Back to Bayreuth

I spent the day today scurrying around Bayreuth, the little town in Franconia (part of Bavaria) where Wagner built his Festspielhaus. It was a holiday—Pfingster, a Christian celebration of something-or-other, I never quite understood, but it had to do with the Holy Ghost saying “Hey, world! Jesus made it to heaven!” and all of Germany was taking the day off (the country is nowadays 1/3 Catholic, 1/3 Protestant, 1/3 mezzo-nothing. And it sounds like very few go to church with any regularity; but they do like to party). Luckily for me, the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth has no interest in Christian holidays, so not only was it open, but I more or less had the place to myself.

I’d been there once before; 10 years ago, in the summer of 1996, when through the good graces of Perry Lorenzo and Verena Kossodo of the New York Wagner Society I managed to get a seat at a performance of GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG. And I remember going to the Villa Wahnfried Wagner Museum with Perry, back when we were both young and idealistic. Wandering through it again today, it’s amazing to me how much has happened since then—in those days there was no Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, I hadn’t really written any supertitles, and the world knew nothing of the Zambello TRISTAN, the Stephen Wadsworth RING, or the Israel/Rochaix PARSIFAL. Not to mention THEFT OF THE GOLD. And we didn’t understand the first thing about PowerPoint, or projectors, or dvds, or even laptops for that matter; I don’t think I went online that entire month-long trip. My father was alive, and Elizabeth Stetson, and a number of other people we know and love Now, on the other side of all those things, it was good to go back to Bayreuth and think: what next?

To begin with, there’s the Seattle Opera Wagner Competition, this August, brainchild of the great Rebecca Chawgo. It’s a more formal way of doing what Speight Jenkins has always been so good at doing: spotting baby Wagner singers and trying to steer them in the right direction. Our Young Artists Program is all about the 20-something singers; the Wagner Competition, which may become a regular thing at Seattle Opera, will focus on the 30-somethings who have the potential to become Wagner singers (because let’s face it, not all singers do). This summer we’ll hear 10 of these people, in a program that features each of them in a solo; and a panel of judges will award a generous prize to the top female and top male vocalist, to be used for further study and training. So think ‘American Idol’ with lots more winged helmets than usual.

Next, there’s...well, why should I go on telling you what’s next? You’ll find out in time! Instead, let me say briefly, about Villa Wahnfried (left), Wagner’s house was built in the 1870s when he chose Bayreuth for his festival theater and moved here with his entourage of insane hangers-on and family; it was destroyed in the war, and eventually rebuilt as a museum. Unlike the Goethe-haus museum in Weimar, it isn’t really set up “as it was when Wagner lived here”; instead, you walk through each room according to an order and follow the story of his life, from weird adventure to weird adventure and opera to opera, with lots of pictures and blurbs and facsimiles of original manuscripts and what-not. I wish more of the pictures here were available generally, because many of them are just amazing. When you get to Wagner’s death, they have the tiny, nasty couch on which he died and his death mask; and then the exhibit starts going through the Bayreuth productions of his operas, with truckloads of designs and pictures especially from the early years. When you get to the more recent stuff, there’s a room with several computer terminals; all the Bayreuth productions of everything since 1951 are catalogued on a fascinating computer archive, which cross-references ever performance by opera, calendar, and performers. There are zillions of pictures, biographical entries, sound clips, and video clips; I only wish this archive were either a) available online or b) published in computer disc form!

Behind the house you find the double grave of Wagner and Cosima. And if you walk from the house through the town, past the train station, and up the famous ‘Green Hill’ you get to the Festspielhaus, which was closed tighter than a drum today (I suspect they’re in early rehearsals for the operas which will open at the end of the summer). Still, it’s a fascinating building, even from the outside—originally intended as a temporary building, which would be torn down after the first festival in 1876, but it has survived to this day and is still one of the world’s greatest and most sophisticated theaters. The whole concept of ‘Regie-theater’—director’s theater, where the audience doesn’t see the time and place where the composer set the action—that all began here, in 1951, when Wagner’s grandson Wieland wanted to re-open the Festival and continue performing his grandfather’s operas, but needed to disassociate them from the Nazi stigma that had gotten attached to those swords and horned helmets. So Wieland changed the time and place (he made it extremely vague, the visuals done very simply and most of the interest in the lighting) and suddenly a) the Wagner operas were relevant to the new post-Nazi age, b) they were suddenly universal myths, not solely German myths, and c) the job of the stage director suddenly got a hell of a lot more interesting than it had ever been. Since then, perhaps we’ve gone too far (the most recent Bayreuth Parsifal allegdly stars projected time-lapse video footage of a dead, decaying rabbit) but if you’re a singer it’s nice not to have to wear those stupid helmets.