2009: Meistersinger, Parsifal and Tristan

by Walter Meyer

I have just returned from attendance at the last three Bayreuth performances of the season (Meistersinger, Parsifal and Tristan, for which I had lucked into tickets from the Wagner Society of Dallas this May.

Twelve years ago, one summer, I walked 195 miles in two weeks across England. During the next few years I successfully participated in the Dutch 4daagse (4 days' walk) of 30 km each day (one year, actually walking 40 km although not required at my age even then) and on none of these occasions was I as exhausted as after attending each of these operas . Each opera started at 4 in the afternoon and had two intermissions during which one could get nourishment from the Festspielhaus' cafeteria or, with advance reservations, in its restaurant. (I never ate in the restaurant.) All the lies you may have heard about the seating in the opera are true. This was not the jewel box in which I heard Verdi's Macbeth when I was in Dresden last year. The, unpadded, seats are like the hinged seats some of us may remember from our elementary school days and not much bigger if at all. They have no arm rests. I was told that the seats were left unpadded so as not to spoil the accoustics, which didn't seem to make sense to me as I should think that people seated in them would have the same effect on the accoustics as would padding. Cushions could be obtained at no cost from the cloakroom attendants but did not really make the seats more comfortable. I had a seventh row seat the first evening and fifth row seats for the remaining two. The stage, moreover, has to be seen to be believed. It seems almost as large as the hall itself, seemingly able to contain the whole world w/in its frame.

With this introduction, let me back up a bit. Since my boyhood, i.e. from about the time I was eight or nine, I have been a Wagner fan as a result of my fascination with mythology, German and Norse as well as classical Greek. From the Ring I went on to his other operas and today, the three I was able to attend are perhaps my favorites. It was therefore a thrill and too good an opportunity to pass up to be able to obtain tickets for each of them at Wagner's spiritual and final home on such short notice. Because much of what I've already written here and much that I may be adding, may seem to reflect negativity, let me state here and now that I am glad I availed myself of this opportunity and that, knowing what I know now, I would seek those tickets again. But I'm not sure I'd do a second time what, forewarned, I would be willing to do again for a first time. (I hope this didn't sound confusing.)

The trip to Bayreuth was probably a rather pleasant one in the days of more leisurely travel. One took a summer transatlantic steamer, luxuriated on the ship, took a train upon arrival on the continent and after maybe ten days' travel time arrived at one's destination. Today, you arrive at an eastern US airport three hours before departure time to get through check-in and security for an eight-hour flight through the night to Munich. Munich airport, like the other German airports I've used, is a passenger's nightmare apparently designed by architects with post-graduate degrees in chicanery. On arrival, we had to go through passport control, which was a good fraction of a mile, if not further, from the arrival gate, after which we had to go through security for our connecting flight (one security check isn't enough here!) after which we went to the departure gate for the connecting flight to Nuremberg, which was about as far away again as the arrival gate had been. The various gates aren't necessarily on the same level and there often were no working lifts or escalators. With two pieces of luggage, neither of which was light, these hikes after an all-night flight, were tough on an old codger like me. The plane to Nuremberg looked like a WWI vintage machine with two 6-bladed propellers which was boarded, not through a covered "jetway", but, again after taking stairs, and an extended standing room bus trip, from the air field itself. In Nurenberg I had to take a cab to the train station, where I had to buy a ticket to Bayreuth, the track for which was at the far end of the station, reachable only by another long set of stairs (again with two pcs of luggage!) In Bayreuth, I had to take a cab to Bindlach, the next town over to my (Best Western) Hotel, where I crashed, coming down only for supper and breakfast, until I took their shuttle bus to the opera the next afternoon. In short, while the trip from Virginia to Bayreuth may now be faster than it was a few decades ago, the obstacles with which it's strewn seem to make it as much of a burdened pilgrimage as it may ever have been.

And now to the operas. To a non-maven like me, the music was lovely, the orchestra and singers all superb. Unfortunately all of the three operas, each one a little less so, I believe, than its predecessor, was an example of what I believe is what in Germany the over-popular *Regietheater* which IMO rarely adds much of anything valuable to the underlying work of art. Here I thought it was painting the lily almost to the point of distortion. What we were attending was, in the case of Meistersinger and probably Parsifal as well even farther removed from the originals than Carmen Jones was from Bizet's Carmen.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

The worst of these, again IMO, was Meistersinger which apparently was booed at the end of each performance throughout the season, including the one I attended. One can at best admire Katharina Wagner's guts at nevertheless coming out for curtain calls as the performance's producer and facing the audience at each of these evenings. (For a description of the work's production, see Playbillarts.com , but see also Mostly Opera.)

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act 3, in Katharina Wagner's Bayreuth production. Photo taken 2009: Enrico Nawrath

I guess I can say that the performance came closer to Meistersinger than to any other opera I've attended. Perhaps it was to Meistersinger what Forbidden Planet was to The Tempest. Walter von Stolzing, sung wonderfully by Klaus Florian Vogt, first appears as a rebel without a cause, whitewashing all the artwork in the hall where the singers all meet and Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, is the only character who goes about the stage barefoot. Beckmesser, whom I always pictured as a middleaged plodder long past any realistic hopes of winning the love and affection of a girl like Eva, is here a brash young know-it all-who later sports a T-shirt with the motto, "Beck in Town", which means even less in German than in English. The guild membership test, which is normally sung to the accompaniment of Beckmesser's pounding out the mistakes as Stolzing makes them, using up the paper before the poor guy can even finish his song, becomes a speed contest in completing a jigsaw puzzle. (Don't ask!) When Sachs later turns the tables on Beckmesser by pounding on a shoe he's finishing to mark Beckmesser's mistakes, finishing the shoe before Beckmesser finishes his attempt at a song, the shoe is here replaced by a typewriter. Someone remarked, why doesn't he just use a laptop? Similarly lost in this way is how Sachs in the original breaks up an elopement plan between Walther and Eva by hammering on a shoe. The final act was for me the final disappointment. Gone was the pageantry and spendor of the Johannestag celebrations, the dance of the apprentices, the pomp and ceremony of the arrival of the Meistersinger, all substituted with historical caricatures many of which I couldn't recognize; Beckmesser, after being humiliated apparently, Shylock-like becomes the "Jew-turned-Christian" and renounces his old pedantic ways and when Walther is awarded the prize of a giant check in the amount of 10,000 Euro drawn on the Bank of Nuremberg, he spurns it and membership into the guild. In the opera as I recall, Sachs successfully convinces him to relent. I didn't see that here. Alan Titus sang Hans Sachs, Klaus Florian Vogt sang Walther, Michaela Kaune sang Eva, Adrian Eröd sang Beckmesser and Sebastian Weigle conducted.

Parsifal

Parsifal was the next performance. It's an opera with which I haven't been as familiar as with others, not really appreciating it until I attended a performance of it with the National Opera at Washington's Kennedy Center, about nine years ago. The only other performance I had attended was about 50 years ago, although I've listened to recordings in the meantime.

In this performance the curtain rose revealing what was apparently the pantomimed deathbed scene of Parsifal's mother in what I understand was one of the rooms of the Villa Wahnfried, where Wagner lived for a while and where he is buried (with his wife and, to one side, his dog). The little boy Parsifal clings to his nanny and is at first afraid to approach his dying mother, preferring to ride his rocking horse (reminding me of nothing so much as the boy in D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner Indeed, IMO, Parsifal's growth seems to be, at least at first from Rocking Horse Winner to Lenny in Of Mice and Men, but let that pass.) The scene changes as the Prelude ends and we see a host of men in suits with gigantic wings growing out of their backs. I guess they were supposed to represent angels. The opera doesn't normally contain angels. I don't like seeing creatures in human shape with wings coming out of their backs. They never fly anyway; they put me off, and how do they get their coats off?

The action got more and more confusing with what seemed to me to be hints of mother-son incest on the death bed but I guess it was all right because all of a sudden we're back to the little boy on the bed alone with the winged creatures gone. Maybe it was all a dream. Or was it? There's a scene of the grail knights who aren't really grail knights, rituals and a dead swan shot by young Parsifal, who doesn't have a clue.

Thomas Jesatko as Klingsor.

The second act in Klingsor's garden was also not at all what was to be expected, Klingsor losing, at least for me, some of his frightfulness when appearing in panties with women's hose held up by garters. (J. Edgar Hoover?) Lots of stuff happen before the confrontation between Klingsor and Parsifal in which Kundry seems to alternate between mom and mistress. Then a host of silent citizens fill up the stage dressed in the shabby fashions of people in the 30s and 40s who had seen better days and their bundled up children, much like assemblage of the doomed in the city squares before the Nazi deportations. In fact, that's exactly what it was because soon there were uniformed men with swastika arm bands goose-stepping over the stage shooting their victims against the backdrop of more swastika banners before the appearance of Klingsor as a half-dressed transvestite is subdued as his spear is intercepted in flight by the apparently ordained Parsifal, at which the entire scenery collapses with the end of the act. The final act takes place in what may have represented the arena chamber of the Bundestag whose seated members, some time grail knights, were seen reflected upside down in a giant suspended tilted mirror.

Parsifal, Bundestag scene in Act 3 of Stefan Herheim's production. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.

Parsifal apparently cures Amfortas of his previously non-healing wound by applying the spear that had first caused it and the latter is now free to crawl into the opened coffin containing, if I made it out correctly, the skeletal remains of Titurel. Parsifal emerges as the new master of the grail and Gurnemanz is seen with Kundry holding before them a young boy and girl. You might be able to understand all this a bit better by checking out this article. I later learned that all this was supposed to depict the degeneration and regeneration of Germany itself (Thomas Mann, in his Doktor Faustus, never took his tale past the country's collapse.) If they say so! Who in Germany's regeneration was its Parsifal? Adenauer? Eisenhower?

As on the earlier day, I found the music and its performance marvelous. Parsifal was sung by Christopher Ventris, Kundry was sung by Mihoko Fujimura, Gurnemanz was sung by Kwangchul Youn, Amfortas was sung by Detlef Roth and Klingsor was sung by Thomas Jesatko. The conductor was Daniele Gatti.

Tristan und Isolde

Tristan was the least distorted of the operas. In the first act, the portion of the ship shared by Isolde and Brangäne was set out like the bar in a modern ocean liner rather than the sailing ship sailing from old Ireland to old Cornwall. The second act took place in what looked a bit like a drab waiting hall of a modern airport and the third, in a nondescript spot where Tristan was lying in state before he was even dead, something like Snow White or, if you like, Lenin or Mao Tse Tung.

The tale of Tristan has been for me a long (and perhaps boring) tale of unconsummated love, with what may be opera's most frustrating operatic coitus interruptus occurring in the second act after which the betrayed king goes on and on about his disappointment. (Perhaps he should simply have anticipated Hans Sachs who nips any advances to him by Eva in the bud with a reminder of what happened to Isolde and King Marke!) For me the opera is first and foremost the music and Isolde's Liebestod at the end was the worthy culmination of the opera that evening and of the trip to Bayreuth as a whole. Tristan was sung by Robert Dean Smith, Isolde was sung by Iréne Theorin, Kurwenal was sung by Jukka Rasilainen, Brangäne was sung by Michelle Breedt, King Marke was sung by Robert Hall. Peter Schneider conducted.

Irene Theorin: Isolde's Liebestod

I took a train to Nuremberg the next day, spent an afternoon on a walking tour of the city, and visiting the Dürer Haus. He had secretly built what was described in the English notes as a "cabinet" in the kitchen which was actually a toilet and was against the building codes. He was fined. The town records indicated that the officials recognized him as worthy man who had brought honor and wealth to the city but who could, nevertheless, not be treated differently from other residents. However, because of his stature, it was declared that, as soon as he paid the fine, it would be restored to him.

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