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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Katharina Wagner's debut as the director of Bayreuth 's new premiere production for 2007, Die Meistersingers von Nurnberg , provides a unique opportunity to canvass a number of aspects of the Bayreutherfestspiele in one survey. As one commentator put it: “ In the absence of a real royal family, the Wagners are a God-given gift to those Germans who like to combine their interests in high culture with society gossip.” However, not only is Ms Wagner the youngest-ever director she is also the first woman to have directed at the festival her great granddaddy instigated 131 years ago. First to the succession – a possible battle (ersatz) royale between Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 62, Wolfgang Wagner's daughter from his first marriage; Katharina Wagner, 29, Wolfgang's daughter from his second marriage; and Nike Wagner, 62, Wolfgang's niece and Wieland's daughter. In contrast to Katharina's relatively recent operatic debut, Ms. Wagner-Pasquier has long been artistic adviser to the Aix-en-Provence opera festival in southern Fran ce , and Nike Wagner, a musicologist by training, has for a number of years been the director of the Weimar Festival in Germany . Katharina Wagner has directed the Wagner operas Der fliegende Hollander in Würzburg in 2002 and Lohengrin in Budapest in 2003 and is, apparently, scheduled to direct Rienzi in Bremen in the future (possibly October 2008 – see the Raven's Report below). According to one interview, La boheme is her favourite opera. But how will the succession be determined, regardless of Katharina Wagner's interest and availability? The outcome is in the hands of the Richard Wagner Foundation that owns the festival's theater, the Festspielhaus, and subsidises the event. But while Wolfgang has only one vote on a 24-member board dominated by German, Bavarian and Upper Fran conian officials, he has so far had his way with the foundation As far as the Editor can establish from various sources (see credits below), from Wagner's creation of the Festival and building of the Festspielhaus and Wahnfried in 1875-76, the Wagner “business” was privately owned by Wagner, then his heirs, until Winifred Wagner, in 1973, signed over to the Richard Wagner Foundation the ownership of the theatre, the family home and the family archives. Under the terms of the agreement, Wolfgang Wagner retained directorship of the Festspiele. Apparently, the Foundation charter, perhaps not surprisingly, also requires that qualified family members receive preference. Under the terms of the Foundation, however, Wolfgang Wagner only has one out of 24 votes; the others are held by German, Bavarian and Upper Fran conian officials and Friends of the Bayreuth Festival (2 votes). The succession plotting became complicated in 2001 when Wolfgang Wagner apparently offered to step down. The Foundation chose Eva Wagner-Pasquier over Nike Wagner and Wolfgang's second wife, Gudrun. Herr Wagner responded by announcing that he was director “for life” at the same time stipulating that, when he died, he wanted his second wife, Gudrun, to become director-in-locus for Katharina Wagner. There is, it seems much speculation in the German press that the Foundation board would meet to consider the succession after the 2007 festival ended on 28 August. According to a commentator, there may also be evidence of a change afoot in the fact that “for the first time Wolfgang Wagner did not attend the [Friends of Bayreuth] meeting, and for the first time the Friends openly criticized his management style”. According to other reports, “Gudrun Wagner already performs many of Wolfgang's duties (because he's so slow and frail). Interestingly, according to further reports, the Foundation “deed contains a special clause says that if he no longer performs his job - or no longer performs it alone - the foundation can cancel his contract. If he were to move aside, the foundation could choose anyone it likes as a successor. And since Gudrun has given him so much help, there may indeed be an opening for a coup, and Katharina's future may not be so assured.” In fact, according to yet another recorder of the Wagner succession struggle, “Eva Wagner-Pasquier remains a favorite on the board, and she says she's still interested in the job. ‘Yes, yes,' she said in a recent phone interview. ‘Of course I would do it.' She laughed, then sighed. ‘You know, I still haven't resigned."' Now for Katharina's bid to demonstrate her credentials as a director separate from her genetic claims. Bayreuth Festival spokesman Peter Emmerich said that, as a direct descendent of the composer, Katharina was "well aware that she must come up with something special," adding that she "has a strong will of interpretation that won't bow even to 'Meistersinger.'" In an interview, Katharina Wagner apparently said new ideas were vital to keep the festival young at heart and that the festival had to claw back from the opera houses its avant-garde role in Wagner interpretation. "My concern is not to just preserve but to develop something new as well," she said. " Bayreuth can dare to experiment," she said, pointing to past engagements of two of the shock directors of German theater, the late Heiner Müller in 1993 for "Tristan and Isolde" and Christoph Schlingensief in 2004 for "Parsifal." George Loomis, in the International Herald Tribune of 31 July 2007, felt that “the prospect that her new "Meistersinger," which opened the 96th festival last week, would advance her cause vanished in a chorus of boos. In her four previous opera stagings, mainly for second-tier theaters, she has emerged as a fervent proponent of Regietheater, or director's theater, in which concept is king and little is sacrosanct. It is an approach that can yield brilliant results and enrage audiences, sometimes at the same time”. Ms Wagner: “Being booed belongs to the job description of a director.” In an extended interview with Larry L Lash in MusicalAmerica.com , Ms Wagner noted that there were four new members of the Foundation and intimated that this might change the dynamics of the Board and its voting intentions and “they are expecting to select a new leader”. She added, very pragmatically and apparently disinterestedly, that “[f]or me, the quality of the Bayreuth Festival must be maintained, and if none of the people who have the name Wagner have the qualifications, they should look for someone else. It's not only that you should have a picture of a Wagner standing there, they should have the qualifications. It should be decided because of quality”. So what was the reception of the Meistersinger production? First the cast and team: Hans Sachs - Fran z Hawlata, Veit Pogner - Artur Korn, Sixtus Beckmesser - Michael Volle, Walther von Stolzing - Klaus Florian Vogt, Eva - Amanda Mace, Night Watchman - Friedemann Rohlig, Conductor Sebastian Weigle, Dramaturg Robert Sollich, Chorusmaster Eberhard Friedrich, Stage designer Tilo Steffens and Costumes Michaela Barth. From the myriad reviews – perhaps the “scandal” of the succession enticed more media commentators to attend or scrutinise activities at Bayreuth than usual – one could conclude that Ms Wagner had constructed a variety of Meistersinger productions; so diverse are the reactions that one could believe no one had been to the same production. Matthew Westphal in PlayBill Arts on 26 July 2007 perhaps summed the divergence of views best: “Reaction to the musical performance was similarly divided [as to the staging, singing and acting –Editor]. AFP described conductor Sebastian Weigle and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra as being in "a state of grace," and the AP said that its playing "was a dream — sonorous, rhapsodic, finely nuanced and at one with the singers on stage." On the other hand, AFP 's English-language report quoted Berlin-based critic Lorenz Tomerius as saying that Weigle "has absolutely no grasp of the score. It's extremely messy. The singing's not up to scratch, either." Hugh Canning, in a review titled “It's all gone to her head” for the Sunday Times on 5 August 2007, wrote: “More shocking than anything in the production, however, is the mediocrity of the musical performance, dully conducted by Sebastian Weigle and poorly cast: Fran z Hawlata's Sachs and Amanda Mace's Eva, both vocally sub-standard, were mercilessly booed, while Klaus Florian Vogt's overgrown-choirboyish, unheroic, pop-singer-like Walther was cheered to the rafters. Only Michael Volle's trenchantly sung Beckmesser achieved anything close to festival standards. In her bid to succeed her father, Katharina apparently chose those singers, though Vogt was a late replacement [for Robert Dean Smith who the Editor had the pleasure of hearing and seeing at a previous Bayreuth production].” Most reviewers seem to share Canning's reservations about the standard of singing, although some were more tolerant of the Konzept of Ms Wagner and, in Canning's words, the “intellectual input of her favoured dramaturg (an ideas man or woman, a role virtually unknown in the British theatre, where directors are expected to have some of their own), Robert Sollich. Katharina's new Mastersingers carries heavy ideological baggage and debatable glosses on the performance and “reception” history of Wagner's only mature comic opera, while virtually ignoring Wagner's narrative, characterisations and music, in favour of an alternative scenario of her (or Sollich's) own.” As another reviewer put it: “ Ms. Wagner tackled the opera's dark association with German nationalism by satirizing luminaries of German culture like Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and even Wagner himself. But European critics said much of the audience turned against her in the last act, when she resorted to topless dancers, full male nudity, plastic phalluses and a bizarre auto-da-fé.” However, in her interview with Larry Lash, Ms Wagner put the phallic record straight by insisting that: “They weren't penises! They are bulls' horns. At the beginning of the scene, the masters are wearing them on their heads like horns. They came from the prop department.” Lash seems to give the most neutral summary of the basic Konzept: “Undisciplined but talented artist Walther attempts to transform his song into a crowd-pleaser and loses his artistic integrity. Wearing sneakers, sunglasses perched on his long blond locks, he winds up in a conservative suit and tie. The moment when he first puts on sensible black shoes is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking. Sachs, too, is an outsider. The cobbler makes identical shoes for the townsfolk, but he remains barefoot until conformity overtakes him. An uptight, prune-faced snob, Beckmesser becomes enlightened through the gibberish Sachs has penned to trick him. Essentially, Walther and Beckmesser trade places: iconoclast becomes buttoned-down conformist; prude becomes free spirit. Sachs, too, undergoes an epiphany, his ideology moving to the far right, bringing a chilling, xenophobic tone to his final paean in praise of all things German.” In expanding his repudiation of Ms Wagner's “heavy ideological baggage and debatable glosses,” Canning says: “…the German press barely questions the debatable premises on which the director and her dramaturg base their contentious interpretations. Sollich writes, in a note distributed to the press, of Sachs's “aggressive conservatism” in Act III and, in the official programme book, of the “sinister content” of his final peroration on German art. But what is aggressive and sinister about a defence of German art from foreign influence? His speech is essentially aimed at Italian opera and is a warning against princes who don't speak the same language as their people. To suggest anything else is as much of a distortion of Wagner's text as the Third Reich's misappropriation of Wagner's works for propaganda purposes.” Canning continues: “…Katharina Wagner and Sollich's Mastersingers is all attention-seeking exaggeration and parodic distortion. They throw everything into the pot: a staged debate about modern art that has the would-be mastersinger Walther von Stolzing throwing paint around the masters' academy and drawing pudenda and breasts on Eva's frock; caricatures of the German masters, who sit disconsolately during the Act III prelude; the chorus emptying replicas of Warhol's Campbell's soup tin over the brawlers of the Midsummer Nightmare at the end of Act II. There are two stark-naked women and a man, and Walther's Prize Song climaxes in a game-show presentation of a huge cardboard cheque by television studio hostesses. The result is an unpalatable witch's brew: a mishmash of the styles of fashionable avant-garde German directors such as Peter Konwitschny and Christoph Schlingensief. If Katharina has inherited anything from her father, it is a knack for aping other directors' work.” If these comments suggest that there is as much if not more happening on stage than in the equally booed Schlingensief Bayreuth Parsifal (in its final year – thank goodness no doubt many will say to themselves), then Shirley Apthorp would agree as she contends: “ This incoherent production tries to do far too many things at once. There are abundant clever references to German art, culture and architecture. Statues of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Wagner, Kleist and others come to life.… A little nudity and some simulated sex are thrown in for good measure. Ms. Wagner's calculated subversion of the plot could have been brilliant if it had been more sparingly realized. In her frenetic struggle to prove herself clever enough, presumably aided by intellectual dramaturge Robert Sollich, a few good ideas and strong images are lost in the dross.” Yet another reviewer opined that “Katharina put "Meistersinger's" text under a microscope and made some creditable adjustments to Wagner's most tradition-bound and only comic opera.” Another again thought the opposite: “Even more importantly, however, while treating the opera as a kind of discourse on tradition and progress in art, she showed no particular respect for the actual plot.” Loomis suggested: “Katharina Wagner's sympathetic treatment of Beckmesser, Walther's rival in love and art, is no less radical. Yet it struck a chord with me, because Beckmesser's humiliation in the opera is way out of proportion to what he deserves. Picking up on an idea advanced by scholars that the gibberish of Beckmesser's contest song anticipates Dadaism and hence is actually forward-looking, she has him undergo an epiphany after the street riot. A strong minority of the populace applauds Beckmesser's song, and he departs, disgusted, only when Sachs starts talking about German art.” According to Canning, “before Hans Sachs delivers his encomium to German art, a theatre director and a conductor are bound and gagged and thrown into a skip, which Sachs then sets alight while flunkies hold out their arms at something just short of the angle required for a Hitler salute.” Another reviewer claimed that the masks these characters wear are of the faces of the production team. Perhaps this move by Katharina was intended to convey a sense of self-parody or ironic detachment? Lash generously sums up: “This "Meistersinger" will challenge, delight and outrage audiences for a number of years to come. Perhaps, as Beckmesser discovers, breaking with tradition isn't such a bad thing.” Canning begs to differ: “One of her more ludicrous notions is that Beckmesser is the hero of Die Meistersinger and that Wagner's parody of composition represented by his song is an example of avant-garde music. This has to be one of the most unmusical stagings of Die Meistersinger in the entire performance history of the work. Dramatically, it has all the sophistication of a drunken and druggy fancy-dress party for rich kids.” As an interesting footnote for those of us planning a Bayreuth pilgrimage in the next few years (the box office gods willing), Larry Lash, in his interview, asked Katharina Wagner “ Why is the “Parsifal” being dumped after this season?” Ms Wagner replied: “My father decided not to run productions so long any more. People always want to see new things. The “Fliegende Hollander ” [from 2003] is gone, too. We are going to make the run shorter for every piece. We want something new about every four years, but it depends on costs, too. “Lohengrin” is very expensive to put on, so it depends on what we need in the orchestra, the chorus”. The Editor is indebted to a variety of reviews and commentaries in compiling this overview, including those that may still be read on the Internet at http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2707619,00.html , http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2347779,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,494992,00.html http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117934348.html?categoryid=33&cs=1 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article2181912.ece http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/31/arts/loomis.php http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/6844.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6917338.stm http://www.musicalamerica.com:80/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyid=16505&categoryid=2&cookies=1 [Editor]
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