"Faithful, all too Faithful": Fidelity and Ring Stagings

Fidelity: the very word carries the aura of virtue. Fidelity is defined as the quality of being faithful, whether it involves fidelity to one's spouse or "high fidelity," the term long used to denote the accuracy of an audio reproduction to its source. But can too much fidelity be a bad thing? Anyone who has struggled through Wagner's prose writings as translated by William Ashton Ellis knows that Ellis's determination to render Wagner's idiosyncratic German in a style as close as possible to the original resulted in something barely comprehensible. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner's English-born son-in-law, wrote to Cosima: "I must talk to you some other time about Ellis's translations. I did not mean, as you appear to think, that they are not faithful; but they are not English. No Englishman who does not understand German can understand this Ellis-style. Ellis is faithful enough to the word—too faithful; but not to the sense."¹

It is from here that the title of my article, "Faithful, all too Faithful," is taken. And I want to suggest that in the context of stage production also, an excess of fidelity is not necessarily a good thing. So what exactly do we mean by fidelity in this context? Fidelity to the original, faithful to the stage directions, faithful to the composer's intentions: these are the mantras repeated over and over again. But do they not beg as many questions as they answer? How do we know precisely what the composer's intentions were? Are the composer's real intentions encapsulated in those stage directions? And even if they are, are we obliged to follow them literally in pursuit of some chimera of authenticity?

Hans Pfitzner, a man of deeply conservative views, called on Hitler's Reich to preserve Wagner's stage directions as a sacrosanct ingredient of the works, demanding "a government law to protect works of art from willful distortion by institutions dedicated to the service of art."² As Wieland Wagner noted, Pfitzner's demand endeavors to protect works of art "with methods more normally associated with the police."³ The very proposition displays not only a fascist mentality but also a complete lack of understanding of the nature of theater.

In the aftermath of the iconoclastic production of the Ring at Bayreuth by Patrice Chéreau in 1976, the Bayreuth management attempted to contextualize the scandal it caused by printing in the following year's brochure a number of protests articulated over the previous century. These protests provide a useful starting point for an examination of the concept of fidelity. In 1928, for example: "The description of the setting and actions on stage at the beginning of act 1 of Die Walküre is just as eternally valid as the notes in the score and the words of the poem."⁴ In 1935, the formulation was more peremptory, not to say threatening: "Should it not be the supreme law, especially in Bayreuth, to obey the Master's will?"⁵ Wieland's own prescription, offered in 1951, to "strike out in new directions, directions ostensibly more in keeping with the spirit of the age,"⁶ was questioned by the traditionalist challenge: "What does 'the spirit of the age' have in common with the universal and eternally human ideas implicit in Wagner's dramas?"⁷ By the time of Chéreau's production in 1976, however, Wieland himself was being invoked as the incarnation of the Wagnerian tradition: "We need a new Wieland to cleanse these Augean stables and guide us back to the imperishable values inherent in the Ring."⁸

Looking back, it is amusing now to see Chéreau himself held up by conservative critics as a paragon, while the latest horror, be it Richard Jones, Peter Konwitschny, or Keith Warner, is excoriated. In order to contextualize my discussion of some of these productions, some theory and history would be helpful. The first point to be made is that the entire idea of interpretation in opera is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The reason for this...