The first-ever visit of this ardent Wagnerite to his festival at Bayreuth coincides exactly with my 20th anniversary of contributing this column to The Spectator. How satisfying to combine them! Whatever reservations, the experience of seeing all seven mature music dramas within nine days in Wagner’s own theatre was pretty mindblowing.
I’ll begin by setting the scene. Arriving by rail, the initial aspect of the little town is somewhat humdrum — an impression later dispelled as one grows familiar with layout and feel. Unlike major German cities, after heavy bombing Bayreuth was rebuilt to resemble what was lost; so we see a decent texture of 18th-19th-century vernacular architecture in local stone, rising to handsome in squares, and curves and vistas opening out to nature, formal and rustic, in an extensive Hofgarten. It only sinks to indignity, like everywhere else, as the ring road is reached. Three buildings stand out: the stolid yet soaring main church; the Palace, exceptional in off-white and yellow stucco studded with strikingly modelled Renaissance heads, male and female, in terracotta; and the Margrave’s theatre, soberly smiling on the exterior, which scarcely promises the glorious profusion, coloration and calibre of the applied work within.
It was the Margrave’s theatre, with its deep stage disproportionate to its tiny, exquisite auditorium, that Wagner initially alighted upon in the search for the right venue to house his unprecedentedly vast and complex project. Yet the pit can’t accommodate the orchestra for Figaro, let alone the huge forces required by the Ring. Wagner’s venture required construction as special as the artworks it was to contain. Upon this modest court capital from the pages of Thackeray or Carlyle was imposed the heaviest cultural cuckoo-egg imaginable. Even now, more than 130 years on, the Festspielhaus retains an unassimilated look, floating heavily on its hillbrow, approached by sombre strips of lawn and park culminating in an outburst of garish civic blooms. Its idiom crosses South Kensington Italianate (like the original section of the V&A) with the unapologetic functionalism of 19th-century commercial building. Function prevails. Money was short; ornament had to be minimal. The severe front of King’s Cross comes closest to mind; and the high-raised roof behind strongly resembles a railway shed; the USAF mistook it for a brewery and left it intact.
If the Festspielhaus recalls a city terminus, Wagner’s custom-built home in a privileged corner of the Hofgarten brings to mind the railway station of a small but ambitious provincial town — Grecian rather than Italianate, ostentatious in its very simplicity; then throwing taste to the wind at the front, with a large sgraffito panel and a grandiose inscription explaining the gnomic name ‘Wahnfried’, then, to the rear, the inscriptionless slab, beneath which repose the genius of the place and his gorgon wife. The interior has totally lost the redolent atmosphere exuded by images from its early days, and by Cosima’s 2,000-page diary wherein she recorded Richard’s every word over breakfast or after dinner. Merely as a museum, however, its contents are endlessly absorbing. Elsewhere in the town is an excellent museum of its history, trades, artefacts, social life, perfect of its kind, that manages to avoid almost wholly anything whatever to do with the Wagner takeover. Instead, a fascinating model of the plan Hitler commissioned for this his ‘lieblingsstadt’ — a layout of imperial Roman megalomania, quite thrilling in its way, that makes Wagner’s by comparison seem like a shrinking violet.
As to the interior of the Festspielhaus, here, too, financial stringency compelled absence of pomp and swagger. Corridors and staircases are distempered in parallel bands of blue, cream, brown à la Pompeii or Berlin; and the auditorium’s single space, unbroken by galleries or boxes, is framed within grand, debased Corinthian columns as might be from an old-time Hollywood epic. Only a quarter of a century or so on, architectural ornament would be declared a crime: a theatre absolutely stark and essential would have been featured in all the histories: bold, ahead of its time — in fact, timeless.
Enough of all this scene-setting! What matters is, how it works. Sightlines in this uninterrupted space are good unless you happen to be fronted by a person of unusual height or girth; which must be just as bad for (usually) him because the rows are tight and narrow. The seats are notoriously punishing, too; not so much their corduroy-covered bottoms as their unyielding wood backs. But cushions are permitted and widely resorted to; surprising, because you would think that several hundred cushions would alter the acoustic. (Apparently not.)
I’m in two minds about this acoustic, the theatre’s most celebrated feature (to hint a fault and hesitate dislike, as I rashly did, is to risk a National Incident!). Yet after attending all seven works I am quite sure it doesn’t suit them equally well. Tristan, seen first, already poses the problem: the prelude’s aspiring start and ebbing close were clear if unmysterious; its burning climax failed to sear. Once singing begins, you register the clever balance that permits voices to emerge distinctly, without straining, over even the most turbulant orchestral textures, and how, within them, every strand is distinct and separate while preserving richness and utterly eschewing the nasty X-ray quality. When towards the end of Act I the lovers drink the potion, the total audibility of every tiniest quiver and shudder was uncanny, mesmerising, electrifying. (At this of all moments the couple in front began a whispered colloquy, which in my outrage I imagined to begin: ‘Are you sure you remembered to put the timer on for the bratwurst?’) Then with the convulsive close of the act the sound was veiled again, just when the orchestra needs to vie with the on-stage trumpets (also rather feeble) to shattering effect.
With Meistersinger the next day I was still unsure. ‘It must be me’, or else ‘It must be an under-projected interpretation’ (the work’s staging was anything but! Katherina Wagner — great-granddaughter — seemed to be vying to produce the grossest, most tendentious spectacle possible, while evincing hapless incapacity with the elementary basics of stagecraft). The soft blending of Act III was heavenly; but the great Chorale towards the start of the closing scene failed to rend the skies. And by the very close, with choir and orchestra going full tilt to less than maximal effect, I was certain. A German colleague tried the morning after to claim that the lack of impact was ironic, giving these still-troubling sentiments an inbuilt critique by deliberately lowering the dynamic level and the brilliance of tone! But such sophistries (depressingly frequent everywhere) just won’t wash.
Thus, too, the Ring: wonderful clarity and distinctness of voices vis-à-vis orchestra; moments of intimacy astounding for close palpability; the more lyric climaxes — the outswelling ardour with which Wotan relinquishes his errant daughter, or the calm after the flames as her deliverer first espies her ensorcelled in magic sleep — marvellously rich, transparent, full. But all that requires rawness, physical intensity at high volume, violent abrasion, sheer magnificent weight and power which it doesn’t deliver. Only for Parsifal is the sound absolutely right; the entire experience here is (to adapt Debussy’s well known tribute to its orchestration) ‘illuminated from within’. And this year’s new production, too, after so much had been fair-to-middling or frankly awful, succeeded for its first half at least in matching for the eyes what the music achieves when they’re closed.
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