Wagner Summer

In Frank Castorf’s production, “Das Rheingold” is set in a motel on Route 66.Illustration by Romy Blümel

Richard Wagner will not be ignored. The two-hundredth birthday of the “Sorcerer of Bayreuth,” to borrow the title of a recent book by Barry Millington, arrived on May 22nd, and the sixteen-hour epic that is “The Ring of the Nibelung” has rolled through New York, London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Milan, Paris, and a dozen other cities—most notably, the Wagner capital of Bayreuth, whose adjective-defying new “Ring” makes all others look timid and sane. By the end of the year, there will have been more than forty performances of the cycle, from Riga to Melbourne. Record companies are releasing deluxe boxed sets of Wagner; sadly, the most vital of them, Sony’s archival collection “Wagner at the Met,” stops in 1954. Dozens of new Wagner books are appearing, including Millington’s handsome volume and, later this year, the nine-hundred-page Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, whose entries range from “absolute music” to “Zurich,” by way of “Baudelaire,” “Nietzsche,” and “pets.”

It would be good to report that the anniversary year has yielded a raft of fresh insights. Alas, outside of scholarly precincts, discussion of Wagner is stuck in a Nazi rut. His multifarious influence on artistic, intellectual, and political life has been largely forgotten; in the media, it is practically obligatory to identify him as “Hitler’s favorite composer.” There was a time, certainly, when the Wagner family’s links to Nazism were overlooked or covered up, but the Hitler connection is now a truism, the one thing that everyone knows about Wagner. Regrettably, new myths are being piled upon the old. It’s routinely said that Wagner’s music was played in the death camps, even though there is almost no evidence that such a thing happened; it’s also widely believed that Wagner’s anti-Semitism precipitated Hitler’s, even though the dictator never mentioned Wagner’s attacks on Jews. The endless Nazi fixation is unsettling. Hitler has won a posthumous victory in seeing his idea of Wagner become the defining one.

Many intelligent listeners honestly resist Wagner, whether on political or purely musical grounds. Even those who revere him can be spooked. Travelling in Germany and Austria this summer, I twice heard Hans Sachs’s closing monologue from “Die Meistersinger”—“Honor your German masters”—and both times I felt a chill at the insinuating line “Evil tricks threaten us.” Although Wagner’s operas are never explicitly anti-Semitic—something that cannot be said of the work of Dickens or Degas—his hatreds often lurk just below the surface. Such historical awareness makes blind idolatry impossible, and that’s a healthy thing. Can we say the same about the American pop culture that now rules the world? Has its darker side been fully exposed? Or is it easier to smite yesterday’s villains than to confront today’s?

Advance word on the new Bayreuth “Ring,” staged by the Berlin-based director Frank Castorf, promised a sharply political interpretation, one in which the curse of the Nibelung’s gold would give way to the curse of international oil. Photographs from the rehearsals showed such settings as a gas station on Route 66, an oil rig in Baku, and the façade of the New York Stock Exchange. Leftist approaches to the “Ring” are nothing new: Wagner designed the libretto as an allegory for the corrupting forces of nineteenth-century capitalism, and late-twentieth-century productions by Joachim Herz, Götz Friedrich, and Patrice Chéreau articulated that agenda onstage. Still, the time seemed ripe for a radical “Ring” set in the twilight of the American empire.

Castorf delivers something much weirder—a sprawling act of operatic Dadaism that falls between Buñuel and “South Park.” The sets, by the Serbian production designer Aleksandar Denić, are, as the photographs hinted, monumental, richly detailed creations: in “Das Rheingold,” a motel with a pool is correct down to the irregular letters on the roadside sign (“Radio Phone Color TV”). The “Siegfried” scenery is particularly staggering: on one side of Bayreuth’s revolving stage, we see a Communist Mt. Rushmore, with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao supplanting the Presidents; on the other, there is a meticulous re-creation of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in the East German period.

Around the time the Rhinemaidens retire from the motel pool and order cocktails, however, it becomes evident that Castorf—a director long associated with the Volksbühne, a radical theatre in Berlin—has no interest in bourgeois affectations of narrative. In “Rheingold,” he makes ingenious use of video feeds to conjure film-noir-style scenes, but these increasingly defy the logic of the libretto; for example, at the beginning of the Nibelheim scene, when Wotan and Loge should be plotting to trap the dwarf Alberich and take his Ring, Alberich is already tied up. Slapstick and absurdism supersede the oil-as-gold allegory. In “Götterdämmerung,” a baby carriage teeters at the top of a staircase, prompting thoughts of the Odessa Steps sequence in “Battleship Potemkin.” But when the baby carriage goes bumping down the steps it turns out to be filled with potatoes—point unknown. Most confounding are two large rubber crocodiles that intrude upon Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s love scene, mating with each other and then gobbling up the Woodbird.

The audience did not care for it at all. There were loud boos on each night of the opening week, and when Castorf showed his face after “Götterdämmerung” the crowd howled in anger. The director proceeded to milk the outrage, lingering before the curtain for more than ten minutes and inserting himself into other people’s bows. To all appearances, this finely nuanced performance as Directorial Narcissist was the only characterization to which Castorf had given serious thought.

Yet the production cannot be dismissed out of hand. Juvenile pranks aside, its surreal grandeur stays in the mind. The real problem is that it attempts an excessively contorted maneuver: a double deconstruction, both of traditional, swords-and-dragons Wagner and of latter-day political interventions in that tradition. The fundamentals of the “Ring” could easily be restored within the context of Denić’s remarkable sets; it wouldn’t be hard to indicate, say, how the oil rig relates to Wotan’s power. Perhaps someone will fill in the blanks when the staging returns next summer. Given his obnoxious antics, Castorf is unlikely to reappear.

The singing fell below the international standard, suggesting that the air of constant crisis at Bayreuth—the internecine squabbles, the financial troubles, the fixation on esoteric production styles—has taken an artistic toll. Wolfgang Koch, the Wotan, lacked a strong lower register, although his voice rang out in such baritonal passages as “O heilige Schmach!,” in “Die Walküre.” Catherine Foster, the Brünnhilde, also showed power on the high end, slicing through the orchestra with a pure and brilliant tone, but she tended to sing flat, and made a pale, insubstantial sound at lower volumes. The dry, thin tone of Lance Ryan, as Siegfried, was hard to take over the long haul, his physical energy notwithstanding. Johan Botha and Anja Kampe displayed considerably greater security and musicality as Siegmund and Sieglinde; Martin Winkler played Alberich with bite and flair. The rough, dark bass of Attila Jun, the Hagen, communicated one of Castorf’s more haunting conceits—that the ostensible villain is the secret hero of a world gone mad.

The biggest ovation went to Kirill Petrenko, the gifted young Siberian conductor, who is about to take over the Bavarian State Opera. He elicited playing of analytical clarity and driving force; often, he was the production’s sole source of momentum. Yet there was something airless and relentless about his approach: he tended to skate over the intimate passages. Sneering trombone glissandos in Mime’s “Verfluchtes Licht” sequence, in “Siegfried,” were nearly as crude as Castorf’s crocodiles. Almost nothing in this fascinating, infuriating “Ring” came fully to life.

Two nights after the “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth, I saw “Meistersinger” at the Salzburg Festival, in a new staging by the chic Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, with sets by Heike Scheele and, in the pit, the Vienna Philharmonic. In many ways, the production came as a relief after the Bayreuth perplexity, since Herheim knows his Wagner and heeds the stories. He portrays the tale of the Nuremberg Mastersingers as the midnight fancy of a Biedermeier-era poet, who, before the overture, is seen scribbling at his desk in his nightgown. In a coup de théâtre, a video closeup of the desk dissolves into the set for Act I, with the characters appearing as Lilliputian figures in its nooks and crannies. The poet doubles as the widower Hans Sachs, the wisest of the Mastersingers, and we realize that the author is writing out of his own loneliness and loss. The fairy-tale mood is heightened during the mob scene in Act II, which conjures Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and other refugees from the pages of Grimm. It’s a delightful, eye-filling spectacle that would play well at the Met; indeed, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, was in attendance on opening night, making arrangements to import it for a future season.

Delightful, but too neat and controlled. Herheim has a tendency to micromanage the stage picture, so that the characters come across as hyperrealist puppets. Furthermore, the focus on Sachs diminishes the other figures in the drama. Perhaps the conception would have benefitted from a conductor more spontaneous than Daniele Gatti, whose tempos dragged throughout. Michael Volle’s Sachs was vocally imposing and theatrically riveting, though too gruff to convey the character’s reserve of warmth. Roberto Saccà and Anna Gabler, as Walther and Eva, both struggled to be heard above the orchestra; the former had elegant style, the latter was unsteady. Markus Werba gave a lithe performance as Beckmesser, Sachs’s pedantic foe.

I arrived home still hungry for Wagnerian greatness. So I went on the Internet to listen to a much lauded “Ring” that had unfolded at the London Proms in the same period as the Bayreuth staging, under the direction of Daniel Barenboim. It, too, had its vocal ups and downs, but in “Götterdämmerung,” with Nina Stemme blazing as Brünnhilde, it entered the stratosphere. Finally, we could hear the reason for two centuries of fuss: supreme, unquenchable, disordering passion. ♦