Arts
Tit for tat and tat for tit
Rodney Milnes
Innocent that I was, On my first visit to Bayreuth I looked forward simply to hearing Wagner's later works in the theatre for Which they were composed. But there are too many unlaid ghosts in that town for something as uncomplicated as that, and the Process of laying those ghosts will create many, many more. The festival is a massive, many-faced industry, commercial (obviously), political (violently, naively), and gossip-ridden (deliciously). Music takes second place, which is the first tragedy of this sad, haunted but beautiful towm.
Innocent that I am, I gathered from the violent reception of the Boulez-Chereau centenary Ring last year that it was little more than a good-natured joke at the expense of an audience about which I had naive preconceptions. I was prepared, in my bloody-minded way, rather to enjoy it. I learned a lot in ten days.
First, the audience, without which no opera performance has any meaning. It seemed as though last year's crack about this. Ring being France's revenge for the , Franco-Prussian War held a certain truth. But there is, and always has been, a huge French contingent. This is an international, and of necessity a rich audience. It is not Musically sophisticated; how otherwise could it cheer to the rafters Gwyneth Jones's well-intentioned but technically Shaky, at times painfully insecure Brunnhilde? How seriously can you take an audience that boos an obviously sick artist (Karl Ridderbusch)? Or one that stamps and claps in slow time in order to summon ,its victim before the curtain so that it can deafen them with boos and whistles. '
What this Ring is, of course, is revenge on Bayreuth for those years of Nazi domination, which are now to be countered by years of Marxist domination — we have had the Friedrich Tannhauser, and next year's Dutchman will be of East German provenance. The management is obviously suffering an excess of not strictly relevant guilt over the festival's past. Yet I know of no evidence of the Nazis deliberately perverting Wagner's works to serve their purPose (his enemies would say they didn't need to, but we haven't time to go into (hat); so, the first, and perhaps only thing to be said about the Boulez-Chereau Ring is that it is a monstrous and in my view contemptible perversion of Wagner's intentions.
Amidst the vast output of leaflets, pamphlets and notes spawned by the production, nothing is sillier than a discussion Printed in the Rheingold programme. It is one thing for Mm Chereau, Boulez and a certain Carlo Schmid to agree that the Ring is a critique ofFrnhcapitalismus (engagingly translated as "precious capitalism"' though I imagine they mean the Industrial Revolution), that Wagner was working by means of an alienation effect further clarified by Chereau; but it is quite another thing for them to impute these aims to Wagner himself, Had Wagner wanted to write such a critique, he was perfectly capable of doing so, but he would not have wasted his time doing it in tetralogous operatic form. The Chereau production, its visual references spanning around 100 years, diminishes at a stroke Wagner's vision. Of course there are elements of socio-political criticism in the work, but by ignoring everything else Chereau is playing only about a tenth of the text and none of the music.
In this he is aided by Boulez, whose foursquare, strict-tempo interpretation makes him the Victor Sylvester of Wagner conductors, a crown forwhich there can be few contenders. Why he should seek to drain the score of every emotion — tenderness, compassion, fear, resignation, pain, nobility, in short of all human feeling — is something that probably only his doctor could explain, and then in the presence of his lawyer. But whatever his problems are, it's tough on Wagner, whose score is virtually destroyed. The only passage in which the orchestra was released from its straightjacket was the finale of Siegfried, but here, to counterbalance the effect, Chereau had Brilnnhilde and Siegfried groping each other like two teenagers in the back row of the cinema. On many other occasions a piece of stage business was either prolonged or invented in order to distract from or diminish music that might otherwise engage the audience's emotions. Ah, an intellectual, analytical Ring, very good, you may say, but it's not what Wagner wrote.
The production is based on sevtrre Marxist determinism. The villain of the piece is Wotan, a shifty, ranting bully from beginning to end — hacking off Alberich's fingers to the get the ring, felling Briinnhilde with a blow to her face in Walkiire, pinning Erda (played as a white'slug) to the ground with his spear in Siegfried. In the Immolation, Briinnhilde lectures him in absentia with a vehemence at. odds with the tender resignation of the music. There is no question of character development, no question of wisdom gained through suffering. Wotan, and the cast as a whole, is seen in terms of black and white (mostly black). There is not much sympathy for his victims (i.e. the rest of the cast) — Sieglinde, for instance is played not as a woman whose suffering finds temporary respite but merely as an hysteric. Only with Mime, who tries to pack
his bag and escape when he sees the way the wind is blowing in the riddle scene and is prevented, trapped by .the spear, are we allowed to feel any fellow feeling.
There is no question of individual choice. The mechanical forge makes Siegfried's sword for him; the woodbird is caged for him to find and corrupts him with its (Wotan's) knowledge. Society cannot be saved by the accidental or the intentional return of the Ring to nature (Brilnnhilde is denied her moonlight interview with the Rhinemaidens); all the past must be ruthlessly destroyed. This last is of course a necessary Marxist gloss, since in Wagner's time-scale, as opposed to Chereau's, Siegfried represents the idealist socialism (national or otherwise) that is found wanting. Once that wrong turning has been taken, Giitterdammerung — as in all dogmatic leftist interpretations from Shaw onwards — falls to pieces, a mere comic strip of randomly juxtaposed images; the Gibichungs in dinner suits, Siegfried in traditional dress, and a chorus of sullen 'workers' who do not (cannOt) know how far to enter into the action. Siegfried's Funeral March, which Boulez manages to make sound trivial, accompanies these workers sauntering on to gaze first at the corpse, then at the audience. Similarly at the end, the workers, who have trooped out of the factory to watch the bosses stabbing and burning each other, show no interest in the Ring being restored to nature and turn instead to stare at us. What are they trying to convey in this piece of People's Kitsch? Accusation? Pity? Judgement? Triumph? It doesn't matter, since by now the whole ludicrous house of cards has collapsed around Chereau's head.
And yet there are flashes of theatrical genius among all this second-hand clap-. trap. The Annunciation of Death, with Brunnhilde ritually cleansing Siegmund's body as she sings; the fresh, rather touching relationship worked out between Siegfried and Mime, one that is bitched-up by Wotan; the stunning realisation of the Giants (two huge Finns perched atop circus acrobats and walking twelve feet tall); the blocking of Waltraute's narration; all these set against the fatuities of GMterdiimmerung or a Wallcure Act Two killed by that famous pendulum, suggest that when he grows up Chereau could be an interesting director.
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