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Post by wahnfried on Oct 13, 2012 21:44:28 GMT
For every Wagner admirer Bayreuth is a magical place. And so there can be said and discussed a lot about it. Bayreuth as Wagners invention, the climax of the "Gesamtkunstwerk", a master stroke of a stage production, the temple of a new religion. Or: Bayreuth under the influence of Cosima. Or: Bayreuth in the Third Reich. Or: New Bayreuth. Or: Decline and fall till today. Anyway here's a wonderful documentary by Stephen Fry. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwH-IiHUi_M |
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Post by Wanderer on Oct 13, 2012 23:22:22 GMT
I watched the Stephen Fry documentary on Wagner a few weeks ago, and as ever with Fry, it's very good. I'm just sorry I didn't see the documentary when it was first aired, because it might have introduced me to Wagner earlier!
Currently I am slowly ploughing through Brian Magee's book Wagner and Philosophy and have been surprised to learn that towards the end of his career, Wagner was moving away from the "Gesamtkunstwerk" concept because, following his favourite philsopher Schopenhauer, he was coming to regard music as a more important art-form than the others. According to Magee, at the time Wagner had died he was losing interest in writing operas and wanted to write symphonies instead. It's a pity he died when he did. Had he enjoyed another 10 years (of good health), who knows what he might have created?
As a Wagner fan, Bayreuth does indeed feel a magical place!Have you ever been there? I would like to one day, but I hear the waiting list for tickets is 10 years or more! Your description of Bayreuth as "the temple of a new religion" is one I've heard elsewhere, and it interests me. What sort of religon is this, and how far does it survive today? For me, Wagner's music feels a bit like a religion because it is so powerful, but I can't articulate it very well.
Given Wagner's legendary financial difficulties, it is a near miracle that he managed to get the place built in the first place. It is also a near miracle that the theatre survived being bombed by the Americans towards the end of World War Two. Another small miracle, surely, that despite the controversial relationship between Winifred Wagner and Hitler, the theatre has remained under the influence of the Wagner family all through the post-war era.
Wieland Wagner is considered by many people to have revitalised Bayreuth after the war, although he apparently unsettled some of the more "conservative" Wagner fans in the process. I can't help but feel alarmed by the details of his connection to a concentration camp during the Nazi period, though.
I imagine Cosima and Winifred must have been formidable ladies to run Bayreuth. Not many women had that level of responsibility at that time. Both had their faults though, and sadly both got mixed up in antisemitism.
Wolfgang Wagner, from what I've heard, seems to have quietly run Bayreuth from behind the scenes for decades, although with his recent death, Bayreuth has gone back to its tradition of being run by Wagner women (Wolfgang's 2 daughters). Do you have any views on how Bayreuth is being run at the moment, and what direction it is going in?
That's enough from me for now. By the way, some of my information on this subject comes from Jonathan Carr's book The Wagner Clan, which I read a little while ago, and makes for an interesting read.
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Post by wahnfried on Oct 14, 2012 20:59:52 GMT
Oh yes. I was twice in Bayreuth (Parsifal and Meistersinger in 2009 and 2010) and a lifelong dream came true. The musical and stage quality was far beyond great quality but it didn't matter anymore when I was in the Festspielhaus.
The whole atmosphere, the sound quality and the genius loci is overwhelming. The theatre is well placed on top of a hill so one as to walked UP to this "temple". (Or going by car wich is a sacrileg somehow.) You are sitting on horrible uncomfartable seats like in a church. Before the lights go out and it is absolutely dark (different from all other opera houses because of the hidden pit) all doors are closed from the outside and were hidden from the inside with heavy black velvet curtains. So there is only music, theatre and you. Nothing else. And then out of the dark the first bars of whatoever arise. Unbelievable.
"Art and religion" Wagner called one of his ghastly essays. So hard to read in such a horrible language. His kind of religion was a mixture out of many others. He claimed salvation through art, his art in particular. I'm sure it didn't work. But besides probably Bach one couldn't get closer to a kind of private religion than with Wagner.
Maybe one can put it in more modern terms. His music is like a kind of drug. It drews one away and makes one absolutely addicted to it.
The turning away from the "Gesamtkunstwerk" I found very interesting. I never heard of it. Maybe it was because he realised that the staging never could fullfill all what music has. "I invented the unseen pit, now I have to invent the unseen theatre." he once wrote realising that the stage productions of his time never could be on equal terms with his music.
Cosima and Winifred must have been ghastly women. Though I must confess that on one side I find Winifred quite sympathetic. She had a great charme. There is a long, long interview with her and the filmmaker Syberberg from I think 1976. She was still talking of "USA" referring to Hitler. In german it means "U-nser S-eliger A-dolf" or in englisch "our blessed Adolf" (!). She never could admit that she once loved a criminal and devil. Disgustable as it is there is more honesty in it I think than in all the others who procclaimed right on May 9th: "Hitler - never heard of. Nazi - whats that?". Wieland was such a kind of person. Surely he was no Nazi at least after 1945. But he never could say a word of remorse.
But here we enter another topic: Artists and their characters. Wagner, Pfitzner, Elly Ney, Backhaus, Strauss, Furtwängler, Wieland, Böhm, Karajan, Clemens Krauss - they all had their arguable and disgustable flaws of characters mostly concerning their behaviour during the Nazi period. But they are all great artists. So how do we deal with them?
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Post by Wanderer on Oct 16, 2012 0:03:20 GMT
You are very lucky to have been to Bayreuth. Wish I could go!
Yes, both Cosima and Winifred had very objectionable attitudes and some of their actions were indefensible. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (wife of RW's daughter Eva), a detestable racist intellectual, was much worse still. I've seen some clips of the Winifred Wagner interview; yes, I must admit there is a certain admirable honesty in her frankness. After that interview, Wolfgang apparently banned her from the festival theatre for a while. In some ways that was hypocritical, though. Wolfgang, Wieland and many others had been mixed up with Hitler and the Nazis too.
Many, many top artists in Germany were morally compromised by the Nazi regime to some extent. Furtwangler, from what I can gather, was no antisemite and despised the Nazi Party, but I find it inexplicable that he chose to remain in Germany during that period - even performing for the Nazis, on occasion! Hans Hotter was against fascism, but apparently remained in Germany because of concerns about his family. Others, like Winifred Wagner, seem much more clearly identifiable as Hitler supporters. Even with some of these people, though, the reality is more complicated. Winifred, for example, used her influence to save many Jews from persecution, and opposed attempts to remove Jews from her employ. I read that she once had a row with Hitler over Wotan being played by a Jewish singer at Bayreuth!!
One of the things I struggle to understand is why Hitler liked Wagner's operas so much. If he had understood 'The Ring' properly, I think he would have seen it as a refutation of everything he stood for. Meistersinger is sometimes portrayed as some kind of right-wing German nationalist opera but having listened to it, I don't really see any of that at all, to be honest. Hans Sachs's speech at the end seems to get misrepresented rather a lot.
As for what I said about Wagner's moving away from "Gesamtkunstwerk"...let me quote you what Brian Magee writes in his book 'Wagner and Philosophy':
...only three of his operas were to be created in their totality after his reading of Schopenhauer: Tristan und Isolde, The Mastersingers and Parsifal. What these are about, respectively, are the three ways in which Schopenhauer thought it possible for us in this life to get a glimmer of contact with whatever it is that is noumenal: through sexual love; through the arts, especially music; and through a compassion-based, self-abnegating mysticism. After that, Wagner planned to write no more for the theatre. He regarded, he said, 'Schopenhauerian philosophy and Parcival [as he was then spelling it] as the crowing achievement' (Cosima Wagner diaries, vol i, p.851). From here there was, so to speak, nowhere else to go. It was his intention, after Parsifal to turn to the writing of symphonies... It would have been the culmination of a continuous process of giving the orchestra its head - allowing it, eventually, to take over, and finally to eliminate everything else - that had begun with his giving up, in response to his reading of Schopenhauer, his dogmatic belief in equal status for all the arts in the combined art-work, and accepting instead the uncontested predominance of music.
Magee doesn't give any specific source for his assertion that Wagner wanted to give up opera for symphonies, but I'm guessing he might be relying on Cosima's diaries and/or Wagner's letters.
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Post by wahnfried on Oct 16, 2012 19:18:57 GMT
Cosima, the "hehre Frau", the "noble women" (though "hehr" in german is more than "noble", their is a touch of purity and holyness in it) opened Bayreuth to the whole bunch of antisemitics. That is her desatrous heritage. And the Klindworth family who raised up Winifred was a part of this circle. Chamberlain and Goubineau are just at the peak of all these chaps who lingered around Villa Wahnfried in those days and were always very welcome.
In one way I admire the young Winifred just for surviving in this shrine where absolutely nothing was allowed to change or to move and with this ghost on the first floor who decided everything and with a husband and a crowd of sisters used to obey. Picture this young girl just running the household always criticised by the old hags. Maybe she was looking for some kind of hero (like all the others who had their vivd memories of old Richard) and finding him of all persons in Hitler.
Yes, she quarrelled with him about jewish artists and also about Max Lorenz who was once found in the Festspielhaus involved with another man. Lorenz she saved. I don't know what happened to the other man. I fear the worse.
The question is and that applies to Furtwängler and his help of jews also: Why did they do it? Just out of humanity? I doubt that. For Winifred no 1 was Wagner and for Fu the music. These people were important for both of them as long as their were important for Bayreuth or the music and the orchestras. That doesn't mean that Fu was an antisemtic. But he was totally naive concerning this subject. And maybe Winifred also (though I'm not convinced she wasn't antisemitic). Both put music above humanity without beeing absolutely inhuman. But they had the wrong standard.
Hitlers appeal to Wagner I think is quite more understandable than for example the fact that always Beethoven 9th symphony was played celebrating his birthday. I mean he was listen to "Alle Menschen werden Brüder"!
I think he dreamed to be a kind of saviour like Lohengrin, a mythical figure like Holländer, a hero like Rienzi. All of them demanded followers without any doubt and questions. Or a new Siegfried messing around without any moral. Or Parsifal as the "inventor" of a new religion. And so on. There a a lot of figures who had their flaws.
Thanks for the quote. This certainly (if it wasn't just misinterpreation by Cosima) would be a most interesting development. I think we can't judge from his only symphony how this new music would have sound.
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Post by Wanderer on Oct 18, 2012 12:49:03 GMT
Yes, I've seen some extracts from her diaries, and it is obvious that she was prejudiced against Jews. Along with Wagner, she seems to have been unpleasant at times to Jews working at Bayreuth, especially the conductor Hermann Levi, who they pressurised to get himself baptised before conducting Parsifal! The view of some commentators is that Wagner's anti-semitism was emotional and conflicted; he could be absolutely dreadful, but he also had more enlightened moments where he regretted his outbursts. Cosima, on the other hand, was much more simple in her bigotry. Yes, Winifred is undoubtedly in some ways an attractive character, and overcame significant obstacles in her life. She began life in an orphanage in East Grinstead, England, where she was apparently treated quite cruelly. A while ago I read A.N. Wilson's novel www.amazon.co.uk/Winnie-Wolf-N-Wilson/dp/0099492474/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350563449&sr=1-1]Winnie and Wolf, which casts an interesting light on Winifred in particular. There were leading lights in the cultural world who fled the Third Reich, but most seem to have stayed, flourished - and then carried on as though nothing had happened after the war. The more I've learned about the Germany of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, the more I am astounded that it descended into the barbarism of Nazism. Germany was in many ways one of the most civilised, cultured and intellectual places on earth. The Germans had great musicians, great writers, forward-thinking theologians and philosophers...so how on earth did the German cultural establishment get so mixed up with the horrors of Hitler's regime? I don't know. Perhaps people at the time did not comprehend how evil the regime was, or perhaps they did - but felt it wiser to remain quiet. There are many people like Furtwangler, though, who could easily have left the country - and yet stayed. Yes, I can understand Hitler identifying with some aspects of the personalities in Wagner's operas. Another figure I think of is Wotan, desperately striving against all odds to hold on to power...maybe Hitler was thinking of Wotan's struggles during his last days in the bunker in Berlin. If you take Wagner's operas as a whole, though, I feel they speak very much against any kind of authoritarianism and warn against the self-destructive nature of power. King Ludwig II, by the way, apparently strongly identified with Lohengrin as well. Magee suggests that if Wagner had gone on to produce symphonies, they would have been relatively unstructured and might have had parallels with the work of Sibelius. He also suggests that Wagner's essay Beethoven (which I haven't read) has more to say about his evolving views on music. |
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Post by wahnfried on Oct 20, 2012 23:10:32 GMT
Don't forget we weren't not so lucky as you british were. I mean after WWI we had only 15 years to learn democracy. And it was a horrible time in those days. Hunger, poverty, lost of self esteem, disappointments everywhere. And for all that they blamed the new and weak democracy. People in Germany in those days were used to follow a leader without asking questions. Well, that's a simple explanation for such horror that followed. But most of the germans were so NAIVE in a way we can't understand it today. And the so called "roaring twenties" with all the new ídeas in thinking, behaviour and living were located in Berlin and some other cities in Germany. But the rest of the people were just old fashioned to say the least.
I dont't think that Hitler admired Wotan most in the last days or weeks. His will that he wrote in his bunker in Berlin sounds very like Rienzi. A nation that is not worth my work has to be destroyed, should perish from the earth. Rienzi is singing something like that and Hitler wrote it.
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