Michael Tanner looks forward to the Mariinsky Theatre’s Ring cycle in Cardiff
A complete production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is always a major cultural event, especially if it is done on four consecutive evenings, so that the great vision of the work takes possession of the spectators’ consciousness as well as of their waking time — though even the slowest performances of it only last for 15 hours, and not the 19 which is being put about as its length by the propaganda of the Wales Millennium Centre. For it is there that the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg will be performing the Ring, one cycle only, on the last day of November and the first three of December. In recent decades Wales has had a great tradition of Wagner performance, with the arch-Wagnerian Reginald Goodall undertaking Tristan und Isolde and Die Walküre with sublime results, and Richard Armstrong conducting the complete Ring there.
What about Russia, though? As one of the countries where opera has long been a central cultural force, one would expect that there would be a tradition of grand Wagnerian conductors and singers, even producers. But even the most experienced Wagnerian will be hard-pressed to mention many, perhaps any, names of great Russian performers who specialised in Wagner, to the extent, say, of recording some of the most famous selections from the operas. I can think of only one fine recording of a complete Wagner opera from Russia, and in Russian: Lohengrin, with the great and weird tenor Ivan Kozlovsky in the title role — but then Lohengrin has a long history of being treated as an honorary Italian opera. There was a lot of Wagner performed in Russia, as there was everywhere in Europe, during the last decades of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries, but that was by Germans on tour, the decisive event being the appearance of Angelo Neumann’s travelling company in St Petersburg in 1889. When Russians performed Wagner, it was in Russian, and that continued until the Great War, when, as in the United Kingdom, it was considered unpatriotic to perform his works.
Wagner has always been a controversial political figure, for many reasons, ranging from the very obvious to the fascinatingly obscure. In Russia it was, for a long time, as much a matter of musical politics as anything else — the Russians were fierce in their nationalism, and Wagner was seen as a grave threat to their musical integrity, as of course he was. Actually, several of the Russian composers we know best from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were influenced by him, if not in the sounds they made at least in the construction of their operas, for instance Rimsky-Korsakov. It was often, as in other countries, especially France, not musicians but other artists who were most explicit and passionate in their admiration for him. And what perhaps impressed them above all were two things: Wagner’s unprecedentedly high ambitions for what art could achieve in terms of social change, and his concept of ‘the total work of art’, or a fusion of the arts, which also meant a fusion of the senses. In Russia the attempt to realise this latter objective was taken to insane lengths by Scriabin, but the so-called Symbolist poets of both Russia and France were deeply in thrall to the idea, too.
It was widely agreed from the start, even by Wagner himself, that the first attempt to mount the Ring, in Bayreuth in 1876, was visually a dreadful failure. Unfortunately he didn’t live to revise the staging, so what he had loathed turned into orthodoxy. The idea was of sets that were as naturalistic as possible — but possibility turned out to be all-too- limited and even ludicrous. More visionary stage directors, of which Russia had at least its fair share, envisaged staging the Ring and other of Wagner’s mature music-dramas in a way that did justice to the all-important mythical dimensions of the works, and so relied much less on specific, time-bound props, more on lighting, atmosphere, gesture and movement — but the latter of a balletic kind; and the costumes, too, were not to be tied down in space and time. But what began as an ideal was compromised, so that the most radical of the innovators, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavsky, not only found themselves up against convention, but were also at loggerheads with one another. What happened, paradoxically, was that the staging of Tristan und Isolde in St Petersburg in 1909, by Meyerhold, was perhaps the most literal-minded ever seen, with every detail of the sets arbitrarily suggesting the 13th century (all this is to be found in authoritative and fascinating detail, and with telling illustrations, in Patrick Carnegy’s new book Wagner and the Art of the Theatre).
The political turmoil within Russia for the next few years, and the enormous cost in life and resources involved in fighting against Germany, meant that, though Wagner continued to exercise his spell on Russian artists, he was persona non grata with the authorities. No Russian company performed any of the Ring after 1913 until Valery Gergiev reintroduced parts of it in 2000, with the exception of the production by Sergei Eisenstein, the great film director, of Die Walküre in 1940, during the period of the Nazi–Soviet pact. Until that ultimately cynical political act, Wagner had been regarded as decadent, bourgeois and the rest of it, as well as being of course the favoured composer of Hitler. Eisenstein saw the Ring, of which only one part was performed before the Nazi invasion of Russia, as an allegory of the separation of Man and Nature brought about by capitalism — an interpretation which has been revived often in Western Europe during the past 30 years. His production, in its details, seems to have been highly cinematic and not really a success.
Then came the great hiatus, Wagner’s music, apart from highlights and extracts, being very little performed in the Soviet Union post-second world war. Now that the Mariinsky Theatre is taking its Ring on tour we shall be able to see how individual a contribution to our understanding of it Gergiev, together with his director George Tsypin, has to make. A touring Ring clearly has its own problems, and it isn’t surprising that this one has been criticised for its minimalist scenery, though the action is dominated by gigantic anthropoid figures, vertical or horizontal. Colour, bright and piercing, plays a key part. Russians singing German tend to sound peculiar, though one hopes for compensation in the discovery of some thrilling voices. Anyone who has heard the Mariinsky in one of its recent visits to the UK singing Russian or Italian opera knows that there are some very exciting voices in the company, including some young tenors who, one hopes, might give us what we have lacked for so long: some genuinely heroic Wagner singing. There are enough members of the Mariinsky company for each role in the Ring to be double- or treble-cast, so there is no certainty at present as to whom we shall be hearing. The only thing that is certain is that what we hear will be very unlike what we have been hearing in the West during the past decades.
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