"The Wagner Identity"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Aug. 15, 2011
My last dispatch from the eternal artistic battleground of Bayreuth,
Germany, the site of the Richard Wagner
festival, was filed in 2004, the year of the
rotting bunny. The late Berlin director
Christoph Schlingensief roiled Bayreuth
that summer by ending his production of
“Parsifal” with footage of decomposing
rabbits. I thought that it was the most
pointlessly chaotic opera staging I’d ever
seen; others acclaimed it as genius. Wagner being Wagner, the truth undoubtedly
lies everywhere in between.
Much has happened in the meantime.
Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s younger
grandson, who directed or co-directed the
Bayreuth Festival from 1951 until 2008,
died last year, at the age of ninety. The
reins are now held by Wolfgang’s daughters, from different marriages: Eva Wagner-Pasquier, a sixty-six-year-old veteran
of the international opera business; and
Katharina Wagner, thirty-three years
younger, a director with avant-garde tendencies. Bayreuth is promising to change
its secretive ways—to achieve “total transparency,” in Katharina’s phrase. Performances are now regularly broadcast; special
events are held for children and the masses;
exhibitions will shed new light on the Wagner family’s not exactly obscure Nazi
past. (During opening week this year, the
Israel Chamber Orchestra played Wagner’s
“Siegfried-Idyll” at Bayreuth City Hall, suspending the unofficial Israeli ban on performing Wagner; Katharina sat in the front
row.) The Schlingensief uproar was no
fluke; almost every year, boos resound
through Wagner’s theatre when a new production is introduced. This summer, which
saw “Tannhäuser” staged in a dystopian
waste-recycling facility, was no exception.
Gratifyingly, Bayreuth’s idiosyncratic
rituals remain: the red-carpet procession of
politicians and celebrities on opening day
(Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor,
is an avid Wagnerian); the intense aesthetic combat of the curtain calls, with
conservatives booing and progressives bravoing; the provocations of Nike Wagner,
the apostate daughter of Wolfgang’s genius brother, Wieland (“I’m surprised that
Angela Merkel has let herself become so
closely mixed up in the politically risky undertaking that is the Bayreuth complex,”
Nike told Der Spiegel, in advance of this
year’s festival); and the agreeable boredom
of the town itself, which forces you to pay
heed to the work at hand. In short, Wagner’s idea for Bayreuth—a city overrun by
art—is intact. Every beer-soaked summer
rock festival is merely a pale imitation.
The new "Tannhäuser" is the work of the forty-two-year-old Berlin director Sebastian Baumgarten, with sets by the Dutch installation artist Joep van
Lieshout. Dominating the stage is a van
Lieshout creation known as “The Technocrat,” first exhibited in 2003 and 2004;
it presents, in the artist’s words, a “closed
circuit of food, alcohol, excrement, and
energy.” Large tanks for the distillation of
alcohol and the production of bio-gas are
surrounded by a three-level structure
through which dozens of workers, dressed
in tank tops and bright-colored pants, circulate. This is meant to represent the orderly, idealistic world of the Wartburg,
the fortress at the center of Wagner’s plot.
The contrasting realm of the goddess
Venus, whose orgiastic house parties waylay the troubadour Tannhäuser, takes the
form of a circular cage inhabited by furry,
Neanderthal-like figures and several giant
tadpoles. Projected all around is an array
of supplementary texts, ranging from
fragments of Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic
Education of Man” to citations of the German heavy-metal band Rammstein.
No, I didn’t understand it, either. Even
veterans of the relentlessly experimental
German-opera scene had trouble making
sense of the affair. Some members of the
audience had trouble seeing it at all; one
crucial turn of events, in which the pure-hearted maiden Elisabeth sacrifices herself
by throwing herself into the bio-gas tank,
was invisible from some seats on the right-hand side of the auditorium. Such are the
perils of staging an opera inside a preëxisting art installation. Still, the production
proved more pleasantly befuddling than
aggressively confounding. Baumgarten is
an imaginative director, as I know from
having seen his haunting version of Massenet’s “Werther” in Berlin (Christmas
Eve in a laundromat), and he injected moments of human drama into van Lieshout’s
creepy environment: Tannhäuser’s desperate narrative of his plea for salvation in
Rome was played almost straight, with
distraught gestures. Other choices seemed
random, such as having several dozen audience members sit on either side of the
stage; they simply looked uncomfortable,
and a few appeared to be edging their
chairs backward as the evening went on.
The performance fell below the Bayreuth standard. Lars Cleveman, the Tannhäuser, sang valiantly but showed signs of
strain a few minutes into his first scene;
mercifully, the second verse of his Hymn
to Venus had been cut. Stephanie Friede,
the Venus, struggled to control an edgy,
errant soprano. Camilla Nylund, as Elisabeth, had spells of quiet, quivering intensity, but tended flat. The vocal standouts
were Michael Nagy, a mellifluous Wolfram, and Günther Groissböck, a timber-voiced Landgraf. The conductor Thomas
Hengelbrock, known for his work in early
music, drew lucid, propulsive playing from the orchestra.
The following night, Katharina Wagner revived her 2007 production of “Die
Meistersinger,” which aroused enormous
controversy at its début and still angers
much of the audience. It is a remarkable
act of filial—not to mention great-grand-filial—rebellion. Wolfgang’s stagings of
“Meistersinger” strove to minimize the
opera’s nationalist elements, its thunderous salutations to “holy German art.”
Katharina, by contrast, brings the ominousness to the surface, completely upending Wagner’s moral scheme. In the
final scene, Hans Sachs, the wisest and most soulful of the Mastersingers of
Nuremberg, is transformed into an absolute villain, a Fascist conjurer out of
Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician.” Sixtus Beckmesser, the pedantic villain of the piece, emerges as an outcast
hipster hero, his mangled contribution to
the climactic song contest refashioned as
defiant performance art. At the end, he
cowers in terror, and then flees.
Katharina possesses an arresting dramatic imagination, and manages to lighten
her design with flashes of wit: a celebrity-conductor figure keeps caressing his hair;
a man in a giant Wagner mask walks
around, shaking his head. The disgust of
Bayreuth conservatives is amusingly anticipated when a gala audience attacks Beckmesser and swoons over the traditional
stylings of Sachs’s protégé, Walther von
Stolzing. At the heart of the concept is the
potent implication that rebels can turn
into reactionaries at a moment’s notice.
All the same, this staging, like Baumgarten’s “Tannhäuser,” adheres to an insular, involuted theatrical philosophy that
undermines the stated aim of opening the
festival to the outside world. (The news
that Frank Castorf, yet another Berlin deconstructionist, is in negotiations to direct
the next “Ring” at Bayreuth, in 2013, suggests that the new regime is not really inclined to change course.) Most problematic, Wagner’s music becomes an ironic
soundtrack rather than the source of the
drama. Casting for this “Meistersinger”
seemed almost an afterthought: Burkhard
Fritz, as Walther, and James Rutherford,
as Sachs, had the measure of their parts,
but neither fully overcame the bustle of the
orchestra, which Sebastian Weigle led in
erratic fashion. Perhaps by design, Adrian
Eröd, a live-wire Beckmesser, walked away with the performance.
Just when I was beginning to think that Bayreuth had lost its way—each visit to
the festival seems to bring such a Valley
Forge moment—an unlikely savior arrived
in the form of Hans Neuenfels, a director
with a long history of scandal. (His most
notorious feat was a Salzburg “Fledermaus” featuring cocaine-snorting Nazis.)
Last year, Neuenfels came to Bayreuth
with a “Lohengrin” that placed the action
in a laboratory setting, with the chorus
costumed as rats. Boos inevitably erupted.
Yet the Neuenfels “Lohengrin,” which
was revived on the third day of the festival, turns out to be an austere, elegant, darkly
enchanting piece of theatre. The interpolation of the rats—fantastically colored
creatures, prancing in front of antiseptic
walls—strips the opera of kitsch and turns
it into a surreal fable midway between the
Brothers Grimm and Kafka. At the same
time, it preserves the romance of the story,
so that Klaus Florian Vogt and Annette
Dasch—portraying, respectively, the mystery knight Lohengrin and his fatally
questioning bride, Elsa—could assume
fairy-tale poses with fresh conviction.
In contrast to the visual barrage of the
preceding nights, this production trained
attention on the singers, who made the
most of the opportunity. Vogt, a forty-one-year-old native of Schleswig-Holstein who had a career as a horn player before belatedly discovering his vocal gift,
gave a dreamlike performance, harking
back to the unforced power of early-twentieth-century Wagner tenors. He sang
with untiring strength of tone, uncommonly crisp diction, and a gleaming,
youthful timbre. Dasch lacked Vogt’s ease
in the upper register, but her embodiment
of Elsa was sweetly impassioned throughout. Petra Lang was a properly searing Ortrud, Tómas Tómasson a bit weaker as
Telramund. The trenchant young bass
Georg Zeppenfeld extracted an unlikely
psychodrama from the largely expository
role of King Heinrich; he was similarly robust as Pogner in “Meistersinger,” and has
a major career in front of him. The
Bayreuth chorus, under the leadership of
Eberhard Friedrich, lived up to its exalted
reputation, as it did in “Tannhäuser” and
“Meistersinger.”
Andris Nelsons, the rapidly ascendant
Latvian maestro, conducted “Lohengrin”
with blazing intensity. He often favored
kinetic tempos—Act III opened with a
precisely controlled explosion—yet he
knew when to apply the brakes and savor
the grandeur of the Wagnerian landscape.
In Act II, after Elsa sings “Es gibt ein
Glück, das ohne Reu’” (“There is a happiness without regret”), Nelsons lingered
lovingly over the wistful postlude, as if trying to stop the music from
sinking into the gloom that ensues. (“Thus
evil enters this house,” Telramund soon
intones.) Great Wagner performances
such as this give the sensation of looking
down at the world from a sadly omniscient
height, like an empathetic scientist observing rats in a cage.