Lively Nights at Bayreuth

By Michael Walsh

A strong brooding Parsifal highlights the Wagner festival

During the intermissions of Parsifal, a young woman with a small monkey perched on her left shoulder paraded among the patrons in dinner jackets and evening gowns, eliciting some sidelong glances but not much else. Throughout a performance of Lohengrin, two women in the audience held hands and caressed one another while onstage the pure knight sang of his love for the chaste Elsa. At the climax of Tristan und Isolde, one bejeweled lady was so overcome by the intoxicating music that she pitched backward into the laps of the unflappable listeners behind her. Richard Wagner, who caused all the excitement, rested peacefully in his grave behind his villa Wahnfried, buried, in the phrase of one astonished British tourist, "in the backyard, sir, like a dog." Bayreuth has seen everything.

As the prestigious festival drew to a close last week at the composer's shrine in Germany, the passion and the controversy were not only to be found in the audience. Fortunately, they could be seen in the new productions as well. The Goetz Friedrich staging of Parsifal, produced in honor of the opera's centenary, is a deeply pessimistic view of Wagner's valedictory ode to the redemptive power of Christianity. Colored in stark blacks, whites and grays, it takes place in what appears to be a gigantic mausoleum. More radical was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tristan, new last year. Ponnelle has staged the last 40 minutes of the work, including Isolde's famous Liebestod, as the hallucination of the dying Tristan, who has been abandoned by his beloved. Now Bayreuth may really have seen everything.

Wagner's Festspielhaus is, as usual, in transition. During its early years, it was the physical realization of Wagner's artistic vision: a theater built to his own specifications where his revolutionary music dramas could be given their fullest expression. After Wagner's death in 1883, his widow Cosima carried on the tradition for 25 years, when she was succeeded by their son Siegfried. Bayreuth was re-opened after the war in 1951, and a leaner, more ascetic style developed under Wagner's grandson Wieland. Operating under the twin inspirations of his own adventurous ideas and the straitened German economy, Wieland Wagner created a spare, allusive form of musical theater in which the listener's imagination played a necessary part.

The latest Bayreuth style came into full bloom in 1976 with the centennial production of the Ring cycle, staged by the French enfant terrible Patrice Chreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Using such anachronisms as the Rhine Maidens playing near a hydroelectric dam, Chereau fashioned an allegory of the industrial revolution from Wagner's mythic tale of greed and its consequences. A vivid mixture of naturalistic detail and wild flights of imaginative fancy, the Chereau Ring set the tone for what followed.

Friedrich's Parsifal is its direct descendant. Instead of underlining the redeeming innocence of the "pure fool" Parsifal (Tenor Peter Hofmann), Friedrich emphasizes the dark spiritual agony of the wounded knight of the Holy Grail, Amfortas (Bass Baritone Simon Estes). Just as later composers found in Parsifal's pliant, chromatic language a wellspring of 20th century music, so Friedrich views it as the first opera of modern alienation. This bleak production could well be called Amfortas. James Levine, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, led a performance of extraordinary suppleness and emotional fervor. Hofmann, a blond vision of saintly chivalry, sang with tenderness and sensitivity and made a perfect foil for Leonie Rysanek's furious temptress Kundry.

Even more effective is Ponnelle's Tristan, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The dramatic problem with this opera is to prevent it from being dominated by Isolde. With her overwhelming Liebestod (and the dearth of heldentenors), a clarion-voiced Isolde, like Johanna Meier in Bayreuth, tends to tower over the opera, reducing Tristan's role to that of a foil. Ponnelle, the brilliant and sometimes outrageously inventive French director --he once staged The Flying Dutchman as the dream of one of the opera's minor characters--has resolved this difficulty with stunning dramatic force. Tristan's madness at the beginning of the last act leads directly to his madness at its end; he only imagines that Isolde arrives and that the cuckolded King Marke ultimately forgives the lovers. The final tableau of Tristan lying dead in the arms not of Isolde but of his retainer Kurwenal while the shepherd looks on helplessly is mournfully effective theater and an image that takes hold in the memory.

Wagner purists will maintain that such liberties with the composer's texts are false to both the spirit of the operas and to Bayreuth itself. If operas were immutable like statues, there might be some truth in that, but in being staged they must be constantly reinterpreted. Productions such as these are exactly what is needed to keep the dead hand of tradition from strangling the vitality of the music.

--By Michael Walsh

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