suggested to our admonishers that they again read the title of this piece. It was NOT intended as a detailed critical review of the performance, but as a commentary on how conductor James Conlon acquitted himself as a conductor of a staged Wagner music-drama, and we noted the performance of the singers generally within that context.

We trust the foregoing will forestall any further admonitory e-missives along this line.

More On Freyer's Staging Of Wagner's Ring

California lawyer, informed classical music aficionado, and blogger George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest has experienced at firsthand the Achim Freyer staging of Wagner's Ring, and, in answer to complaints about that staging's artistic merit by tenor John Treleaven (the Siegfried) and soprano Linda Watson (the Brünnhilde) as reported in this Los Angeles Times piece, had, in part, this to say about the staging:

It isn't really about Achim Freyer or his directorial "vision".... To Freyer's credit his production is, for all its eccentricities, very much about the Ring as Wagner wrote it. The layering of symbols, the expressionist/expressionless masks, the outré costuming, the doubling and tripling of characters, all of it serves as an elaborate mechanism for "getting at what Wagner was getting at." Figuring it all out is a challenge for the audience, but the necessary effort and attention pays off and, paradoxically, out from all the clutter emerges a remarkable clarity.

This might seem like good news; something that should make us rest easy concerning this staging. Alas, what it does is seem to confirm our worst fears concerning it, for as we wrote in part in this S&F post of 20 April:

In the case of the Freyer staging of the Ring, as we've previously remarked, we can't really be sure of this judgment [that Freyer seems to have gone the Eurotrash Regietheater route] just from printed reports and production photos as we can in the case of clear Eurotrash, and would need to see in the theater the staging of the entire cycle before we could be certain of anything about it other than that the staging seems to be on at least the right mythological track. The staging's manifest complexity demands such firsthand experience of it before any meaningful judgment can be rendered, a judgment that hinges on the answer to the question, Does all that complexity work to transmit to the audience the dramatic core and sense and emotional wallop of Wagner's drama as it's being played out onstage and in the orchestra pit, or does it work to make the dramatic core and sense of that drama understandable only after one has mulled it over and worked it out intellectually after the fact (that is, assuming it makes dramatic sense intellectually)? If the former, then the staging is right and true; if the latter, then it's not and almost certainly Eurotrash Regietheater. And there's a third possibility to consider: Does all that complexity work not to transmit the dramatic core and sense of Wagner's drama, but instead work to transmit Freyer's commentary on Wagner's drama? If that in fact is what it works to do, then the staging is top-to-bottom wrong and false and unmitigated Eurotrash Regietheater.

But perhaps it's only the wording of Mr. Wallace's commentary that's at fault here, and not Freyer's staging.

Would that it's so.

So What. Who Cares?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:31 AM Eastern on 22 Apr. See below.]

It's a commonplace today, even a cliché, to say that in opera, the composer is the dramatist, meaning that the core of the drama is contained in the music itself, not the text and staging as it is in straight drama, the text (libretto) and staging in opera serving primarily as the armature about which the drama is constructed.

This is true of all genuine opera from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo to John Adams's Dr. Atomic, and is a truism not open to serious contradiction. That notwithstanding, it's more true of some operas than of others as, for instance, it is of the operas of Mozart. But in all opera, Mozart's included, its most true of the music-dramas of Richard Wagner (i.e., the works written post-Lohengrin), not only because he wrote his own libretti all of which are organically and inseparably wedded to the music, but because it was a fundamental principle of his creative method and a hallmark of his genius notwithstanding his original theoretical concept, first set forth in his 1849 publication, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art-Work of the Future), that opera ought to be a Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) wherein all the arts — in particular, music; poetry; mime; dance; and painting — are synthesized in equal measure to create the drama, a concept he later came to understand as flawed in practice as it became clear to him that in opera, music always trumped and overshadowed everything as the carrier of the core of the drama.

It will hardly come as fresh news to most operagoers that recently, and for some little time now, it seems this truism has mostly either been forgotten or willfully disregarded, as at present the opera director and his Konzept reign supreme on opera stages worldwide. This phenomenon has been aptly named Regietheater (director's theater, or, somewhat less commonly, Regieoper (director's opera)).

Should this alteration of primacy be considered progress or even a desirable or good thing?

Here on S&F over the six-some years of its existence (and for some two years prior to that on a predecessor blog), our objections to Regietheater have been something of an idée fixe, most especially as it concerns the staging of Wagner's music-dramas. In our various sorties, we haven't always made clear enough that our objections are lodged not against Regietheater per se, but against Eurotrash Regietheater, which is to say, deconstructionist Regietheater — Regietheater that instead of working to realize in the most dramatically, aesthetically, and theatrically vivid and compelling way possible the Konzept of the creator of the opera, works instead to realize the opera director's own Konzept of the work to hand, or, infinitely worse and more corrupt, an opera director's own Konzept that's, essentially, a critical commentary on the work to hand. These (and most particularly the latter) are the very definition of what it means to be Eurotrash.

The above thoughts are provoked at present by the near concurrence of three events: the new production of Wagner's Ring by the Los Angeles Opera directed by Achim Freyer; the upcoming first installment in September (Das Rheingold) of the Met's new production of the Ring directed by Robert Lepage; and the 21 March death at age 90 of Wagner's grandson, Wolfgang Wagner, longtime director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, whose death marked the end of a Wagnerian era that stretched back in direct line to Wagner himself, and the artistic control of the Festspiele consequently passing into the hands of Wolfgang's two daughters: 32-year-old Katharina and 65-year-old Eva Wagner-Pasquier.

What we find disturbing about all this is that, in the case of the two new Ring productions underway in two of this country's major opera houses, one of which (the Met) is easily the most prestigious house in the nation and among the most prestigious in the world, and judging solely from what can be gleaned from writings in the press and from available photos, it's our general impression that both directors, to greater or lesser degree, have chosen to go the Eurotrash Regietheater route* notwithstanding each one's claim to the effect that he's doing nothing other than presenting Wagner's Konzept in a way that's more relevant for a contemporary audience (whatever it is that's supposed to mean).

In the case of the Bayreuther Festspiele, there are the festival's two new co-directors — one of whom is devoted to Eurotrash Regietheater of the very worst sort (Katharina), and the other of whom favors anything that promises to secure the financial health and German cultural supremacy of the festival — whose stewardship all but guarantees that under their artistic control the festival will never satisfy its raison d'être and fulfill Wagner's mandate for it: to be the one opera house in the world where his works would be given model stagings and performances that realized perfectly his deepest inner vision of those works.

And why should all this be of concern? As we've written elsewhere (here in 2005, for instance):

What ... does [this] mean for those who've no prior experience of these timeless, universal, and deathless works of art in their original form, and who today have almost no opportunity of ever seeing them realized as their creator intended them to be realized, and therefore lack any proper point of reference? It's quite as serious a problem as would be, say, having the plays of Shakespeare available to the general public only in versions utilizing modern settings and with dialogue in modern English, the opportunity of reading and/or seeing them performed in their original form nowhere to be had.... When viewed in that light, the true magnitude of the gravity of the situation today vis-à-vis Wagner's operas and music-dramas makes itself instantly manifest.

It might be thought I rhetorically overstate the case in making the above comparison. Nothing could be farther from the facts of the case. Today's postmodern realizations of Wagner's operas and music-dramas ... so distort the originals as to make them wholly unrecognizable as Wagner's creations were it not for the music itself being so well known. Even at that, one could almost be forgiven for imagining that some enterprising producers cum opera composers manqué have concocted musical stageworks of their own invention, but incompetent to write the music for them, simply hijacked Wagner's.

But still, why be concerned about any of this? We're not, after all, talking about controlling global warming or finding a cure for cancer or eradicating the Islamist terrorist threat or securing world peace. We're here talking only about bloody art, for chrissake, and only about bloody Wagnerian opera at that. So what's the big deal? Who cares? No one other than Wagner freaks or opera freaks generally gives so much as a rat's ass about any of it. Mother Nature sure doesn't care, nor does God Almighty Himself. It's not their concern, if either could be said to have concern for anything other than themselves.

The answer is, civilization cares, as does its child, culture, absent both of which we're all no better or more advantageously evolved than monkeys swinging from branch to branch in the treetops looking for their next meal or mate.

Art matters, as does opera, and as do the works of opera's greatest creators as they envisaged them, among which are the works of one, Richard Wagner.

* In the case of the Freyer staging of the Ring, as we've previously remarked, we can't really be sure of this judgment just from printed reports and production photos as we can in the case of clear Eurotrash, and would need to see in the theater the staging of the entire cycle before we could be certain of anything about it other than that the staging seems to be on at least the right mythological track. The staging's manifest complexity demands such firsthand experience of it before any meaningful judgment can be rendered, a judgment that hinges on the answer to the question, Does all that complexity work to transmit to the audience the dramatic core and sense and emotional wallop of Wagner's drama as it's being played out onstage and in the orchestra pit, or does it work to make the dramatic core and sense of that drama understandable only after one has mulled it over and worked it out intellectually after the fact (that is, assuming it makes dramatic sense intellectually)? If the former, then the staging is right and true; if the latter, then it's not and almost certainly Eurotrash Regietheater. And there's a third possibility to consider: Does all that complexity work not to transmit the dramatic core and sense of Wagner's drama, but instead work to transmit Freyer's commentary on Wagner's drama? If that in fact is what it works to do, then the staging is top-to-bottom wrong and false and unmitigated Eurotrash Regietheater.

In the case of the Lepage staging of the Ring, from what can be gleaned from the little that has been made public of the production, it appears to us that the staging will be all about the show, and Wagner take the hindmost. We've no doubt the production will prove a visually extravagant and arresting one in its own right, but while that kind of thing will play SRO in, say, a Las Vegas dinner theater, it's a veritable kiss of death for the serious presentation of a work as profound, nuanced, intimate, and complex as the Ring. What we expect is that this production will end up being a Robert Lepage spectacular with Wagner's music serving as sound track; IOW, a thorough catastrophe vis-à-vis Wagner's Ring. We truly hope we're proven dead wrong about that, but suspect we won't be.

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Update (8:31 AM Eastern on 22 Apr): We knew this was bound to come when we wrote the above piece, but thought that at this point in the game, we could perhaps spare ourself the trouble of having to preempt it: the perennial straw man accusation by, um, progressive types that those who think like us are reactionary "traditionalists" who consider any deviation from Wagner's stage directions to be anathema.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that's a crock, and we can do no better than to quote ourself from a footnote to our above linked 2005 post.

[We] do not intend [by what we've above written] to even suggest that Wagner's stageworks ought to be realized by slavish adherence to his 19th-century ideas of mise en scène. What [we are] suggesting is that those stageworks ought to be realized by adhering assiduously to the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized vision as expressed in the music and text to create and shape the mise en scène. One can, for instance, at one extreme, as did Wieland Wagner in his brilliant 1951 Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold, choose to represent the seabed of the great primal body of water that opens the Ring by displaying onstage a totally abstract "frame" or "matrix" that lets the music in tandem with the text fill in the details for the audience's imagination, or, at the other extreme, display onstage through the magic of modern optical trickery a vast body of real water within which the Rheintöchter and Alberich do their cavorting as did Peter Hall in his 1983 Bayreuth production. What one cannot do and still be true to the dramatic spirit and sense of Wagner's original idealized vision as expressed in the music and text is to, for example, display onstage a simulacrum of a 20th-century hydroelectric dam and reservoir to represent that great primal body of water as did Patrice Chéreau in his 1976 Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold. [We] trust the difference will be immediately clear to the reader.