The Bayreuth Festival
By JANET LEEPER WIELAND and Wolfgang Wagner, grandsons of Richard Wagner, who have shouldered the Bayreuth Festival since it started again in 1951, have had the courage to throw overboard much that was traditional since the opening of the Festspielhaus in 1876 and to, produce the operas in a new symbolical way, an innovation which would hardly have been tolerated elsewhere. That this should have happened at Bayreuth, centre of the Wagner tradition, is astonishing. Yet this is no stunt but a genuine desire to enter into the very spirit of• the music and of Wagner's real intentions, for the performances of his day are known to have fallen far short of his expectations.
The staging is now absolutely subordinated to the music, the singers are sometimes hardly lit at all, and the medium for expressing the changing moods of the music is, as Adolphe Appia advocated long ago, the medium of light—and darkness. Wieland Wagner, who is the painter-designer-producer of six of the seven operas this year, has swept away most of the " scenery " which so disgusted Wagner, and has painted with light all that he wishes to be visible and considers necessary. How far has he succeeded ? This is hotly debated and Wagnerian circles, press and public are torn with discussion. The battle is on, and nothing would have delighted the revolutionary Wagner more than to find he had a revolutionary grandson. Did he not say, "Children, you must create things 1 " and in a less-known passage, quoted by Wieland, be speaks of his abhorrence of the atmosphere of grease-paint and mummery : "When I think that a character such as Kundry will be dressed up, as at a carnival, I am reminded of those 'artists' fetes' and their indecencies. I have created the invisible orchestra, if I could only now invent the invisible stage ! " Wieland has done his best to invent the invisible stage. Is the public capable of appreciating such a basic change ? I think the answer is Yes as far as the mystical drama of Parsifal is concerned and No as far as The Ring is concerned, while r , Lohengrin (produced by Wolfgang Wagner) seems to be in a mixture of styles, and, apart from great moments such as the arrival of Lohengrin and the swan, to be neither one thing nor the other, while the chorus behaved like a well-drilled choir; in any case Wieland must be regarded as a liberator from an iron-bound tradition, and for this we must be pro- foundly grateful. But it is time to consider the Festspielhaus, where these remarkable performances take place, with its enormous stage, its marvellous acoustics and lighting equip- ment, its invisible orchestra and its audience. A visit to Bayreuth is something of a pilgrimage. It is also something of an ordeal : daily the long hill has to be climbed, at the top of which stands the fan-shaped opera-house; the performances begin at four and are not over until ten or later, but in the long intervals the devotees can dine or stroll about the lovely hillside. It is a Germanic version of a Greek Drama Festival, and it was for such a theatre and such a place that The Ring was composed.
How sure Wagner was about it all ! In a letter to his friend Kietz in 1853 Wagner, then an exile with no prospects, he envisages the Ring Cycle as it would one day be: "I have completed my poem; it is called The Ring of the Nibelung, a stage-festival play for three days preceded by an evening. Evening, The Rhinegold; first day, The Valkyrie, second day, The Young Siegfried, third day, Siegfried's Death. If I am well I will begin the musical composition this summer."
But it was not until 1864 that he received the commission to finish and produce the operas, and it was not until 1876 that the first performance took place. Parsifal, had the composer's wishes been respected, would only have been performed at Bayreuth—a mystical rite, without applause. So there is a spirit of dedication among those who come to Bayreuth and a singular hush falls on the audience of eighteen hundred before the lights fade and the opera is due to begin, a hush which allows the first notes, which are nearly always pianissimo, to be heard in dead silence.
It is immediately apparent that the acoustics are superb. They have to be experienced to be believed. Never have I heard anything to compare with the overture to Rhinegold, for beauty of sound, or such fusion of voices and orchestra with the solo instruments rising out of the complex score with such wonderful clarity. The house, built of light materials with hollow pillars down each side, is as resonant as a violin. The orchestra (with its conductor) is invisible under a curved wooden hood. The players are seated in tiers descending into the earth. The stage is equipped with a "light organ" and a new lighting bridge on which twenty electricians work. The front of the stage is nearly forty feet wide, but the depth is enormous, and much of the action takes place before a cyclorama. The absence of visible orchestra gives us the illusion that the music comes from the scene. With this close- knit unification it is tragic when we are given nothing to look at but darkness, for we are not always in Nibelheim, which certainly did create a tremendous impression of depth and darkness, of huddled hordes of slave-workers. It may be true, as Wieland Wagner writes, that much was lost when the mysterious gas-lit theatre gave way to the hard light of today and that the visions conjured up by the music cannot be duplicated for the eye, but the really beautiful effects achieved, especially in Parsifal, suggest that there is a middle path, symbolic, hieratic and aloof, which will feast the eye instead of frustrating it.
In this genre I give pride of place to the first scene in Parsifal, where streaks of light falling obliquely and indefinitely took us out of time and place. It was like a Gordon Craig woodcut on a monumental scale, painted with light, but not following any known work by the great stage designer. The two Grail scenes—the knights in grey, and the knights in deep red—were extraordinarily effective, vast glooms and glints of pillars, a distant niche of light for Titurel, while the tyranny of Klingsor over Kundry was symbolically suggested by a web of light that seemed to close in on her as his power was made manifest. Unforgettable moments of grandeur ! Let us forget the Magic Garden with its flower maidens who were flitting moonlit wraiths and remember instead how wonderful the Good Friday music seemed with, before a wide sky, only a few stones as a setting.
Tristan, Act II, also touched a new high poetic level : a scene played entirely in half-light, which was perfectly successful, the shape of the stage being that of a gentle raised mound. On the other hand, the ugly raised circular platform which is the main playing-space for The Ring was unfortunate and at its best when heavily disguised with ramps or walls, or crowded with people. As other times its stark ugliness disturbed the eye by its uniformity, and when modifications were made they were always symmetrical, right and left, in the most Teutonic manner. A little courage is needed here— a mythical drama need not be so regelmaessig Having thrown away the old cluttered-up stage, surely it is still possible to follow Wagner's specific stage directions, to have a Valkyrie's rock, to allow Siegmund's sword to be broken in the fight with Wotan and a funeral pyre for Siegfried, and to give us new visions of beauty.
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