Twilight at Bayreuth

RALPH GUSTAFSON Twilight at Bayreuth This is an account of failure at Bayreuth, the town in West Germany which is the stronghold of Richard Wagner's music and of Wagnerian tradition, now celebrating the hundredth year of the opening of its festival theatre by Wagner himself. In 1876 the Festspielhaus was launched with panoply and princes and the musically great - Lisit, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, Gounod- and there on the little green hill was heard the first complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen, that sequence of four music dramas known for short as the Ring, and this season pretty well brought to ruin. Wolfgang Wagner, the grandson of the composer, is currently in charge. My Wagnerian memory goes back to primordial times: Marcel Journet singing Wotan against the sputtering unpredictable fireworks of the Paris Opera for his fiery farewell to his daughter Briinnhilde in ,Die Walkiire; back to Sigrid Onegin as the pleading Waltraute in Gotterdammerung given in Munich at the old National Theatre bombed to bits: So, dumped, the bombs. Ach,so! On London, Munich, down Where the birds sing Naming the ruins. Man bears just so much ecstasy, And thunders in his cowl. I heard Melchior, Frida Leider, Schorr, Lotte Lehmann, Muller, and Rethberg, at the Met in New York, at Covent Garden in London under the conductors Furtwangler and Beecham who told the chattering audience to 'shut up,' and I have seen recent performances: Birgit Nilsson outlasting three loving T~stans in the same evening's three acts; Nilsson, Windgassen, Wolfarht, Gottlob Frick under Karl Boehm. IfI am name-dropping, it is with musical purpose. I like to remember those Wagnerian evenings, but beyond that, I wish to establish some sort of authority on my part concerning the viable traditions, the consummate music-making attendant on Wagnerian music-drama. I emphasize this because I want to pan out of hand what has·happened at Bayreuth in this year of 1976. UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number 2, Winter 1976/7 94 RALPH GUSTAFSON Arrangements had been made for my wife and myself to hear six operas in eight days, the musical week to start with Parsifal, the longest opera ever written, and to end with that divinely long-winded crash of the gods at the end of the Ring Cycle, Gotterdammerung. Wedged in between Parsifal and the Ring was a performance ofTristan undIsolde. All that sounds like musical exhaustion and yet there we were eager to experience opera for the sixth time at the Festspielhaus with its orchestra sunk invisibly in the 'magic abyss' and with its sombre interior and hard seats-all ofwhich make for perfect acoustics (Wagner knew what he was building); we could hardly await, as who can not, Wagnerite or nonWagnerite , those opening notes of Das Rheingold. Bayreuth can raise excitement in the most sophisticated; the quality of its singing can go up or down; one can deplore the hocus-pocus of Wagner's drama- and yet, there it is: the absolute splendour of the music. The entire Ring is based on that primordial E-flat at the opening; gradually the triad mounts into the serene liquidations of the pristine Rhine River with its three waternymphs guarding the untouched gold - not yet any contamination of greed, any hint ofgold-power which is to corrupt mankind and the godly Valhalla - the gold touched only by the sun's rays. The mise-en-scene of Wagnerhas the three Rhine-maidens rejoicing in the depths ofthewater, the innocent source of all life, and hailing with joyous greeting the sun smashing through to awaken the gold into glorious gleaming. The scene is all joy and innocence despite the dwarf Alberich's appearance longing for the love of the beautiful nymphs. Such should have been the beginning of the hundredth anniversary of the first presentation of the Ring, with an orchestra of Bayreuth drawn from all over Germany and perhaps Karl Boehm at the helm, the music given its own meaning. What we got were the distortions of a producer brought in on the word of Pierre Boulez, the conductor of this season's Rings- a young producer from the Theatre National Populaire in Lyons, Patrice Chereau, with his team...