A mythical drama about “yearning love’s misery”

The Valkyrie
First day of A scenic festival in three days and in an eve by Richard Wagner
Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Director: Stefan Herheim
With Brandon Jovanovich, Andrew Harris, John Lundgren, Lise Davidsen, Annika Schlicht, Nina Stemme u. a.
Premiere on 27 September 2020

 

III. Bayreuth and Berlin
 

For his drama, Wagner not only created contracts and rules that were new to music theatre; he also built the house where his big “stage festival play” was be mounted: the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth. He referred to its orchestra pit poetically as the “mystic abyss” and somewhat more prosaically as the “technical hearth of the music”: a wave of heat and glowing light issue from it. For the composer and for the singers, the technical hearth of the music gets downsized to the piano, out of which everything comes into existence. We may recall that the only partial performance that satisfied Wagner before the Ring cycle received its world premiere in 1876 was given on this instrument, at Zurich’s Hotel Baur au Lac on 22 October in 1856. It was Act One of The Valkyrie, performed unstaged with Franz Liszt on the piano on what was his 45th birthday, with Wagner singing the roles of Siegmund and Hunding, and Emilie Heim singing Sieglinde. The concert brought the composition to public notice. The piano – which conjures up worlds through sound, and is the medium that delivers art to an audience…

What was to be presented to the spectators of the stage festival play was “the total reality of the most meaningful illusion by a noble art” – in Wagner’s words. This aspiration for the total reality of the most meaningful illusion that a noble art can accomplish is the aesthetic manifesto that is viewed from all sides in the preliminary and three subsequent three evenings of the tetralogy and made to resonate again and again; reality, illusion and art are woven together in performance.

Never have all artistic ideals and technical matters been so concentrated in the hands of one artist as they were in the case of the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung in Bayreuth in 1876. Wagner had not only written the libretto and the music himself, he had built a theatre specifically for the work; he selected the designer and stage manager, cast the singers and took charge of stage direction himself. The collective event, opera, was to an unprecedented extent his own production, both in conception and realisation. He sought to stage “model performances” in Bayreuth, by dint of superhuman effort, but in the end he admitted to his Bayreuth patrons a year after the cycle’s world premiere: “My ideal was not attained with last year’s performances.” Wagner’s artistically conceived experience of the saga was not possible to realise technically. Why was that?

If we ask Wagner, we will discover that in his view myth originates in the contemplation of nature – sunlight and darkness being the elemental experiences. Myth, he says, is a condensing “of the contemplation of nature into the human and moral”. The natural environment is the habitat of natural males and females in myth, while architectural space surrounds historical men and women. This distinguishes Wagner’s drama fundamentally from grand historical opera and so it is that the action in the Ring takes place more or less exclusively in the natural landscape: water, cliffs, rocky mountains, river valleys, caves, forests. Wagner talks of this natural environment as a “living organism”, “full of life, organically interrelated”.

In translating his gesamtkunstwerk to the stage, however, Wagner, as the director in 1876, was labouring under a misapprehension. His categorical stage realism only imitates nature. He does not approach nature’s essence where its meaning resides; he does not explore its dramaturgical function; nor does he address the idea of it as a “living organism”. He believed that with the best stage technology on an illusionist stage, he was capable of the perfect presentation of his saga. But the problem is not technical but artistic. Let us remember the passage quoted above from his letter to Röckel, where he speaks of “the necessity of acknowledging the changeability, the variety, the multiplicity, the perpetual newness of reality and of life”. Wagner intended his mythical drama to be an alternative to the historicism of his day, but in fact it was nothing more than the dim reflection of a once great revolutionary vision.

Myth is essentially a collective narrative. Goethe saw myth as “the reflected truth of an ancient present”; Nietzsche recognised “eternal recurrence” in it, and Thomas Mann defined myth as “the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious”. All three have in common the fact that they conceive of myth as repetitive in structure and hence figuratively partaking of the nature of the circular ring.

In the speech he gave on the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, Wagner made a clear distinction between the structurally provisional theatre building and what was to be presented inside it, in terms of technique and technology. On the stage there would be “nothing provisional, merely hinted at”. The audience should be “presented with perfection in staging and acting, to the extent artistically achievable in the present day”. Wagner believed that by harnessing the maximum then artistically achievable he could put perfect stage technology at the service of naturalism. In so doing he committed a system error, because the “most meaningful illusion”, as he put it, only forms itself in the mind of the spectator – on stage nothing is real; rather, things are indicated, betokened. At the premiere Eduard Hanslick was amazed by “the huge machinery, the gas-apparatus, the steam-engines on and under the stage”. In his opinion Wagner “would not have been able to compose the Ring before the invention of electric light”. Wilhelm Mohr, in his discussion of the premiere performance, described the panoply of stage technology as “the new marvels of decor”, but at the same time felt they were “incompatible with what mechanics or indeed the machinists of today can manage, and, which is even worse, they are in conflict with the nature of art”. He thus clearly separated the epic drama of ideas from the entertaining mechanised farce.

Wagner brings together the genres of literature and music, pantomime and costume design, painting and stage design, not in a living synthesis, metaphorically speaking, but rather gives the gesamtkunstwerk of opera the task of “consuming, destroying each one of these genres as resources for the sake of […] the unconditional, direct representation of perfect human nature”. Consuming and destroying for the sake of perfecting sounds like sinister language, but what he was in fact striving for was the reconciling of aesthetics with ethics in opera, and he considered the art form to be “the necessary collective work of the people of the future”. People who flee the present in search of a future. A mission that goes far beyond the stage and the drama.

Wagner himself, in a letter from 1851, said the following about the storyline of third part of the cycle, Siegfried: “…it uses play to teach the audience the crucial myth, as a child is taught a fairy tale. Everything sinks in, as a result of vivid sensory impressions; everything is grasped”. Let the public be taught by means of intelligible play, he says, and he also gives the compelling reason for it: only when the last part comes, Twilight of the Gods, does the audience “understand everything that had to be simply accepted as given or could only be hinted at there, and – I’ve won”.

Wagner therefore himself uses the double notion of play – including the game he is playing as author – in his aesthetic conception. And making a staging of this conception possible is precisely what we are aiming at with a suitcase-built isle of the dead, drawn from contemporary history. The narration of myth necessitates compression, Wagner writes, the representation of all “conceivable realities…in compact, clear and plastic form”. Just as though every individual of a collective had packed a suitcase with memories and aspirations, to take up an image from a satirically apposite poem written at the beginning of the 1850s by the exiled Heinrich Heine, whom Wagner met after his flight to Paris:

In my brain there’s rumbling and cracking,
I think a suitcase is a-packing,
And my mind is leaving – oh no!–
Much sooner than I will go.

Amidst verbally packed suitcases a piece of theatre comes into being out of nothing, the nothing that is everything: a collective piece of theatre that brings forth material worlds by which the individual is taken in, a mythical drama about love, one which seeks to free art from the lie that it has to be true, and which by doing so may offer “holy comfort”.

The Ring of the Nibelung is – in the words of Thomas Mann – “directed and composed against bourgeois culture and education as a whole”. Which leads us back to the opening speculations on the nature of the bürger in Germany. In Cosima Wagner’s diary there is an entry in spring 1874 which records Richard reiterating the importance of the revolutionary impulse of 1848 for his stage festival play: “Only the Springtime of the Nations brought continuous fine weather from March onwards, and despite all the nonsense the foundation was laid then for Germany’s unification. I believe I wouldn’t have conceived the Ring without that movement.” The active impulse of the radical citoyen is the destructive and as it were consoling artistic germ cell of the sated bourgeois.

>> I. Escape and play  >> II. Power and nothing

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