Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed me about some of my views on Wagner, as part of their featuring the first complete Ring cycle to be performed in Canada. In the course of the interview, I was asked how I would like to see the Ring and Wagner’s music dramas in general staged and produced, in the light of my expressions of distaste for all the recent Ring productions I had seen. Fortunately, that was a question I had often asked myself, so I was able to reply fairly promptly: I just don’t know. Or rather, I do know up to a limited point, but I’m bashful about saying what I think.
First, to eliminate the obvious undesirables: I don’t think that in the Ring in particular, but probably in any of the mature Wagner dramas, with the possible exception of Die Meistersinger, anything approaching an old-style ‘naturalistic’ setting is any longer possible. It was once, and you only have to flick through a book of pictures of Ring productions from the early 20th century to see that some of them look very appealing. Now, they would strike one as just kitschy, or a deliberate evocation of the theatrical past. I’m not sure why our attitudes to staging have changed so drastically, though the cinema no doubt plays a large part in the story. I feel, as I think most members of an operatic audience do, that it’s unnecessary to see props, unless crucial to the action, as Siegfried’s sword or Wotan’s spear clearly are.
What seems to have happened recently is that one kind of naturalism has been substituted for another. Where we used to see Hunding’s hut in a forest, with an ash tree growing through it, we now see a suburban kitchen with tasteless furnishings, or a sleazy bar. To stress Siegfried’s domestication at the beginning of Götterdämm-erung we see him in a suit and tie, Brunnhilde serving him his coffee in a pinafore, and obviously fake flames licking round the table. So there is no lack of props, and the most influential Ring so far as current productions go, Chéreau’s centenary one at Bayreuth in 1976, had a huge amount of hardware always in evidence. The main point there was, and is, that what one sees is a big shock after what one would have seen 50 years ago, and that it should strike one as being at odds with the music. The grander and more noble the music that Wagner’s characters sing and are accompanied by, the more petit-bourgeois and the more mundane what we see. This is supposed to serve two separate, though connected purposes: it cuts pretensions to cosmic grandeur down to size, and it demonstrates the relevance of this drama to our — small-scale and ordinary — lives.
It’s possible to sympathise with the impulse which led to this kind of staging, often though unclearly described as ‘deconstructive’. At least some of the designers and directors of post-Chéreau productions are determined that we shall have some closer relationship to Wagner’s drama than that of contemplating, moved and thrilled as we may be, a splendid, huge-scale epic which has no more contact with the way we live than the often impressive escapist movies which their audiences find so enthralling and so ignorable. Goethe’s famous remark in his novel Elective Affinities that there is no way in which one can bring oneself closer to life than by art, and no way in which one can more effectively distance oneself from it, is at least as true of Wagner’s art as it is of any that has ever been created. And it’s fair to say that the old-style productions, with their pretty and grandiose settings, were more likely to provide thrilling and non-thought-provoking experiences than the best of more recent ones, where one may be less stirred, but at the same time one is forced to confront issues about the relationships between noble ideals and the necessities of dealing with the issues of daily life, about the cost that is exacted in changing a society into a more just but also compassionate one, where one code of values is brought into sharp conflict with another.
One trouble is that the shock value of modern productions has now evidently passed its peak. One has come to expect the Rhinemaidens to be mini-skirted tarts, Wotan to be an uneasy gangster, Siegmund to arrive with an empty suitcase, and all the rest. This style of staging has become just as anaesthetising as any that it replaced. My own preference would be for a return to the semi-abstract mode of production of which Wieland Wagner was by far the most successful exponent, though by no means the originator. In his finest productions, the mind was wholly concentrated on the drama, as realised through great singing actors and superb conductors: without inducing elevated stupefaction, they were overwhelmingly moving, partly because they didn’t attempt to provide a particular slant, or to take the mythic out of Wagner and substitute the local and the political. But they did depend on a great team of performers, the like of which I don’t suppose we shall see again.
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