Sounds & Fury

Poor Richard

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:43 PM Eastern on 19 May. See below.]

This coming Wednesday, 22 May, is THE bicentennial day of celebration of the birth of Richard Wagner and we don't know of a single on-the-boards major opera house staging of any of his stageworks worldwide that Wagner would recognize as being his own stagework, even remotely. Not one, the Bayreuther Festspiele included.

Poor Richard. We've done him a deep wrong.

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Update (3:43 PM Eastern on 19 May): Our above is not quite accurate. We forgot about the Met's Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (a Freudian act of forgetting, no doubt). As dreadful as that staging is, Wagner would most certainly recognize that staging to be a staging of a stagework of his own, and would, at first, just as certainly even marvel at the stage machinery responsible for its presentation.

Ghost Tracks Of Wagner In New York

Alex Ross, classical music critic of The New Yorker and author of the best-selling book The Rest is Noise, has written a fascinating piece for The New Yorker's Culture Desk that, as "a thought-experiment", "follow[s] ghost tracks of Wagner in New York, a city that he never saw and probably would have hated."

During his tempestuous life, Wagner lived in many cities across the Continent, leaving an indelible imprint on all of them. In Leipzig, Dresden, Paris, Zurich, Lucerne, Vienna, Munich, and Venice, among other places, you can go on Wagner walking tours, seeing the houses where he lived, the halls where he conducted, and the meeting-places where he held forth. In recent weeks, as a kind of thought-experiment, I have been following ghost tracks of Wagner in New York, a city that he never saw and probably would have hated. A case of authorial obsession is to blame for this peculiar undertaking: I am working on a book called Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music, an account of Wagner’s cultural impact. To be candid, the itinerary is often pretty dull, but it picks up interest toward the end, as traces emerge of hidden links between the Rockefellers and the Holy Grail.

Read the full text here.

Of Rotten Eggs And Eurotrash

Howls of indignation could be heard emanating from the champions of and cheerleaders for Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater at the decision by Deutsche Oper am Rhein to cancel its new Burkhard C. Kosminski Nazi-themed staging of Wagner's Tannhäuser because of angered objections by certain segments of the opera-going public. "Deutsche Oper Am Rhein capitulates to morons who never even saw the production," sputtered one prominent Eurotrash champion, a card-carrying member of the "progressive" crowd whose members champion The New in opera stagings of canonical operas provided, of course, that those new stagings bear no resemblance to nor have any connection with anything the opera's creator could have had in mind.

Well, as one doesn't have to actually eat a rotten egg to judge it rotten, one doesn't have to actually see a Eurotrash staging of a canonical opera to judge it Eurotrash and therefore self-indulgent, self-serving crap no matter how well executed. A descriptive sentence or ten describing the physical staging is, in most cases, all that's required to make that determination.

And so it is in this case.

The New York Post Does Bayreuth

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

Congratulations, James! You've earned it.

An Introduction To Opera

On a heavily populated online opera forum, a member asked:

I am curious about people's first recordings of opera (I mean the first two or three, not the first thirty). What were they? At what age did you first listen to them? Were they a gift, bought, borrowed, or stolen (OK, you don't have to answer the last one)? What impact did they have on you? How have they held up over the years, as you have heard and learned more?

That provoked a (predictable) deluge of responses. Here' ours:

My proper introduction to opera, per se, occurred quite late (viz., when I was in my early 30s) and quite by accident (a double entendre as will presently be made clear).

I grew up within a musical milieu peopled by serious-minded musicians, instrumentalists all, who regarded, as did I, the whole domain of opera to be nothing other than fodder fit only for the delectation of musical groundlings and the proper butt of uncharitable jokes. In my younger years I'd occasionally tune into the Texaco Saturday Met opera radio broadcasts (which almost invariably turned out to be something from the Italian or French rep) and despite Milton Cross's enticing intros never managed to last beyond the first half-hour or so of the first act so trashy if superficially pretty and appealing did it all sound to me.

Fast-forward to 1970. I've been laid up for the better part of a year courtesy of a near-death-dealing motorcycle accident. Bad business that, but it's not all terrible. I've plenty of time on my hands, and I'm taking full advantage of it by reading like mad and listening to dozens of LPs I'd bought one fevered afternoon of record buying at a Sam Goody 50%-off sale some few years previous but still haven't gotten around to auditioning. (Not as ridiculous as it sounds. I bought over 250 LPs that out-of-control afternoon.)

One of the albums I'd plucked from Goody's shelves was the then-new Solti-Decca release of the first _Ring_ opera, _Das Rheingold_, an opera of which I never before heard so much as a measure and a recording I bought not because I had any intention of listening to the opera itself (what an idea!) but because that then-new recording had quickly gained a reputation among audio freaks, of which I was one, as being a kick-ass test of one's speaker system.

So one afternoon of my enforced confinement I pull the still un-played _Rheingold_ album from its place of storage, think to myself, "Forgot about this. Time I gave it a whirl to see just how great these speakers of mine really are," remove its still-intact shrink-wrap, and start the first LP going on the turntable.

With hobbling gait I almost make it back to my comfy armchair when the soles of my feet more than my ears become aware of that solitary, 16', four-measure opening E-flat pedal, and my first thought is that something's gone badly awry with my stereo system. I mean, no opera can possibly begin like that. After assuring myself that my stereo system is operating just fine, I start the LP going again, this time no longer intending to test my speakers but intending instead to find out just what sort of opera it is that can begin in such an un-opera-like manner.

One-hundred-and-thirty-six measures later (i.e., the full length of the _Rheingold_ prelude) such is my astonishment that I'm struck virtually dumb. I simply can't believe what I've just heard. No composer — not the divine Wolfgang, not even great Bach himself — should be able to do that much with such a paucity of harmonic and melodic material stretched over 136 measures; essentially not much more than a single arpeggiated major triad repeated over and over.

Hobbling back to the turntable as quickly as I'm able, I start the LP going again at the beginning, and again listen, more carefully this time. I end up replaying those opening 136 measures some dozen times before I let the first of the three Rheintöchter finish the opening phrase of her song. And when she does, further astonishment. She and her two sisters are bantering among themselves in dramatic real time, their banter sounding as natural as the dialogue of a spoken stage play, but they're all...singing! And the singing is lovely. Not bel canto lovely, but a different kind of sung lovely I've no name for because I've never heard anything like it before. Then a nasty-sounding baritone comes on the scene and interrupts their playful banter with some rather less playful banter of his own, also sung, and his singing, like the singing of the Rheintöchter, is in dramatic real time and as natural as spoken dialogue in a stage play and, in its own jarring way, electrifying. Inseparably intertwined with all this rather than merely accompanying it as it would in any respectable opera is a huge orchestra making rich continuous comment on all the goings-on in the manner of the chorus in a classical Greek drama, enriching and deepening immeasurably both drama and meaning, the gestalt effect positively riveting.

At this point it becomes abundantly clear to me that, in terms of opera, I'm not on solid ground anymore but hopelessly adrift in waters wonderful strange and considerably over my head. This is a new and gripping musico-dramatic experience; one which bears but the most superficial resemblance to opera as I understand it. No recitative, no arias, no duets, trios, quartets, or choruses. Nothing from and among the singers but a single continuous stream of back-and-forth natural-as-speech sung dialogue, the whole interwovenly fleshed out and deepened by the huge orchestra acting as the work's principal "voice". As I've said, astonishing. And as I continue listening almost each succeeding new measure brings with it something new to astonish and by opera's end I'm utterly floored by the evocative and eloquent magic of it all.

That initial encounter with Wagner and his _Ring_ tetralogy set the stage, so to speak, for my subsequent Wagner attachment, and the deeper I immersed myself in the _Rheingold_, and over the ensuing weeks, months, and years in the entire _Ring_ tetralogy and then deeper still in _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_, that which initially captivated the Wagner-naïve musical snob continued, as it continues still, to captivate the seasoned and informed devotee I became. While in strictly musical terms Bach and Mozart are still my ne plus ultra composers, transcendent geniuses both, in musico-dramatic terms I now know there has never been, nor is there ever again likely to be, a genius as all-encompassing prodigious and transcendent as Richard Wagner who today still bestrides the domain of opera like a colossus, and whose music-dramas have since shaped or influenced the course not only of opera, but of all Western music.

Grin And Bear It

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up (Götterdämmerung)

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

And so it goes.

The Met's François Girard Staging Of Parsifal

We watched the entire Met HD film of its production of the François Girard staging of Wagner's Parsifal the other night courtesy of a YouTube bandit — Blessed be he or her! — who posted a digital copy of the Met's HD film to YouTube spread across three HD videos, one for each act (all of which have now been taken down on a just and justified copyright infringement complaint by the Met) and were both surprised and hugely disappointed by the staging. From the very brief snippets we'd seen of that staging previously, all of which gave promise of its being truly splendid, and from all the enthusiastic talk about it on online opera forums, opera blogs, and in much if not all the mainstream media, we suppose we expected far too much. The very best we can say about the staging is that it's not Eurotrash as monsieur Girard at least recognized his responsibility and obligation to Wagner and Parsifal by trying, to the extent of his gift, to realize the full spirit and sense of Wagner's vision and concept rather than impose a vision and concept of his own devising. The resulting staging, however, is, in our not so humble opinion, seriously flawed and in places just out-and-out off the rails, and while not Eurotrash, is badly misguided and largely ineffective. What rescues the production are the sterling music-making and gripping onstage dramatic performances by all involved which music-making and dramatic performances are so strong as to almost convince one the staging is on an equal par — or so we imagine is the reason of this staging's widespread acclaim.

Too bad (for us). We were really looking forward to and had high hopes for this.

Backstage At The Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House streamed live today a ten-hour video of the backstage goings-on at the theater that was truly fascinating. The day closed with a prerecorded simultaneous look onstage and backstage at an actual performance of the full Act III of Die Walküre (the current Keith Warner production for the ROH that, if this act is representative of the whole, is a mildly Eurotrashy one more wrongheaded or just plain stupid than outrageous for the most part) and it was a real eye-opener to see the almost impossible coordination, mechanical and human, required among the 100-plus stage personnel to make it all come off onstage seamlessly and, as far as the audience was concerned, seemingly effortlessly (pay special attention to the Deputy Stage Manager (DSM): the amazing Sarah who calls out all the cues).

For those of you who missed today's webcast this part of it can be seen in full here. We think you'll find the viewing well worth the time spent.

The Glyndebourne Tristan: An Object Lesson In Doing Things Right

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 3:47 PM Eastern on 27 Dec to restore a one-word but important qualifying parenthetical and to clean up some overblown language.]

The Guardian has posted until 6 January 2013 videos of the 2007 revival of Glyndebourne's 2003 Nikolaus Lehnhoff über-minimalist staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Act I, Act II, Act III), a staging that's an object lesson in just how powerful a Wagner music-drama can be when the opera director stays out of Wagner's way by doing — and doing only — what he ought to be doing: viz., discovering, to the utmost capacity of his gift, the most vivid and compelling way to realize onstage the full sense and spirit of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions), as we've put it previously. This holds true even when the resulting staging turns out first-rate but is imperfectly realized and dotted here and there with (mostly) small but outright conceptual blunders as it is in this case. Of course, it doesn't hurt matters in this case that the cast is also first-rate, both as singers and as actors, and that the performance of one of that cast, Nina Stemme as Isolde, is the equal of every iconic performance known to us of that impossible role. On the other hand, it doesn't help much (and most especially in this music-drama) that the conductor, Jiří Bĕlohlávek, turns in a less than profound reading of the score; competent, conscientious, and lively as it may be. Negatives notwithstanding, all in all a thoroughly worthwhile and rewarding expenditure of some five hours of our time. We suspect it might prove to be for you as well.

The "Creative Soul" Of The Opera Director

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

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

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

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

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

And so ought it to be in saecula saeculorum.

Beczala's "Black List"

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

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

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

To which we responded:

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

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

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

To which we responded:

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

Letter From Bayreuth

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

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

Kaufmann On Regietheater

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

Well, on second thought, maybe we do.

Staging Wagner: From Wagner To The Birth Of Eurotrash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

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

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

Read the full text here.

A Brief Wagner Corrective

Although it hardly meets the burden of its title, Alex Ross's newly posted article for The New Yorker's Culture Desk section, "The Case For Wagner In Israel", is a brief but incisive commentary that ought to be read by all whose understanding of Wagner is mired in the pop image of this complex artist as a composer of music characterized by "grandiosity, bombast, anything that makes a loud noise and goes on for a very long time," as Mr. Ross put it, and that he was Hitler’s favorite composer.

The artist who fired the imaginations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Cather, Kandinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Eisenstein, among hundreds of others, cannot be summed up in a few adjectives.

[...]

Wagner must take some of the blame for the reductionist image that prevails in the public mind. It was his spiteful anti-Semitism that has caused so many people to draw a straight line from the “Ring of the Nibelung” to Hitler.

Read the full text here.

Wagner's Huge Blunder

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:48 AM Eastern on 25 Sep. See below.]

We've never given the close attention to Wagner's three canonical operas (for none of which have we ever so much as glanced at a score) — Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin — that we've given Wagner's music-dramas (with the exception of Die Meistersinger which, while recognizing it as a masterpiece, we've never been able to "connect" with because entirely too sunny and diatonic a work for our tastes and temperament) and have for decades been mildly dismissive of all three calling them Wagner's practice pieces on his way to becoming Wagner.

On our recently learning that Anna Netrebko is scheduled to sing the Lohengrin Elsa in Dresden in 2016 (with Thielemann on the podium), we were moved to again listen to the work which we haven't listened to for a great many years and on doing so were struck anew by its remarkable Act II Prelude and first scene which for the first time in Wagner's oeuvre give unmistakably clear intimation of the Wagner to be — specifically, the Wagner of the Ring (that Act II Prelude and first scene is almost a working draft of the Act II Prelude and first scene of Götterdämmerung) — and by a huge blunder by Wagner that, in a single stroke, turned Lohengrin into another German Romantic opera instead of the perfect operatic version of a tragic fairytale of the Hans Christian Andersen sort it could otherwise have been embodying all the profundity that lies at the heart of all great fairytales: Wagner had Lohengrin not only fall in love with Elsa, the woman he was sent to save, but actually marry her — a double-whammy blunder that shows a Wagner still a fair way off from becoming Wagner.

So, why is it a huge blunder? Because it instantly transforms Lohengrin, a divinely charged and empowered personage, into an ordinary (if extraordinarily noble and brave) human being with all the presumptive foibles native to the species. More Wagnerian would it have been to have Elsa unrequitedly in love with Lohengrin and ultimately come to realize that such a love is tragically impossible of fulfillment or consummation and must of necessity be unrequited and rebuked and conclude with her dreams brought to an end by Lohengrin's ineluctable departure and return to Monsalvat and the Grail, that departure and return untimely brought about and hastened by her betrayal of her vow to never question Lohengrin as to his name, lineage, or from whence he came.

That's the profound stuff of great fairytales. What the still-not-yet- Wagner Wagner gave us instead is but the sentimental stuff of conventional opera.

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Update (1:48 AM Eastern on 25 Sep): We've received a number of eMails pointing out that Wagner intended the Lohengrin-Elsa falling in love thing to evoke the Zeus-Semele myth and that the Eros-Psyche myth is another parallel. We're perfectly aware of all this but maintain our above expressed opinion nevertheless. It's our position that Wagner's idea here was both ill-conceived and ill-executed as drama. Wagner set his Lohengrin tale against a real-world German-historical background and was even compulsively insistent on historical accuracy in the settings and costumes and then attempted to insinuate centrally that which belongs entirely to the fantastic world of myth and fairytale and, in our less than humble opinion, managed the merger quite clumsily. What he ended up with as consequence was neither fish nor fowl but a German Romantic opera with its supernatural component distorted and crudely integrated dramatically.

As we've above suggested, Lohengrin is, after all, but a practice work by Wagner on his way to becoming Wagner.

Putting Aside The Greasy Kid Stuff

Finally! The great and glorious Anna Netrebko is going to put aside the greasy kid stuff and get serious. She's scheduled to sing the Lohengrin Elsa in 2016 in Dresden (with the equally great and glorious Christian Thielemann on the podium). Can Sieglinde and Eva be far behind?

O 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up

Thanks to the Met and PBS we've now seen all four parts of Robert Lepage's staging of Wagner's Ring and so it seems at least a brief summing-up is in order concerning it. Yes, we're well aware we didn't do even a bullet-point review of Götterdämmerung. There was simply nothing there to impel or compel us to undertake the tiresome and unrewarding task. Suffice it to say that it was pretty much more of the same-old-same-old with Mr. Lepage's employment of Le Machine ranging from his trademark stupefying Busby Berkeley symmetricality thing to the occasionally evocative to the at least visually attractive to the unobtrusive and un-tricky, to the totally flat and boring as at the close of Götterdämmerung. And more of the same-old-same-old as well with Mr. Lepage's seeming habit of leaving his singer-actors to their own devices dramatically for the most part sans any "directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision" as we put it previously. The singer-actors all gave their professional best which is considerable as did the Met Male Chorus but we would single out only Jay Hunter Morris for his convincing Siegfried, and Iain Paterson and Wendy Bryn Harmer for making come fully alive Gunther and Gutrune, respectively; two too often innocuous characters as they're typically sung and played. As for conductor Fabio Luisi, his reading of the score gave full due to Wagner rhetorically and stylistically notwithstanding that Maestro Luisi tends to run rather too fleet through some of the dramatic high points and climaxes not the least of which is the climax of the three intertwining leitmotifs that form Götterdämmerung's — and the tetralogy's — close.

There. Don't ever say we didn't review Götterdämmerung.

Regarding the staging of the entire tetralogy, if one were inclined to be kind about it one might say Mr. Lepage is, by slow degrees, learning how to best employ the Frankenstein contraption that's at the very heart of his staging of the Ring. The problem with that, however, is the very way in which Mr. Lepage seems to approach everything concerning the employment of the contraption. His focus seems to be on what he can get the contraption to do that will result in some visually arresting effect at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption can best be exploited to express, frame, or support the dramatic content to hand. It's a tail wagging the dog approach that's all but guaranteed to come up with the wrong way to go pretty much every time.

Of course, saying that Mr. Lepage is by slow degrees learning how to best employ Le Machine is not saying very much and is of little comfort given Le Machine's appalling initial and ongoing cost. The Met (and its audiences) deserve far more and far better considering the huge investment involved. On the other hand, occasionally evocative or visually attractive or unobtrusive and un-tricky employment of Le Machine is preferable to their opposites and since it's an almost sure bet that Le Machine and Mr. Lepage or his Lepage-trained surrogate will be with the Met for the next decade or so of Ring performances, we suppose the Met (and its audiences) ought to be thankful for small favors as there's but one other way out for the Met from under Mr. Gelb's colossal economic and artistic blunder: cease throwing good money after bad, have done with it entirely, and live to try again another day the wiser for the experience.

But we all know that's not going to happen, don't we.

Of course we do.

And so it goes.

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Siegfried

We're going to make brief, bullet-point work of this as writing our music-drama-by-music-drama commentary on the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen has become a most tiresome and unrewarding exercise. So, in brief and bullet-pointed:

⚫ In Acts I and II of Siegfried, Le Machine showed that it could be something more and better than it's been so far and actually create some genuinely evocative settings while at the same time accommodating the singer-actors by functioning as a stage for all their actions (not just a few tricks) instead of as a mere 21st-century high-tech version of a 19th-century scenery flat in front of which the singer-actors can do their thing. Most impressive. On the other hand, the very same genuinely evocative settings are achievable without having to construct a special piece of machinery costing $16M to achieve them.

⚫ In Act I, and for the first time in this tetralogy so far, it appeared the singer-actors were not left to their own devices but had their every movement shaped by a director who, for the most part, seemed to know his business. Also for the first time in this tetralogy so far, the singer-actors actually faced the person with whom they were exchanging sung dialogue instead of singing their lines facing the audience bel canto opera style (and it's about bloody time, too!). Perhaps the director was responsible for that as well.

⚫ The Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris) actually looked (and acted) every inch a Siegfried, and although his fine voice is not terribly big it was big enough and used with intelligence.

⚫ The dragon looked a bit silly but we've seen worse.

⚫ Conductor Fabio Luisi, treating this music-drama as the Ring's scherzo as it is, made a fine if just a tad too-fleet job of it, and Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Gerhard Siegel (Mime), Bryn Terfel (The Wanderer), Eric Owens (Alberich), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Hans-Peter König (Dragon/Fafner), and Patricia Bardon (Erda) all did themselves proud.

⚫ Memo To The Powers That Be: Fire the idiot who suggested Mime should wear spectacles (complete with a jeweler's loupe, no less). Fire as well the idiot who suggested that Erda be blond and blue-eyed and leave her subterranean abode to stroll about with The Wanderer.)