An American In Bayreuth

[lennygoran]

You've heard of An American In Paris-this might be called An American In Bayreuth. Regards, Len

Watching Neo-Nazis in Virginia From a German Opera House

By MICHAEL COOPER AUG. 16, 2017


BAYREUTH, Germany — It was my first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. There was the thrill of realizing my long-held dream of hearing Richard Wagner’s music in the opera house he built, where some of my favorite recordings were made. But there was queasiness, too, at the inescapable memories of old photos showing the theater defiled during the Nazi era, festooned with swastikas and visited regularly by Hitler.

Then I stepped outside at intermission on Saturday evening and checked my phone.

Swastika flags, like the ones I’d just been ruminating on, were all over my Twitter feed — but they were flying back in the United States, in Charlottesville, Va. There were photos of angry young men marching there with torches, and reports of them chanting about Jews and invoking the Nazi phrase “blood and soil.” A young woman who was standing up to racism was killed. In 2017.

The images shocked the world. But seeing them play out from here — a place that after more than seven decades is still grappling with the horrors of its Nazi past — added another dimension, and a frightening reminder of where such outbursts can lead.

In recent years, Bayreuth has stepped up its efforts to confront its history. A 2008 “Parsifal,” directed by Stefan Herheim, intertwined the opera’s plot with imagery from the founding of the festival and the dark progression of the 20th century in Germany. The bronze bust of Wagner outside the Festival Theater is now surrounded by gray panels, an exhibition called “Silenced Voices,” devoted to Jewish artists who faced discrimination at the festival at the hands of Wagner’s heirs, and to those killed in the Holocaust.

A symposium last month at Wagner’s opulent home, Villa Wahnfried, which is now a museum, explored “Wagner and National Socialism.” Perhaps most startlingly, this season’s well-received new production of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” by Barrie Kosky, the first Jewish director in the festival’s history, ends by actually putting Wagner on trial in a courtroom modeled to look like the one in Nuremberg where the Nazi war crimes tribunal sat.


“We tried to discuss the past,” the current director of the festival, Katharina Wagner, who is Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, told me when I met her backstage on Sunday evening during one of the intermissions of “Götterdämmerung.” “Bayreuth has a very problematic past, and it was never really done before. So it was important to do it.”

Being an ardent Wagnerite can be complicated. For years I have tried to separate the art, which I find transcendentally beautiful, from the man, who espoused monstrous anti-Semitism, fearing deep down that such compartmentalization is suspect. It’s why my Wagner bookshelf is long on explorations of his music but short on biographies or his own writings. It’s why I was happy to snack on chocolate Mozart treats while in Austria, but found the Wagner sweets for sale here less enticing. It’s why I was transfixed by the exhibitions of old Bayreuth sets and costumes at the Richard Wagner Museum at the Villa Wahnfried, but was made uneasy by his well-preserved clothes and other household artifacts, which gave the place the uncomfortable feel of a reliquary. (The museum also explores, chillingly, the intimate friendship some of Wagner’s heirs forged with Hitler.)

The disturbing events of the outside world largely faded for me, though, once I entered the theater, where the “Ring” was given its premiere in 1876. As “Tristan und Isolde” began, the sound seemed to emanate from all around — Wagner’s famous sunken orchestra pit (he called it a “mystic abyss”) was even more sunken than I expected, with the musicians and the conductor completely hidden from the audience.

When the festival reopened several years after World War II, it consciously broke with its past by mounting increasingly abstract, symbolic productions that stripped away the Teutonic imagery that had become fraught with nationalistic associations. In the decades since, Bayreuth has moved toward increasingly avant-garde reinterpretations of the Wagner canon (the only operas done here). The stagings I saw, a “Tristan” whose first-act ship was represented by a series of Escher-like stairways, and a “Götterdämmerung” with a climactic scene in front of the New York Stock Exchange, would have been unrecognizable to audiences of a century ago.

My Bayreuth sojourn ended with that “Götterdämmerung,” with its themes of cataclysm, the fading of old orders and the possibility of redemption. When it was over, I left the theater, checking for the latest reports of the Nazi sympathizers on the streets of Charlottesville, and thinking about Bayreuth and how easy it was for the powerful to let their prejudices and blindnesses leave them on the wrong side of history. I walked past “Silenced Voices” panels devoted to Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann, a contralto who sang several roles here in the early 1900s and was killed in Auschwitz, and Hugo Lowenthal, a violinist who played here in 1912 and was later killed in a concentration camp in Poland.

Then my Bayreuth journey ended, and it was time to fly home. I picked up some newspapers at the airport, and though I do not read German, it was all too clear what phrases like “der Neonazi-Mob” meant in their dispatches about the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/arts ... ctionfront

[jbuck919]

His first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, as though this were a little thing? It takes at least seven years to get tickets, and there are no longer quotas for American-led tours such as those that were led by my grad school friend so-and-so who also wrote a Beethoven biography, thereby enabling you to figure out who he is without posting his searchable name. I've seen the house, though only off season and on a tour. It is wildly not what you would expect. Among other things, the stage is more narrow than that of most high school auditoriums, though it is very deep.

Anyone who spends the intermission checking tweets and such should have his head examined. The nightmarish things that are happening in the US right now have no relationship with Bayreuth or Germany in general. They are our problem, and so shall they remain.

[jserraglio]

I just watched on Amazon Prime video the opening credits of Lohengrin from Bayreuth, and yes, I noticed that narrow=across stage and thought it was camera pincushion.

[lennygoran]

The nightmarish things that are happening in the US right now have no relationship with Bayreuth or Germany in general. They are our problem, and so shall they remain.

Thanks, I didn't like having to see Donizetti's Siege of Calais and be reminded of Aleppo and I don't see the need to relate Bayreuth with our problems. However with regard to the evil in Charlottesville I can see how one might think of the German far right fringe groups. But just going to an opera I surely would want to think about the opera and not any of these violencematters. Regards, Len

[THEHORN]

Apparently , it's easier to get an audience with the Pope than getting tickets to Bayreuth !

[jserraglio]

Apparently , it's easier to get an audience with the Pope than getting tickets to Bayreuth

Tell that to poor Sean Spicer.

[John F]

During the Bayreuth Festival, performances start at 4 in the afternoon, and each intermission lasts an hour. Most have dinner in one of the intermissions, but the other provides a lot of time to kill. During this American's one Bayreuth summer, we attended all seven operas (including the Ring cycle) and so had 12 intermissions to deal with (none for "Das Rheingold.") If smartphones had existed and any of us had them, no doubt they would have been put to use.