Patrick Bade
The New Bayreuth

Patrick Bade - The New Bayreuth

- Well, this is the Bayreuth Festspielhaus decorated with swastikas and of course, a banner of Hitler to celebrate his birthday. And from 1933 to 1943, the Bayreuth Festival was very, very closely associated with the Nazi regime. And this reached a climax during the Second World War. The 1942 and 43 festivals were completely devoted to recuperating soldiers. Although the idea of coming back wounded from the Eastern front and having to sit through Gerta Demeron doesn’t sound all that great to me, and munitions workers. So these are pictures of wartime Bayreuth Festivals. Now, in the very last days of the War, Bayreuth was bombed by the Allies, and it was two-thirds destroyed. This is Villa Wahnfried, Wagner’s Villa, that was partially destroyed. The Opera House itself, the Festspielhaus, was undamaged, and the American occupying forces took it over and they put on entertainments there. I imagined there was a lot of head wagging from old Wagnerian’s when the Americans put on, “Kiss Me, Kate,” Cole Porters, “Kiss Me, Kate” in the sacred portals of the Festspielhaus. And then it was handed over to the town of Bayreuth as a sort of town theatre. And they put on various things, anything, of course, but Wagner. They put on Die Fledermaus, they put on “Madama Butterfly.” And I think probably if it were not for the Cold War, the Bayreuth Festival might have really permanently bitten the dust. But as we’ve seen in other contexts, the outbreak of the Cold War in the 1940s changed everything. The Americans are very keen to bolster Germany. They wanted everything to go back to normal, to keep Germany as a bullock against communism and against the Iron Curtain countries. So it was decided to relaunch the festival six years after the end of the war in 1951. Well, obviously Winifred who’d run the festival for the war, she was out of the question.

She was really too implicated in the old regime. And the theory was we best skip a generation, go down to her two sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, who you see here, and that somehow they would be a clean break, a clean pair of hands. As we now know, it wasn’t really quite like that because they had been very groomed in a way by Hitler. They were very close to him. They were his zatt’s family. They regards him as their uncle Wolfie. Here are Wieland and Wolfgang with Hitler. And here again, Wieland on the right hand side, Winifred on the left, Hitler in the middle. Hitler wanted to keep Wieland safe. And so he gave him a sinecure job in a satellite camp of the slave labour camp of Flossenbürg, which you see here, which was one, it wasn’t a death camp. The inmates were mostly Russian prisoners and so on. And it was a compound, I suppose, for the development of those magic weapons that Hitler kept promising would win him the war towards the end of the war. In fact, Wieland doesn’t seem to have had much of a military role at all. He seems to have spent his time making little maquettes and models of stage sets. He had actually at a very early age, before the war, had his first attempt at designing opera, 1937. This is his design for the 1937 production of Parsifal, which is perfectly straightforward, rather conventional. Nothing wildly original about it. During the war, he designed a Mastersingers. Again, the sets for the first two acts were very straightforward, conventional. You can see these are the two sets for Act three, the beginning of Act three is in Hans Sachs’s workshop. Again, very traditional, but you might raise an eyebrow at the his set for the final scene.

The Festwiese, which looks really startlingly like a Nuremberg rally setting. And also interestingly, in some ways, looks forward to the rather monumental minimal sets of the new Bayreuth. So 1951, the festival opens with a performance, not of Wagner, but of Beethoven’s ninth Symphony conducted by Furtwängler. But he, Furtwängler himself, was not invited to further take part in these early festivals. I think, again, probably, he was too associated with the pre-war Bayreuth, and people wanted to move on and distance themselves from that. The first opera, again, I think was a careful choice, Parsifal, the obvious choice in a way would’ve been Meistersinger but it was so associated with the Nazi regime, Meistersinger, which was regularly used for the Nuremberg rallies, I don’t think they could have used that. So they opened with Parsifal, which was an opera that was not particularly in favour with the Nazis. It was not performed all that often during the Nazi regime. Now, if you go along with Barry Millington and my dear friend Margaret Brealey, who have explored and theorised about Wagner’s operas, they think that in fact, Parsifal is probably the most racist, the most antisemitic, the most Nazi in its core ideology of all the operas. Their theory would be that it’s an opera, and I think I find it quite believable, that it’s an opera that is celebrating racial purity. It’s by far from being conventionally Christian. But the Nazis oddly enough, didn’t see that in the opera.

And they certainly took the Christian piety of the opera at face value. So when the curtain went up, audiences were astonished. This did, in a way, seem to be a break with the past. It’s Wieland Wagner who designed these early productions. And this is a drawing by Wieland Wagner for Parsifal. And so the minimalist sets, very, very little detail, very abstracted approach to the operas. But as my good friend, Mike in Munich, actually pointed out to me today, and that Joe just put these images, thanks to his prompt, the sets for the 1950s Parsifal productions at Bayreuth are not actually such a clean break with the past, as was assumed at the time. On the right hand side here, we have a photograph of the so-called Cathedral of Light that was designed by Albert Speer for the 1937, the Nuremberg Rally. And so there are several sets in the Parsifal productions of this time by Wieland Wagner that seemed to show a reminiscence of the Nuremberg designs of Albert Speer. Now the conductor of the first Parsifal and the first Ring Cycle in the 1951 festival was Hans Knappertsbusch, who was only slightly less revered, I suppose, than Furtwängler. He had, I would say, a somewhat chequered relationship with the Nazis. He’s a mysterious guy, it’s hard to work him out. In 1936, he was actually sacked from his position as director of the Munich Opera because of hostile and critical remarks that he made about the Nazi regime. But nevertheless, he remained in Germany like Furtwängler, in fact was much more willing than Furtwängler was to go along with the demands of the regime. He was particularly renowned for his conducting of Parsifal. And there are two recordings, live recordings from Bayreuth. Very, very slow tempe, very grand indeed.

I’m going to play you the opening of the prelude to Act one from the very first performances after the war in 1951. It’s the music, whatever you think about what it means, I’m really not sure that I want to know really what Parsifal means, but the music itself is extraordinarily beautiful, exquisite veils of shimmering sound. So here are the opening bars of Parsifal live from the festival in 1951. Incidentally, the insert here at the top is the design for the original production of 1881. It was also remarkable at this performance of Parsifal in that it included the first Jewish singer to sing at Bayreuth since 1935. The last one, of course was Alexander Kipnis, who sang the role of Gurnemanz in 1935 before fleeing from Germany. But this cast included the Canadian tenor, George London, and I wonder slightly what he felt about it. I mean, this was six years after the liberation of Auschwitz. He was in the heart of the most conservative part of Germany singing the role of Amfortas. Now, again, if you go along with the theories of Barry and Margaret, Amfortus is an Arian character in the opera, there are Arian characters, and there are characters who are other, and one can assume that they’re meant to be Jewish. And he is a hero, an Arian hero. He sets forth into the world carrying the sacred spear that pierced Jesus Christ’s side, in order to do good deeds. But he is seduced by Kundry. This is, of course, miscegenation. Well, he’s supposed to have taken a vow of chastity anyway, but this is miscegenation between races. They presumably get up to some rather acrobatic sex. ‘Cause somehow he manages to, while having sex, to wound himself in the testicles with Jesus’s sacred spear. And she then purloins it, and she hands it over to the evil Klingsor.

And he is afflicted with a horrible, excruciating, saparating wound in his testicles. And he spends the entire opera, but it’s a long opera, moaning about the agony of his saparating testicles. He’s still at it in the last act. I’m going to play you a bit with George London. Marvellous voice, dark, smooth, impressive voice as you will hear. As I said, Parsifal contains, it’s very, very long. It’s an endurance test, but it does contain ravishingly beautiful music, I think particularly the choral music. And I’d like to play you the final bars of the opera in this performance of 1951. When I had the great pleasure of meeting Friedelind Wagner in Switzerland, it must be about 30 years ago, and we spent a day talking, and an amazing woman, I’ve talked about her before. Very brave woman who rebelled against her family and renounced Nazism and Hitler. But she said her great ambition in life was to direct a performance of Parsifal in the Albert Hall in London, using the Albert Hall as a set. And it really does look like a set for the last act of Parsifal. And I thought of that many years later, I went to a prom performance in the Albert Hall of Parsifal, directed by Daniel Barenboim. It was truly, truly extraordinary because they placed the choruses around the vast building, so had this incredible quadraphonic effect with these other worldly choruses coming from distant places. And I happened to go with a Jewish friend who got so carried away, she was so ecstatic at the end, she said, “Oh my God, that’s so beautiful. I think I want to get baptised.” I hope she was joking. But there was, that was an expression of her in theism. Anyway, here it is, the final heavenly bars of Parsifal. It is actually the scene just before it, nevermind, I think I’ll let you discover that on your own. So the same year, 1951, Wieland presented his Ring Cycle, again with the same kind of aesthetic, very paired down, very abstracted. This is Valhalla in the distance, the God’s about to enter Valhalla. This is the Rainbow bridge. This is act two of Walküre with Sieglinde and Siegmund.

This is act two of Siegfried, with Siegfried in the Forest. Act three of Siegfried, confrontation between Siegfried and Wotan. It’s a very, very paired down, very minimalist sets. And it’s a kind of a Freudian approach to the Ring Cycle. And also trying to remove from it any kind of historical context. Here is Brünnhilde on her rock, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Act two of Götterdämmerung. Now many recordings exist and they’re easily obtainable of these live performances from Bayreuth. And they’re highly recommendable, I think, and certainly in favour of live performances, often over studio performances. They’re they’re more live, more more vivid and so on. And the level of the singing by today’s standards, it seems remarkably high. I think probably at the time in the 1950s were people who remembered that golden age of the 1930s with Frederick Shaw and Lauritz Melchior, Frida Leoder, Kirsten Flagstad, all those very great Wagnerian singers. And they probably found the singers of the 1950s wanting in comparison. But nevertheless, some very, very fine performances. And there was the great Wotan, of course, of Hans Hotter. And here he is in Wotan’s farewell from the last act of Die Walküre. That’s it. I think I’d probably mentioned before that for me, few more disagreeable sounds than that of a German helden tenor reaching for his top notes through a strangulated throat. The leading heroic tenor at Bayreuth in these years was Wolfgang Windgassen.

Even he, I have to say, is not the most delightful sound to my ears, but he was an intelligent singer and capable of some degree of lyricism, as you’ll hear in this short excerpt from the Forest Murmurs scene in Siegfried. The alternative conductor to Knappertsbusch was Herbert von Karajan, still quite a young man in 1951. He was also somebody who really benefited from the abrupt change brought about by the onset of the Cold War. He had joined the Nazi party twice. I didn’t say that, of course, Knappertsbusch like Furtwängler always refused to join the Nazi party. Karajan later always claimed that he only joined the party for career reasons out of expediency. I’m not sure that that is a very valid excuse. In fact, I don’t think it is. And in fact, I don’t think it’s true because he joined the Nazi party in Austria in 1933, well before it would’ve been useful to his career. So I think he probably was, at least for a while, a true believing Nazi. And he had to go through the de-Nazifiction process and had a performance ban for a while, but then of course, all forgiven and he was allowed back. And in 1951 and two, he conducted Tristan und Isolde again, designed by Wieland Wagner. You can see very minimalist ship in Act one. This is the last act of Tristan und Isolde, Tristan on his rock in Kareol. Again, a very minimalist rock. And this is a fine performance that you can get on CD with a wonderful tenor, actually, not a German tenor. He’s from Chile, his name is Ramón Vinay rather baritone sound, but none of that awful effortless fullness and reaching for notes that you so often get withheld in tenors. It’s a really lyrical performance. And he’s singing here with Martha Mödl. And this is Karajan conducting. And for the once, having an argument with, not an argument, a discussion with Margaret Brealey. I don’t always agree with her, but I have the greatest respect for her knowledge and her opinions. And I said, “oh, please, please, at least Tristan, surely there is no antisemitism in Tristan.” And she said, “Ah, well Tristan is actually a refutation of Judeo-Christian sexual morality.” And and I thought, “well, I could go with that. That’s not such a terrible thing for me actually.” So I still love, of the Wagner operas, it’s the one that I like best and listen to most often. So far, I mean, on the whole, although of course there was Wieland Wagner’s productions were controversial.

There were people who objected to the way he jettisoned all the paraphernalia of the old Wagnerian productions, you know the helmets and the breast plates and all the platter. But most critics praised his productions. He had something of a check when he put on Meistersinger. Actually, both the images you see on the screen are designed by Wieland Wagner. The top right one is from his 1943 wartime production, which of course is a completely conventional one with a recreation of 16th century Nuremberg. And on the left is his 1950s production where he strips away all of that and gets rid of Nuremberg altogether. And I think of all the Wagner operas, it was probably the one that lent itself least well to this very abstract approach of the new Bayreuth of the 1950s. 1961, there was another milestone and another very controversial production. This was Tannhäuser. And it was particularly controversial because of the fiery there was about inverted commerce, “The black Venus of Bayreuth.” This was the very first time that a black person had sung at Bayreuth. It was Grace Bumbry fabulous American metso, actually protege of Lotte Lehmann, one of the really great metso voices of the 20th century. And again, there was a quite a lot of kickback from this production. Not only because of her, but most of the singers, I think only Fischer-Dieskau was German. The other singers were all non-German. And there were conservative people who wanted to keep by Bayreuth German as we’ll see in a minute, the Elsa was and Victoria de los Ángeles. So, it may be shocking to you, it may be surprising to you that it was controversial to have a black singer at Bayreuth in 1961. But remember that the very first time that a black singer had sung on the stage of the metropolitan New York was only very shortly before this in 1955 when Marian Anderson was the very first black American singer to sing on the stage of the metropolitan.

But I’m going to play you, this performance exists again, complete in good sound. And I’d like to give you an excerpt of the very, very thrilling singing of Grace Bumbury as Venus. Wieland Wagner died at a early age in 1966. And it was unclear really, I think for a while in what direction Bayreuth would go. His younger brother Wolfgang took over, and he was an efficient director and a reasonably efficient producer of operas, but without the originality and the genius of his older brother. But productions at Bayreuth took a very new direction in 1976. This, of course was the centenary of the original Ring production of 1876. And they brought somebody in from outside the hall, Bayreuth melia, the French director, Patrice Chéreau. And he designed an entirely different type of Ring production, and one that was going to be enormously influential. I think we’re still feeling its influence very much today. So instead of like Wieland Wagner trying to completely remove the opera from its historical context, he puts it firmly in its 19th century historical context, mixing costumes from different periods, but particularly using costumes of the era of Wagner himself and giving it a very political content. So this is the emulation scene from the end. This is Rheingold, of course, we’re down with the Nibelung, here are the Rhinemaidens, 19th century prostitutes on what looks like a hydraulic dam. This is Siegfried’s borge. So these sets of course, compared to Weiland Wagner, they’re complicated and cluttered. And that is a tendency that’s increased ever since.

I’m just amazed actually, that at the amount of money that is thrown at opera directors today, when opera houses are supposed to be starved of money, to do these incredibly elaborate sets. And there is just so much going on in modern productions, so much business. It’s as if all modern producers think that audiences suffer from attention deficit syndrome and need to be constantly distracted every minute of the opera. So 1976, as I said, that was hugely influential. And it set in motion a trend at Bayreuth where you tend to get these star director producers, often very left wing, often normally Marxist, often very political in their interpretations. This is the Harry Kupfer production of 1988, which I saw, that’s the only complete Ring I’ve seen at Bayreuth, which again, was controversial. And what you get actually at Bayreuth, it’s odd because you get these political left wing outrageous productions where you do feel that the director, their principal aim is to cause a scandal and they want to get booed. And you have very conservative, sometimes very right wing audiences who are very happy to give them satisfaction by booing. So, you know, every new production at Bayreuth is a scandal. This production of Harry Kupfer was denounced at the time as high-tech kitsch. It certainly had its moments, very dramatic moments. I personally was absolutely outraged by the beginning. The opening of Rheingold, of course, is one of the most magical openings in the history of opera or the history of music. You are in darkness, absolute darkness. And it’s the beginning of time. And then you have this very slow, low, deep murmur from the audience.

And the sound begins to well up. And in Harry Kupfer’s production, the curtain was already up, and you had people trumping backwards and forwards carrying suitcases, utterly wrecking and ruining the magical effect, musical effect created by Wagner. And this has become a kind of cliche of modern productions. I always groan when I go to the Opera house and the curtain is already up and you’ve got business going on before the music starts. In fact, I was just at Wozzeck a couple of nights ago, in fact a very fine performance. But it was the usual thing. In fact, it was the first act was set in a public toilet. And for 10 minutes before the music started, we were offered the spectacle of men dropping their trousers and sitting down on toilet seats to defecate or pissing against a urinal. And I thought, “do we really need this for 10 minutes before the music even starts?” So what, where do you go from there? You know, every producer has to make his name by being more shocking, more outrageous. This is the so-called Lohengrin, which was controversial because as you can see, the chorus are dressed up as rats. And this is Barrie Kosky, who’s the current of the opera world. And this again, was discussed and even controversial because he was the first Jew who’d been invited to direct an opera at Bayreuth. And this was a Meistersinger a couple of years ago. And he describes himself as a Jewish gay kangaroo. And he certainly went all out to stir things up with his production of the Meistersinger. But I thought I’d like to end with a musical excerpt and something beautiful for you to take away. So I’m going back to the 1961 performance of Tannhäuser. And here is the very lovely Catalan soprano, Victoria de los Ángeles in her big entrance aria.

Q&A and Comments:

Lorna. Well, Meistersingeris, there’s been a huge debate about what what Meistersinger is about and the subtext and so on. I mean, of course, in many ways Meistersinger is a celebration of creativity, as you say, of joy. And there are certainly those aspects of the opera. So, and in a way I hesitate to to even spoil it for you by talking about the very negative interpretations that have been made.

This is Jean. You had the great privilege of seeing Hans Hotter. Yes. I only caught him right at the end of his career doing a little role in Gurre-Lieder. I never really saw him in one of his great roles on stage, but he was certainly a great singing actor.

Oh yes. And you saw him at Covent Garden. Yes. Because Wagner has always had the reputation right from the start, of being a voice wrecker. But you know, Wagner himself, he wanted his operas to be sung. He didn’t want them to be shouted. And he didn’t want people to force their voices. And of course, the Bayreuth is one place where singers can sing Wagner without straining their voices because the orchestra is down in this covered pit. And it’s much easier for the singers at Bayreuth to project over the orchestra there than in probably any other opera house in the world.

This Herbert, George London, you didn’t know that he was Canadian and Jewish. He was. Where is he? Lost you again. That’s true. That he was the first non Russian to sing Boris in Russia. And yes, he had a very distinguished career, quite a long one, but he suddenly developed vocal problems and had to give up when he was still apparently at the height of his hours.

Yes, absolutely. Wieland Wagner was very influenced by Gordon Craig. Gordon Craig who was of course the son of Ellen Terry and the lover of Isadora Duncan, and a very influential designer, stage designer at the beginning of the 20th century. You’re quite right.

I should have mentioned that This Herbert. Oh my goodness. Herbert, you are dating yourself. Yes. You were at the debut of Marian Anderson at the Met in Un ballo en maschera as Ulrica. Yeah. And no, I don’t blame producers for wanting to throw a new light. Sometimes, I blame them for making it more about themselves than it is about the opera, for being, you know, sort of pointlessly outrageous. And also I think there is some operas, I think the Ring is an opera that really is a work that invites constant reinterpretation. Don Giovanni is another work that does, there are other operas that lend themselves much less well to experimental productions.

And you saw the with Barrie Kosku, that’s Anne Stanton. He’s certainly brilliant. What can I say? I was absolutely blown away by his production of Saul at Glyndebourne. And I think that was one of the most dazzling productions I’ve seen of anything, although I was rather less convinced by his Don Giovanni in Vienna, which I saw last year.

Yes, John Tomlinson, he was the Wotan in the Ring Cycle, in 1990 that I saw at Bayreuth. And initially, I was rather disappointed. I thought, “oh my goodness, I finally got to Bayreuth and there were so many English singers in the cast at Bayreuth that I knew already, of course from the English National Opera. But I can tell you he sounded a hell of a lot better in Bayreuth than he did, Bayreuth has a much, much kinder acoustic than the Colosseum in London. He sounded and looked absolutely terrific as Wotan in that production.

So that seems to be everything. And we’re moving on, of course. Next week we’re going to be talking about heroes. I’m going to talk about Myra Hess and about Paul Robeson. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.