The Bayreuth Festival, 2006

Colin Mackerras

 

· For Wagner lovers, going to Bayreuth for the Festival of Wagner operas is a wonderful experience, and for me to attend the Festival from 19 to 27 August 2006 was among my life's highlights. The musical performances were in almost all respects just superb. I made many new friends, all sharing an enthusiasm for Wagnerian opera, and the company of other members of our society was a real bonus. Apart from sitting together in the theatre, members of our society made trips to Nuremberg and Bamberg during the days when there was no performance and also looked around the pretty and important town of Bayreuth together. Another good point was informative and engaging lectures in English given by musicologist Jeffrey Swann on behalf of the New York Wagner Society. These all took place in the morning of the corresponding opera's performance. And another social occasion was a dinner hosted by the Wagner Society of Southern California that included among the guests quite a few of the cast and Richard Wagner's grandson Wolfgang, who is now about 85 years old.

 

· The Bayreuth opera and chorus are both unparalleled for their excellence in the performance of Wagner's music. In the 2006 Festival, both orchestra and chorus lived up to their reputation. It is true the horn in Siegfried's horn call cracked once or twice, but after all, we are all human. The quality of the sound and the orchestral balance were just marvellous, and the tone of strings, wind and brass were all very hard to equal, let alone beat. The conductors were all superb, especially Christian Thielemann, who did all four Ring operas.

 

· In some ways, the best singing performances were in Tristan and Isolde. Nina Stemme, the Swedish soprano, is known for her excellence in the role of Isolde, and she certainly did not disappoint. She has an extremely powerful but beautiful voice and her intensely emotional acting was an admirable fit to the music. The Tristan of American Robert Dean Smith was quite new to me. He is not quite as powerful as Stemme, but he is intelligent, musical and emotional, and sings well in the style of the music. In particular, in the wonderful Tristan music of Act III, he showed consistency, beauty of tone and enormous staying power, never sounding as if he was about to give out.

 

· Parsifal was also a wonderful musical experience. The Parsifal of Alfons Eberz, the Gurnemanz of Robert Holl and the Klingsor of John Wegner were all quite memorable, all singing with power and sensitivity. Australian-trained John Wegner, who sang Wotan at the 1998 Adelaide Ring and Alberich in the 2004 Ring has grown in stature, power and confidence over the years, and has become quite an outstanding Wagnerian baritone. I hope to hear his Wotan again in the future, expecting it to have improved on the 1998 performance. However, in Parsifal the one who stood out most was the Kundry, German singer Evelyn Herlitzius, who is remarkable for her strong and beautiful voice, her humane singing, exactly in style, and her attractive appearance. She is actually quite short, even petite, but her size is no indication of her remarkable power.

 

· The singers in The Ring were also mostly very good, but with a couple of lapses. In Act I of Walküre Siegmund was played by Endrik Wottrich, but he weakened greatly towards the end of the act, with very distinct and loud boos greeting him from some quarters at the end of the act, along with the normal but hardly thunderous applause. He pleaded sickness and in Act II Robert Dean Smith took over, giving a much more confident and better musical performance. The Brünnhilde, American Linda Watson, was very good, though I do not find her voice or appearance particularly appealing for this role. She had a tendency to sing flat on the high notes, especially in Walküre. To be fair she improved with time and gave a creditable immolation scene at the end of Götterdämmerung. Even so, I thought her somewhat below both Evelyn Herlitzius, who sang the role at Bayreuth in 2003, and our Adelaide 2004 Ring Lisa Gasteen. Falk Struckmann and the American Stephen Gould were both just excellent as Wotan and Siegfried respectively. Struckmann was familiar from the DVD of the Barcelona Ring but Stephen Gould was new to me. Though a bit bland in the middle register, his voice was just superb higher up, ringing, in tune and clear. The other characters in The Ring, from Sieglinde to Mime, from the Rhinemaidens to Gunther, from Loge to Waltraute or Erda (both roles sung by the Japanese mezzo Mihoko Fujimura), were all just excellent. If I had to pick one that was especially good, it would be the Hagen of Hans-Peter König. I heard a couple of people comment that he seemed a bit too nice for Hagen, but to me he gave a memorable account of the sinister figure of Hagen, with a powerful voice that had beauty but a darkness in it that seemed to me to fit this role perfectly.

 

· And finally The Flying Dutchman. John Tomlinson in the title role is perhaps past his prime, but he was still excellent, with a firm and clear voice and excellent staying power and an appearance just as I imagine the flying Dutchman to be. The Senta of Adrienne Dugger was also good, though her voice is not as beautiful as I would like.

· Endrik Wottrich, whose Siegmund was rated so poorly by the audience, was much better in the lighter role of Erik, with a pleasant voice that could manage this role admirably.

 

· The productions were generally good, but not on the same level as the music. My overall standpoint on productions I have to admit is conservative. I like the traditional productions, for instance I like Tristan and Isolde to seem medieval, with medieval sets and costumes, because the opera is, after all, set in the middle ages. However, I have no problem with modern settings as long as they are appropriate and roughly in line with what Wagner intended. And I realize that the really traditional productions are no longer the norm, especially in Europe.

 

· So generally the productions were all right. Tristan was quite effective. I thought it a pity that Tristan was dressed in a modern suit and Isolde sang the Liebestod, surely among the peaks of music, in a costume that made her look a bit like an overgrown schoolgirl. The settings were unmemorable, and very modern. But nothing in the production of Tristan and Isolde was offensive and it still gave the timeless message of the extraordinary music, among the most original and influential of any opera.

 

· The production of The Flying Dutchman was the same as I had seen in Bayreuth in 2003 and I thought it very interesting. In particular, there was a girl continually appearing who represented the child Senta, with her fantasies of rescuing the mythical sailor. The psychological approach is certainly not against Wagner's intentions, even if the double-Senta is innovative.

 

· The Ring was a new production, mainly by Tankred Dorst, and in general it worked pretty well for me. There were no real fires as there were in Adelaide, but the opening of Rheingold really did take place in the Rhein, with images of naked girls swimming at the top of the stage, making the scene look genuinely aquatic. There were two sets of Rhinemaidens, one set that did the acting, the other that did the singing. Siegfried wore a costume like a worker, with braces, in most parts of both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, even in the wedding scene of Act II of Götterdämmerung, when more or less all the other characters were dressed up as appropriate to a wedding, the men in dinner jackets, the women in elaborately crafted dresses. I prefer the vassals to seem a bit more as if belonging to the mythical age when the opera is set, but the whole scene was certainly grand and magnificent and after all the themes of the opera apply to all periods. There were quite a few extraneous characters who did not seem to me to add to the story or the drama. For instance, in Götterdämmerung, there was a young man who sat reading on one of the steps of Gunther's palace all through scenes set there. He continued to read even during the fire at the end of the opera, then closed his book a few minutes from the end and went out through what seemed like the emergency fire exit. Maybe he was reading the text of the opera, but this character seemed a bit unnecessary to me. There's a lot to say about the production of this mighty work, but in essence there was nothing that for me detracted from the power of the splendidly beautiful and powerful music of The Ring.

 

· I cannot say the same about Christoph Schlingensief's production of the Bayreuth Parsifal. It seemed to go overboard to distract attention from the music and to change essential elements of the story, as well as to be a combination of ultra-political correctness in some respects and not sensitive enough to racial issues in other ways. The Christian symbolism of the opera, which largely dominates the work, was entirely eliminated in favour of the multi-faith approach. At the end of Act II there was no sign of the cross that destroyed Klingsor's magic castle. In the Grail scenes, there were clergy of all faiths, including Jewish, Muslim, Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu, as well as Christian. This seemed to me less offensive than a bit silly. On the other side, we had Klingsor, almost naked, and several of the knights of the Grail painted black in a way that struck me as a bit ridiculous. The symbolism of the black Klingsor and Grail knights was completely obscure, and a black person might even find it quite offensive to have somebody like John Wegner specifically painted black when he is supposed to be the villain of the opera.

 

· This production featured numerous and unnecessary stage transformations. Sure, you can praise it if older productions are too slow-moving for you, but personally I found the numerous scene changes and extraneous images distracting, and the symbolism quite baffling. There were quite a few non-singing characters simply invented by Schlingensief, one of them being a gross man with large naked women's breasts and looking highly pregnant.

 

· But the worst feature of this production was that it changed the story. When Parsifal enters at the end of Act III and heals Amfortas's wound with the recovered magic spear, as he explicitly says in the words of the wonderful monologue at the end of the opera, what happened on stage was that Amfortas was killed with the spear by aggressive actions from Parsifal and Kundry, they being represented as joint victors and potentially the joint rulers of the Grail. Yet Klingsor appeared several times in Act III, after his defeat, as if he was still Kundry's master. At the end of the opera, during the ultra-sublime music that provides Wagner's final legacy, there was a gigantic image of a disintegrating rabbit that obscured almost everything still happening on stage. The significance of this was completely lost on me. It seemed to be saying that the opera is about disintegration, whereas the dominant themes as Wagner wrote the opera are redemption and hope in the midst of despair.

 

· For me the production of Parsifal certainly did detract from the ethereal and sublime music. All right, you can just shut your eyes and listen to the music, and that's what I did a bit of the time. But having said all that, maybe this production is worth seeing again. It is possible that some of the symbolism's significance would become clearer after seeing it several times. But for the present, this production was the low point of the Bayreuth Festival 2006.

 

· If I could sum up the Bayreuth experience as a whole, I would say that musically it was just wonderful, but in production terms a bit less notable. And socially it was great as well. I thank the Wagner Society of Queensland for making it possible for me to get tickets for this splendid occasion. Overall, I know that I shall look back on it with enormous pleasure for the rest of my life, but also probably remember the distortions of the Parsifal production.