A century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche, an erstwhile partisan of Richard Wagner turned fervent detractor, scorned the bored, unmusical, self-important ”cultural Philistines” who attended Bayreuth, the festival that the composer created to the greater glory of his own music amid the gently rolling countryside of northern Bavaria.
”Eventually, for the edification of posterity,” Nietzsche wrote, ”one ought to have a genuine Bayreuthian stuffed, or better yet, preserved in spirit-for spirit is exactly what is lacking.”
Nietzsche would be forced to revise his description were he among the many thousands of pilgrims from 70 nations who are descending on the Wagnerian Holy Grail-to a town that also enjoys the dubious honor of having the largest cigarette factory in Europe-for this summer`s opera festival, one of the world`s oldest and greatest.
Over the years, those devout Wagnerites who assemble for their ritual fix of the Master`s music dramas have become a vocal, finicky, highly opinionated lot. Self-important they may still be, but spiritless? Not in the least.
The key word is ritual. The acolytes in their operatic finery walk the tree-shaded avenue leading up the fabled ”Green Hill” to the barnlike, red- brick Festspielhaus, as gawking locals at curbside applaud and cheer. At precisely 3:45 on performance afternoons, a brass ensemble gathers on a tiny outside balcony of the 2,000-seat theater to summon the faithful to their seats-hard wooden seats, eminently suitable for a worship service.
During the hourlong intervals that separate the acts of the Wagner works- no other composer`s music is performed at Bayreuth-passionate, informed, detailed discussions of the virtues and vices of each opera take place variously among groups of strolling Wagnerites, at the next table in the festival restaurant and cafeteria, or around the less formal wurst-and-beer stands adjacent to the Festspielhaus.
This summer`s new production of ”Der Ring des Nibelungen” by director Harry Kupfer and conductor Daniel Barenboim, the Big Event of Bayreuth `88, which began July 26, gave the assembled Wagner enthusiasts plenty to argue over-enough, indeed, to keep this modernist interpretation enmeshed in controversy for the planned five years of its festival run. (The 1988 ”Ring” has one more cycle to run, Aug. 23-28, which ends the festival.)
All this would seem to be more or less the intention of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer`s genial, 69-year-old grandson and artistic director of the festival. Bayreuth audiences, in Wolfgang`s view, clearly craved a boldly ideological new ”Ring” after the timid fiasco produced there by Peter Hall and Georg Solti in 1983 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Richard Wagner`s death.
Kupfer, an East German enfant terrible of the theater-he is principal stage director of the Komische Oper in East Berlin-was a likely choice for staging the 10th ”Ring of the Nibelung” at the mecca since 1876. Although his only previous Bayreuth stage experience had involved a darkly Brechtian interpretation of ”Der Fliegende Hollander,” Kupfer is known throughout operatic Europe as a director of arresting ideas, daring iconoclasm and sharply focused dramatic details. He is that rare creature, an operatic regisseur who actually knows and respects the music.
Kupfer made it clear in pre-performance interviews that his was to be a post-Chereau ”Ring”-refering to the once-derided, ultimately praised neo-Marxist ”Ring” first mounted at Bayreuth in 1976 by French director Patrice Chereau and French conductor Pierre Boulez. ”One can try to declare a larger dimension for the allegory,” Kupfer told a Bayreuth press conference. Kupfer did more than try. Indeed, the director and his designers (the sets were by Hans Schavernoch, the costumes by Reinhard Heinrich) swept away the musty mythology of the ”Ring,” purged the sprawling epic of its pretty, romantic trappings and made a serious, thoughtful, even provocative attempt to explore the relevance of the 112-year-old saga in the age of Chernobyl.
In so doing, they shifted the dramatic emphasis from the lofty gods of Valhalla to the deeply flawed and fallible mortals who also fall under the fateful curse attached to the nibelung`s ring. They treated the ”Ring” as a timeless, cyclical drama of greed, power, betrayal, sacrifice, self-sacrifice, love and redemption-one that must be repeated indefinitely so long as blind humanity fails to grasp its profound moral lesson.
At its best, this carefully rehearsed ”Ring” (Kupfer and Barenboim had worked with the singers and orchestra almost nonstop since mid-April, and the technical production had been two years in the making) represented a cogent amalgam of the spare, abstract playing style made famous at Bayreuth by Wieland Wagner`s postwar stagings, and iconographic leftovers from the Chereau, and, yes, even the Solti-Hall ”Rings.”
At its worst, the new ”Ring” suffered from stylistic inconsistency, visual gimmickry, hectic, even distracting, dramatic choreography, and a frustrating vagueness of intention. When Kupfer and his designers appeared to run out of ideas, they simply filled the stage with ”Star Wars”-style laser effects, or hauled out the smoke pots. Too often, what one saw confused, or, worse, contradicted, what one heard.
Now, a convincing case can certainly be made for a postnuclear, demythologized ”Ring”-one that reinterprets Wagner`s complex symbols and levels of allegorical meaning in terms a sophisticated modern audience can recognize, if not necessarily understand or agree with. The Seattle Opera last summer ventured a Wagner interpretation, by Francois Rochaix and Robert Israel, that was founded on similar premises.
But if one dug a little bit beneath the glitzy high-tech imagery (a neon elevator to transport the gods to Valhalla, a fallen rocket launcher as the dwarf Mime`s cave, a ruined sewer as the dragon Fafner`s lair, and so forth)
one could detect a fairly straightforward, if not exactly traditional, retelling of the ”Ring” narrative. Dramatically, at least, it proved brilliant, challenging, absorbing, never boring.
Musically, the performances under Daniel Barenboim (conducting his first complete ”Ring” in any theater) proved uneven, notable more for moments of lovingly nuanced lyricism than for firm, cohesive, thrusting drama. Barenboim`s slow, essentially Furtwanglerish conducting reveled in the chamber-music-like quality of Wagner`s most transparent orchestral pages, and the mellow Bayreuth acoustics responded gratefully to this sonority-oriented approach-more gratefully than they had to Solti`s blunter traversal of five years earlier.
Still, the somewhat variable quality of orchestral execution (the execution improved steadily over the four nights of the first cycle) and Barenboim`s teasing tendency to delay expressive climaxes into which Wagner expected a conductor to press steadily ahead suggested that the man whom the West German gossipmongers heavily favor to become the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra needs more stage experience with the ”Ring”
before he is able to affix a really firm musical imprint on the work.
(Barenboim, for his part, neither confirms nor denies the rumors, and the CSO management continues to maintain a strict silence.)
Nor did the singers-a roster of mostly inexperienced and/or anonymous newcomers mixed with a handful of holdovers from previous Bayreuth ”Rings”- invariably create a consistent, or consistently impressive, Wagner ensemble.
Seven artists looked and sounded as though they should be singing Wagner at the Wagner shrine. John Tomlinson infused the young Wotan`s music with gutsy baritonal authority, enacting Kupfer`s controversially ignoble conception of the chief god to the dramatic hilt. (This Wotan, sporting fur-collared trenchcoat and sunglasses, behaved more like an arrogant bully than Wagner`s complex, morally conflicted deity.)
Franz Mazura, despite some moments of dry ranting when delivering the Wanderer`s bemused, cynical outbursts, commanded the ”Siegfried” stage both vocally and dramatically. Nadine Secunde wielded a beautiful, shining soprano and acted with rare urgency and touching conviction as Sieglinde.
Graham Clark doubled appreciatively as a cunning punk-Loge and a prissy, hilarious Mime, depicted here as a bug-like mad scientist. Gunter von Kannen, his dwarf transformed by the ring`s power into a white-suited nuclear-energy czar, made a marvelously nasty Alberich.
Waltraud Meier was the memorable, vocally resplendent Waltraute, while the East German newcomer Eva-Maria Bundschuh, Kupferized into a platinum-blonde, Jean Harlow-style seductress, gave a firm accounting of Gutrune.
The Siegfrieds were split between two would-be Heldentenors-the West German, Siegfried Jerusalem, and the East German, Reiner Goldberg.
Jerusalem, a former Bayreuth Siegmund and Loge, may lack the baritonal timbre one wants to hear in a Siegfried. But his tenor has grown respectably in size and weight, he paced himself well and in his singing and acting conveyed well the hero`s evolution from sulky boy to conquering lover. Unfortunately, his stamina began to falter in the taxing ”Siegfried” love duet, where nearly all tenors come acropper.
Goldberg, who had lost his nerve and was fired from the Solti-Hall
”Ring” five years ago, wielded a whitish, medium-sized tenor, tight on top, neutral in expression. Goldberg sounded as if he has it in him to deliver an honorable Siegfried a few years hence, providing his musical manners improve. (He jumped ahead two bars in Siegfried`s Oath, a lapse Barenboim failed to cover.) The tenor`s acting called to mind critic Ernest Newman`s caustic observation that often Siegfried gives the ”impression of a man whose mental development was arrested at the age of 12 and has been in custody ever since.”
The single out-and-out disaster was Deborah Polaski, the much-vaunted new Brunnhilde of Bayreuth. The Midwest soprano sounded like a decent (at best)
Sieglinde who had gotten in way over her head with the taxing music that Wagner wrote for his chief Valkyrie. Her coltish impersonation could not disguise severe deficiencies above the staff, a top that turned wobbly under pressure and the lack of a solid column of sound. Chicago Symphony subscribers will hear her in October when she sings more Wagner with Barenboim conducting. Peter Hofmann, Bayreuth`s favorite Siegmund since the Chereau days, was rewarded with bouquets and cheers for his leathery-sounding, off-pitch singing. Linda Finnie`s unhectoring Fricka gained in vocal firmness and allure from ”Das Rheingold” to ”Die Walkure.”
Matthias Holle, a remarkably sensitive Fasolt in ”Das Rheingold,”
proved blackly menacing as the Hunding of ”Die Walkure.” Philip Kang, an unremarkable Fafner, reappeared in ”Gotterdammerung” as an unremarkable Hagen. As the giants, Holle and Kang were 20-foot puppets bearing real heads, swinging fake arms and gliding around the stage atop rollers hidden under their skirts.
In ”Das Rheingold,” Kurt Schreibmayer (Froh) and Bodo Brinkmann
(Donner) made a provincial pair of gods, although Brinkmann`s characterization of Gunther as a weak, unctuous politico was well drawn. Eva Johansson was the Freia (her rueful parting glance at Fasolt`s dead body was a nice touch), Anne Gjevang the dolorous Erda, rising from the earth via a convenient trapdoor.
Hilde Leidland, Annette Kuttenbaum and Jane Turner made a nicely well-matched trio of Rhinemaidens, cavorting (in ”Gotterdammerung”) in a fallen space station. Leidland chirped sweetly as the Waldvogel. Gjevang, Finnie and Lia Frey-Rabine were the wobbly Norns, mysterious crones who strung clotheslines over a tangle of road signs, or perhaps TV antennas.
Norbert Balatsch`s chorus, comprising some of the finest choristers of West and East Germany, drew deserved bravos at their collective curtain call. Perhaps Bayreuth`s new ”Ring of the Nibelung” simply will require several summers before hitting its artistic stride, as did the Chereau
”Ring” before it. Perhaps Kupfer and Schavernoch need more time in which to fine-tune dramatic and visual details. Perhaps the inevitable changes in casting will serve to bring into focus what now seems fuzzy, scattershot and unmotivated.
When it was clicking, musically and dramatically (which was most of the time), this ”Ring” supplied encouraging answers to the age-old question of how much contemporary baggage the ”Ring” can comfortably, indeed
meaningfully, bear. If not the historic reinterpretation advance reports had suggested, the new ”Ring” is an achievement of honorable intentions honorably realized, for the most part. It is an important addition to the postwar international ”Ring” annals, one that should serve Bayreuth well over the coming seasons.
And-who knows?-maybe even the Bayreuth booers and dissenters eventually will come around to admiring the merits of what Kupfer and Schavernoch have put on stage. A spirit of healthy partisanship lives on at Bayreuth. Nietzsche would have been confounded.
