Introduction to Lars von Trier's "Deed of Conveyance"

As operatic commodities go, it would have been the ticket of a decade: a Bayreuth Ring cycle directed by Lars von Trier. Not surprisingly, then, von Trier's cancellation of the project has occasioned a good deal of second-guessing, particularly of the journalistic variety. Was he unable or unwilling to work with Wolfgang Wagner, the festival's famous—and famously intransigent—figurehead? Should he have steered clear of Bayreuth altogether, thus heeding the advice of Nike Wagner (Wolfgang's famous—and famously disaffected—niece)?¹ Or was von Trier simply in over his head and courageous enough to admit it? Undoubtedly, the production's failure has lent a retrospective cache to the project, particularly among Bayreuth's critics, and given the mixed bag of Wagner stagings to emerge from the house in recent years, it is indeed tempting to blame the festival leadership. But von Trier's explanation of why he withdrew from the project suggests something else, or at least something additional: he seems to have painted himself into a corner with his concept for the staging.

At first glance, Wagner and von Trier make for a curious pairing: the former a committed magician, willing to resort to any number of conjuring tricks in the creation of his musical and dramatic phantasmagorias; the latter a committed purist, the most famous signatory to the "Vow of Chastity" pledged by the Dogma 95 group of filmmakers. (It is as difficult as it is amusing to imagine Wagner vowing chastity of either the artistic or bodily sort.) Despite the reformist ambitions of Wagner's eager pamphleteering, there is little in his actual oeuvre that compares to the rigorous formal purity of von Trier's Dogville—which was filmed on an almost bare sound stage with only chalk outlines demarcating the sets—or his interest in natural lighting, handheld cameras, and purely diegetic music. Although von Trier and the school of Danish filmmakers associated with him have rarely stuck to the letter of their chastity vow, even its spirit seems perversely anathema to the lax triumphalism and the sly harmonic and dramaturgical technologies of Wagnerian trickery.

And yet the document reproduced here shows surprisingly little sign of ideological difference. In fact, von Trier explains his approach using talking points that may as well be Wagner's own; both his "intrinsic yearning towards and away from the medium [of opera]" as well as his insistence that "any stylization had to have a purpose" read like notes from Opera and Drama. And in what is surely a bone to the more conservative contingent among the Bayreuth audience, von Trier also promises that his staging would have been a "servant of [Wagner's] original intentions." He is a little cagey in explaining what that entails, but certainly his visual vocabulary—authentic "Northern European moss," spruce trees, and juniper bushes2—would seem to signal at least a partial return to the extreme naturalism of Otto Schenk's notorious production at the Met, or more recently Steven Wadsworth's at Seattle Opera. (In this, von Trier would also seem to share an interest in Wagnerian foliage with Bill Viola, whose recent videos for the Tristan Project similarly offered close-ups of greenery at regular intervals.)

But von Trier's seeming affinity with Wagner goes beyond the matter of stage design. These texts reveal a director who is both dedicated to a Wagnerian aesthetic of overwhelming emotional intensity and willing to pull out all the stops to achieve it. His comment that in using video projections to render Wagner's special effects it is "important to conceal the technology" reads like an implicit affirmation of Adorno—who charged that Wagner's oeuvre "strives unceasingly to spirit away its own origins in human labor."3 Ditto von Trier's insistence on not lighting the stage "democratically but—on the contrary—manipulating to the extreme." Indeed, von Trier's interest in concealment and manipulation requires (hidden) human labor on an extraordinarily Wagnerian scale. As he explains below, his concept of "enriched darkness" would have necessitated armies of stagehands equipped with night-vision goggles, continuously moving...