Die Welt Der Herr Wagner, Die Meister

Ever since the new production of Siegfried premiered at the Met on Thursday last week, I've been dwelling on Wagner - as character, composer, cultural influence, and, at times, cultural pariah.

I spent the majority of this afternoon listening to the Georg Solti / Wiener Philharmoniker recording of Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg.  Among Wagner's operas, it's probably one of the lesser known scores.  Registering around four and a half hours of disc time, it's not exactly a short bit of entertainment.  Then again, little of Wagner's music could be categorized as brief.

Yet, for all of his long-windedness, Wagner is a cultural phenomenon without much comparison.  How many other composers are so universally recognizable?  In that, I mean that you can speak to a person who knows nothing about opera and might never have heard of The Ring Cycle, but if you play the Walkurenritt (Ride of the Valkyries) theme for them, they'll instantly know it - probably to the point of being able to hum along.  My own slightly tonally challenged boyfriend can intone Donner's "Heda! Heda Hedo! from Rheingold as a sort of inside joke between us.  (Naturally, I counter with the Valkyrie's "Hojotoho!  Hototojo!" from Walkure.)

Last night, after feeling like I was losing my grip on sanity for the majority of the day due to grading and an absurd inability to find what I was looking for, I began to read a fascinating book about opera composer Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival, which he created.

Written by Fredric Spotts, Bayreuth, A History of the Wagner Festival, chronicles the then hundred and eighteen year history of the Festival.  (The book was published in 1994).  Since its inception in 1876, the Bayreuther Festspiele has featured only the works of Richard Wagner.  Legendary actors, conductors, directors, and designers serve as prominent signposts along the, at times, highly contentious past of the festival.

Of course, the largest problem in the room for most critics - however much it might remain unstated - is Hitler and his co-opting of Wagner's canon as part of his nation-building agenda.  This includes pictures of S.S. stormtroopers atop the King Ludwig balcony of the Festspielehaus and Hitler saluting the crowd on the plaza below.

Wagner's own notable and well-documented anti-Semitism is often linked with the rise, decades later, of Hitler's Nazi party and the Third Reich.  Yet, of course, many musicians that played in the orchestras at Bayreuth were Jews.  Wagner had a deep admiration for the music of Felix Mendelssohn and even allegedly carried on an affair with a half-Jewish woman.

In truth, while Wagner might have had antipathy for some Jews, the overall focus of the problem isn't him.  The composer himself died in 1883, six years before the Fuhrer's birth.  Adolf Hitler, in amalgamating his idea of a perfected German Vaterland, combined elements of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the Teutonic Nibelung mythology, Wagner's concept of a universal, all-embracing artform (Gesamtkunstwerk), and the Romantic notions of German society that suffuse Wagner's operas as ideals of the new Reich.  The whole thing is further complicated by Winifred Wagner, wife of the composer's only son, Siegfried Wagner.  She became close friends with Hitler and, via her ingratiation, furthered the nationalistic mythology inherent in the operas by her father-in-law.

In the post-war decades, with the next generation away from the paterfamilias, Wolfgang Wagner worked to absolve the Wagner family of the Nazi stain and spent 57 years at the helm of Bayreuth, 42 of those years alone at the top after the death of his brother, Wieland.  Productions became more abstract, losing their overwhelmingly German nature.  In the Centenary production of Der Ring Des Nibelungen, director Patrice Chereau removed both time and place from Das Rheingold, placing the Rheinmaidens atop a hydroelectric power dam rather than in the depths of the Rhine.

Yet, the music persists.  Opera companies peg their reputations on daring new productions of the Ring.  Los Angeles found out in 2009 that if you push the boundaries of taste too far, as with Achim Freyer's $32 Million production, you may well lose your shirt.  Critically reviled, bashed by the actors for the impediments caused by the sets and costumes, and deeply in debt after its initial run, the LA Ring was shelved and doesn't seem to have much for future prospects.

The new Metropolitan Opera Ring is experiencing teething problems of its own.  No, it's not a matter of taste as much as technology.  Conceived by the forces behind Cirque du Soleil, the new Met Ring is dominated by a behemoth set piece that the creators affectionately dubbed "The Machine."  A mammoth set of 24 revolving planks, the Machine has a bad habit of freezing up at inopportune times - like opening night of Das Rheingold.  The $40 Million-plus production even necessitated a retrofitting the support structure beneath the side stage of the Met where the Machine would be stored, an additional $5 Million endeavor.

While audiences around the world flock do the latest Meistersinger or Parsifal, in some places Wagner is still, shall we say, verboten...

Such was the strength of post-war hatred of Wagner among the Jewish establishment that his music was unofficially banned in the state of Israel.  Only in 2001 was conductor Daniel Barenboim able, after much debate, to play the overture to Tristan and Isolde at the Israel Festival.  He'd first wished to present the first act of Die Walkure, but was persuaded by the Israeli government and Holocaust survivors to change the program.

Very few remain as loved and loathed, as studied, and as venerated as Wagner.

As I continue through Spotts' book and the recorded operas, I'm sure I'll have more interesting tidbits to offer about the man, his myth, and the operas he left behind.