Merkel Attends 2017 Festival Opening July 25th opening night featured Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s powerful meditation on art!
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” as Mark Twain was reported to have said. After 40 years of listening, watching, reading, and studying all things Wagner, I can say that Twain was in his own way, right. Repeated listenings are the trick! And, after repeated listenings it does sound much better, in fact sublime.
Like any passion or hobby, one gets drawn in, and after a while, the time spent or invested becomes almost effortless as you seek out anything even remotely related to your fixation. Wagner hooked me in my late 20s. I was lucky enough to see several of Wagner operas at the San Francisco Opera, including two Der Ring des Nibelungen (Ring) cycles conducted by Edo de Waart (currently Music Director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra), as well as performances of Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. My travels abroad also enabled me to see productions in London and the venerable Vienna State Opera. But alas, I have yet to see Tannhäuser or any of Wagner’s early works which are seldom produced.
On July 25th, the 2017, month-long Bayreuth Festival–a Wagnerian Woodstock of sorts–began. It is held in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus which was opened for the first festival in 1876. Designed in part by Wagner himself the orchestra is seated almost underneath the stage so that the acoustics provide the perfect balance between orchestra and singers. Without air conditioning, however, it can become quite sweltering in the humid summer heat. But the “total art work” is what you go for anyway, so sweat is no bother.
The festival gathers the best musicians, conductors, and Wagnerian singers from throughout the world and while three Ring cycles are standard festival fare, Wagner’s other creations are rotated in and out, often introducing new set productions. This year, Chancellor Angela Merkel attended the opening night performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The Chancellor, along with her husband, are regular festival attendees.
I listen to at least one Ring cycle a year, usually around Wagner’s birthday, May 22nd. However, this year, I launched into the Ring on July 25th, to coincide with the festival opening. I would like to focus here a bit on the Ring cycle which consists of four operas:
- Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold);
- Die Walküre (The Valkyrie);
- Siegfried and;
- Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
The Rhinegold is usually referred to as a “prelude”. The Ring operas are seen over a period of successive evenings (although if there is more than one cycle going, the performances may be every third evening) and total roughly 17 hours in time. The power of the Ring is such that one needs a day of hiking and outdoor refreshment to contemplate and digest a performance of the evening before. This time off is by design, and of course no one wants to sit through 17 hours of opera, although I think it was done that way in Argentina once.
In a Ring cycle performance you will see the birth of a world, its withering and immolation, and hints of its rebirth, along with the renunciation of love and its redemption. (This is no comedy). Along the way there will be incest, giants, a dragon, magic, polygamy, deception, legalism, greed, and of course blood. Yes, Wagner created a world and a world order and let it wither into deceit, moral lassitude, and struggles for wealth and power (or both really).
Despite being difficult to work with and notoriously anti-semitic (who wasn’t in late 19th Century Europe?), Wagner had a vision of art that he gave us in several ways (his writings–which are numerous–but more concretely in his operas). His was a vision of gesamtkuntswerk. I’ll use the Wikipedia definition of gesamtkuntswerk, which describes it quite well:
“A Gesamtkunstwerk (German: [gəˈzamtˌkʊnstvɛʁk], translated as “total work of art”, “ideal work of art”, “universal artwork”, “synthesis of the arts”, “comprehensive artwork”, “all-embracing art form” or “total artwork”) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so.”
Fusing orchestral music, singing, drama and staging (architecture, scenery, lighting, positioning) into one is no mean feat, but perhaps it was a 19th century vision of virtual reality. Operas before Wagner’s dealt with bel canto (“beautiful song”) or in varying degrees emphasized singing and orchestra. While many operas come close to a total work of art, it was thanks to the sheer genius of the composer but likely not with gesamtkuntswerk in mind.
A byproduct of the total work of art as virtual reality is the leitmotif, an integral part of all Wagner’s operas, but particularly important in the Ring. In short, a leitmotif is,
“a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation.”
In the Ring, Wagner makes ample use of leitmotifs (see the list used in the Ring below). In fact, as many as 178 leitmotifs are used in the Ring. They combine, invert, and link together, many developing from the very first Ring opera, the prelude Das Rheingold. Often, they foreshadow events unbeknownst to the characters on stage. While 178 sounds substantial, repeated listenings of the Ring enable one to clearly recognize and virtually link almost all of them.
Since Wagner in his Ring cycle painted with such a broad philosophical brush in his vision of “total work of art”, his staging can be reinterpreted and set in just about any format. Originally, Wagner intended the Ring staging to be traditional, folkloric, with castles, gold, etc. Post WWII, the Bayreuth Festival went “minimalist” for all Wagner’s operas with little scenery and bleak lighting. Since then, productions have pitted capitalists against the workers, Nazis against the people, etc. The San Francisco Opera productions I saw were fairly traditional and much more along the lines of what Wagner had conceived as staging.
Recent Ring production concepts could include a struggle of global powers (China, Europe, U.S., Russia, Japan, etc.) and those emerging, or feature the World Trade Center towers as the final immolation of the old order. Despite the expansive choice of production concepts, some Ring and other Wagner opera productions have resorted in some far-fetched political ideas or staging (The laughable LA production of recent memory) which diluted the impact of the operas while confusing the audience. In these cases, the gesamtkunstwerk became a defused and deconstructed mess.
Of course so much of how a production is staged, or a work of art is interpreted centers on one’s view of the purpose or definition of art, an argument that has lasted centuries if not millennia. Should art inculcate for the sake of a political or philosophical viewpoint or struggle? Should art strive to depict beauty and truth in nature and the world? Or should art aim to achieve both? Deconstruct reality?
This argument(s) and its numerous derivations are beyond the scope of this short essay. Regardless of point of view on the purpose of art, I would only offer that when you boil the total work of art broth down, for the Ring, what should be left is the rawness of world creation and destruction. Also, I would argue that by Wagner’s own philosophical writings and operas, he viewed art as an exercise in identifying truth through beauty in the world with a dose of philosophical inculcation.
“Only the Strong know Love; only Love can fathom Beauty; only beauty can fashion Art. ” Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution
Wagner has had many devotees and detractors who are almost always polarized with little shared common ground. One of my favorite authors, James Joyce, was enthralled by Wagner’s efforts. With a beautiful tenor’s voice (I have heard him on some scratchy recordings but the voice rings out as beautiful) and a chance at a career in opera, Joyce nonetheless went for writing. Some could say we are lucky that he chose writing, but they have probably not read Finnegans Wake. I can say that I have read Finnegans Wake, which means I read all the words. But it would take another lifetime to begin to understand what Joyce said, and I am still glad he chose writing as a profession to communicate through art. And Joyce does not spare any references to Wagner. A humorous slight ala Twain from Joyce’s play The Exiles:
‘The piano is an addition since your time. I was just strumming out Wagner when you came. Killing time.”
There are numerous references to opera and Wagner, Puccini, and Verdi in Finnegans Wake, but they are too obscure to quote here. But they can be found. Joyce also makes extensive use of leitmotif in all his novels, particularly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The leitmotifs become more identifiable with repeated readings but they are there. Suffice it to say, that fellow travelers in art on different paths, Joyce and Wagner ended up in the same place.
Joyce, like Wagner, was seeking something new and different in his art form, perhaps a virtual reality or total work of art in words. But both Joyce and Wagner, to give us their best, used a world cycle to describe the pulse of humanity as a repetition that, while we may not be able to escape it, we should embrace and enjoy all the same.
With the 2017 Bayreuth Festival well underway, it is worth nothing that those lucky enough to obtain tickets for the 2017 festival, most likely did so in October of 2016. Yes, the reservation and raffle process begins 9 months before the festival. The registration process can be done at least partially online. I have listed the link to the site below. While you still may have a chance to grab a ticket for 2017, they will be pricey. Better to plan ahead for 2018.
Listed below are some links to some famous Ring scenes.
Siegfried, Act III, Scene 3, Prelude
Götterdämmerung, Hagen’s Chorus
Götterdämmerung, Siegfried’s Funeral March
