Die Walküre, Bayreuther Festspielehaus 29.7.24
By Sigmund Oakeshott
‘That artistic director. What a douche. This doesn’t count as my first time - as far as I’m concerned I’m still a Valkyrie virgin’ protested an elegant brunette as the curtain fell on the opening night of Valentin Schwarz’s retelling of Die Walküre on Monday.
‘Cherie, the last Bayreuth production I came to was so bad, the conductor cried when it was over’ a veteran Wagnerian of Parisienne extraction offered by way of consolation, while processing like a stately galleon to the Biergarten, unlit Gauloise already in hand. Not so much a dramatic nadir then, as a sub-oceanic trench, perhaps beholding through the fug, leagues above, the dimly gleaming hull of a half-serviceable Fliegander Hollander production of yesteryear. Which beggared the question, as we sat nursing our steins of Kellerbier, shadowed by the bulk of the Bayreuther Festpielehaus; from what dramatic heights, what soaring historic feats of artistic refinement, have such present operatic depths been plumbed?
It brought to mind the example of Neuschwanstein, ‘Mad’ King Ludwig’s alpine Festung of glimmering stone and hair-tuggingly exuberant Rapunzel spires. Supposedly built as a refuge from the then-on trend - and still on-trend - psuedo anarcho-iconoclasm of Munich’s liberal intelligentsia and set beneath Toblerone-worthy snow-dusted peaks, this much-Disney-parodied castle endures as a case study in late C19th sword-knot twirling conservative camp. It evokes flavours of a pint-sized Richard Wagner fingering his equally-tiny dog-whip menacingly while correcting fetishistic mail orders for satin-bowed costumes and corsets all suspiciously in his size.
The dressing-up-closet nose of the place: of perfumed silk and compact powder - is slightly offset by menacing undertones of moustache-wax and brass polish - the historic reek of Wagner’s patron Ludwig leaping despondently aboard Bismarck’s spike-helmeted madmoiselle-despoiling bandwagon in a fruitless quest to fund said Swan-Knight pleasure palace.
Given Ludwig’s breathless accounts of his neo-Gothic never-finished bachelor pad in letters to his Lucerne-bound tremolo-terrorist chum - Wagner being a terror in both a musical ‘destroy-Mendelssohn-and-Mayerbeer’ manner and in a literal, ‘Saxon-court-just-sentenced-your-fellow-revolutionaries to death’ sense, Susanna Puente Matos and our heroically tracht-clad schloss-to-trot travelling party felt obliged to pay our respects therein. The piece de la resistance, is, naturlich the arcaded baronial-style balcony, jutting out god-like over the forested valleys below - on our visit yawning under the weight of several bovine Dutch beauties. Squeezed between their ample busts and bingo-wings, dodging the lances of their extended iphone-tripod legs, one only had to mentally paint a bit of chainmail coif on to them to get a sense of what the historic Brunnhildes of Bayreuth-yore might have reassembled. Yet there was little need for such reverie, because if you really want to see shield-maidens with selfie-sticks, all you need do is try your luck at any contemporary Der Ring production and I’ll wager you’ve an even chance.
Trundling slowly north to Bayreuth- accompanied by snippets of Gergiev’s 2012 Marinsky Parsifal wafting from our mini-Bose over deserted platforms - via an arcane timetable of charming if circuitous and oft-delayed Bavarian regional trains, we reflected why it was that grain-alcohol-and-goosestepping Prussia, and not the fairytale vine-hung florid-dirndl-demesne surrounding us, had became the dominant German power. But the real nub of it all is that you don’t need to be thunder-clapped in Norwegian fjord (as Wagner once was fleeing from his debtors in Riga) to see that there’s enough in the way of transgression and personal-flaws inherent to both the composer - oddly never yet featured on any ‘Refugees Welcome Here’ graphics despite his years in Swiss exile - and to his horse-master-fancying regal funding-source to make Bayreuth edgy enough without having to resort to thrusting the fleshy forearms its maestro into the audience’s faces via the mirrored glass a 1980s leisure-centre-like set.
We could touch on all we saw in Monday’s staging of Die Walküre beyond the distorted chamber-of-orchestral-horrors looking-glass reflections of its kaftan-clad conductor or the First Violins in their jogging bottoms and soiled t-shirts. Yet so antithetical was it to both Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of the transcendental opera experience - more so even than the VR glasses inflicted on us last year - so removed was it from the actual plot of Der Ring, that one wondered whether this was secretly all some long-running esoteric Neue Deutsche Welle in-joke whose punch-line escaped us.
There were the young children in gold-sequined thigh-highs, more glam-rock than Gotterdammering, standing in variously for the Rheingold, the Tarhelm, the Ring, with each traded between increasingly rich and sleazy 1970’s West German upper-crust foster parents. Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan was powerfully sung star turn, too noble to pass-off as the predator the director had rewritten him as. Christa Mayer’s Fricka was majestically, indomitabily stern, enough to send Catherine Foster’s petulant Brunnhilde off into the arms of a roguishly Bader-Meinhof-worthy earthly suitor. There was the illuminated pyramid with a long-barrelled Luger inside it, half didactic elementary school light prism experiment and half post-modern depiction of an all too convincing Jagdschloss-set coup plot.
I slowly suspected these contemporary references might suggest just the sort of daring new repertoire the aforementioned Munich anarcho-iconoclast opera-establishment really wanted to stage - ‘The Prince, the Judge and the ex-Paratroop Regiment Commander’ - I mean, could there be a better named ready-made Baritone baddie than Heinrich XIII? But I digress.
Doomed instead to stage The Ring Cycle twice a summer for eternity, Bayreuth’s programme was emblazoned with philosopher Theodor Adorno’s 1967 declaration: ‘What does Wotan want?’ - ‘The end’.
Certainly this year’s Ring, with its orchestra on view , its bushwhackingly irreverent conductor Simone Young and willy-waiving direction from Valentin Schwartz; from the madcap foetus-on-film opening of Wotan and Alberich as twins separated at birth to Sieglinde molested in a dingy stairwell and a leather-tasselled Brunnhilde being subjected to a fatherly choking before stalking anti-climatically offstage in a huff, could all be summed up as ‘Springtime for Wagner.
What an inspired repurposing of Mel Brook’s The Producers plot-line, cryptically also of 1967 vintage! I was sure some fifth column of malign geniuses in the catchily-titled Bayrisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst must have had the intention all along of staging a Ring Cycle so repellent, so drably non-sensical, that they could cast off the shackles of the paradisal Siegfried Idyll or the Panzer-tread-clinking, Huey-gunship chuddering soundtrack of the Walkürenritt and finally ‘de-chronologise and decolonise’ - in the words of one interval grandstander - the Bavarian opera canon for good.
Suddenly much more sympathetic to King Ludwig’s fantastical plan to escape from his cultural commentariat to an unaffordable, unrealisable chivalric chateau in the sky, I resolved to seek solace in one’s closed eyelids, happily remembering the previous morning’s lederhosen-burstingly sweaty hike up to Neuschwanstein. As the orgiastic flutes and violins of the closing ‘Magic Fire Music’ swept me away in blissful darkness, I reflected I hadn’t, in the present Vienna University Philosophy grad Herr Schwarz’s retelling, actually seen what punishment befell Brunnhilde. Presumably something suitably niederöstereichisch -perhaps chained in a dank basement by her father instead of set triumphally on a flame-licked peak? I also missed the conductor’s bow, but then - and man hath no greater insult to the composer than this - the age-old Bayreuth mystique of having the maestro hidden behind Wagner’s specially designed obscuring wooden lip, had long since been stolen, like the magic of the Rheingold itself, by the sub-Tik-Tok mirrored gimmickry of the set. A strobe-lit Twilight of the Gods, flashing aggravatingly still in one’s mind’s eye.
