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      How a Production of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin' Changed the Met Opera

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      Robert Wilson’s staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened to a wall of boos in 1998. But it brought new theatrical possibilities to the Met.Huge bars of light, floating down from the flies. Singers almost like statues, their gestures shifting at a glacial pace.When Robert Wilson’s slow, spare, luminous production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998, it was a shocking break with the house’s prevailing aesthetic. While there had been some progressive stagings there, the elaborate, old-fashioned naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk reigned, particularly in the standard repertory.Wilson and his production, with its nearly nonexistent set and precisely calibrated, dreamlike movements, were greeted by a storm of boos on opening night. But this “Lohengrin,” so radical for the Met at the time, anticipated today’s broader range of directorial approaches there — like Willy Decker’s starkly symbolic “La Traviata” and Simon Stone’s contemporary-America “Lucia di Lammermoor.”On Feb. 26, the Met will introduce a new “Lohengrin,” directed by François Girard. The Wilson production, having not been revived since 2006, never quite got its due — or the kind of farewell justified by its impact on the company’s artistic trajectory. Here, interviews with some of the artists, technicians and administrators involved, excerpted and edited, tell the story of a watershed event.ROBERT WILSON In 1976, we had produced “Einstein on the Beach” at the Met on a night they were dark. It was a huge success, and the Met was interested because they got an audience they never had before. So they asked me, “Would you like to direct something?” They suggested “Aida” or “Madama Butterfly.” I said no, I want to do, with Ella Fitzgerald, the first jazz opera. So, the Met didn’t work out. Then, about 10 years later, Alexander Pereira became the director of the Zurich Opera, and he asked me to do “Lohengrin” as his opening production, and he got the Met on board.GREGORY KELLER (former Met staff director and one of Wilson’s assistants on the staging) In the ’80s, the voice was really king, especially at the Met. There was a lot of park-and-bark opera. Most directors were trying to bring in Stanislavski: “Who, what, when, where, why?” “What am I doing in this scene?” The questions a traditional director and actor talk about. And Bob completely breaks with that. He approaches things from an external point of view, with formal, classical, crystalline choreography. He’s fascinated by Eastern theatrical forms, Kabuki and Noh, and those formal, visual, artistic concerns were what he was bringing into the opera world.KIRT BURCROFF (then a new Met electrician) I’m not sure anyone, when we started, knew how we were going to pull it off. I’ve always thought the shows that look the simplest from out front are usually the hardest. And it was pretty sparse out there for “Lohengrin.”JOSEPH VOLPE (then the Met’s general manager) I was there for “Einstein”; I was on the Met’s technical staff at the time. And when I became general manager, there was always a desire to have Bob do something. I remember we had lunch, and he was so specific about every scene; on a napkin he could draw out every scene. He went through the entire opera over lunch. And everything that is called for in “Lohengrin” is there. It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.WILSON I worked on it with Annette Michelson, the critic. And she said, “Read this.” It was Baudelaire, from after he saw Wagner’s “Tannhaüser”: “I’ve witnessed a spectacle of time, space and light that I have never experienced before.” So that was the key. Then I looked at the original pen-and-ink drawings, and actually, spatially, I did exactly what Wagner did. His first act had a big oak tree over here; I brought in a vertical bar of light that descended. It’s starting with a wider space and zooming into a marriage that doesn’t work, and then back out.The tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title role in the production, with members of the men’s chorus (who wore stiff and heavy neck-to-ankle tunics) in the background.Metropolitan OperaKELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine” at N.Y.U. So we both knew the way he worked, and could shepherd him and get a product onstage he would be happy with. He had two of us he could trust.DEBORAH VOIGT (soprano who sang Elsa in the opening run) I had a bit of experience with Bob: I had covered Jessye Norman as Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990. We covers were brought in for weeks before the principals. They lined us all on one side of the room and had us walk to the other side, telling us we had two minutes to do it — not a second longer or shorter. And we spent the next six weeks choreographing “Alceste,” and memorizing Bob’s style of movement. I learned what it was like to have his choreography imprinted on my body, and Debbie Voigt’s way of moving and using my body stripped away. That gave me a head start that some of my colleagues did not have.In September 1991, Wilson’s version of “Lohengrin” premiered in Zurich.BEN HEPPNER (tenor who sang the title role in the Met’s “Lohengrin”) I got a call from my Swiss agent, who asked me if I would be willing to jump in for “Lohengrin” in Zurich. I said OK, and if they can send me the video, I’ll try to learn the staging a bit. And my 7-year-old son was so bored; he had nothing else to do, and said: “Dad, I watched it and I’ll tell you what to do. First of all, there’s no sword fight in Act II” — he knew “Lohengrin” pretty well by this point — “and when you move, you’re like a robot, the way you move your arms. And oh yeah, Dad, when you walk, you have to walk like there’s something stuck in the crack of your bum.” With this in mind, I put on the tape, and, son of a gun, if he wasn’t right about everything.KELLER Giuseppe Frigoni, the one who really honed the movement vocabulary, had created all these different moves for the chorus in Zurich. They had someone offstage prompting the chorus for those gestures, and at the Met, we wanted to cue the chorus seamlessly and silently. So with Joe Clark, the technical director, we devised these machines, like in a bakery, the “now serving 98” machines. We put these two big number machines on the edge of the pit so the audience couldn’t see them. And we devised a numerical system to cue the men and an alphabetical system for the women.WILSON It wasn’t all the Met people’s cup of tea. But they had committed. And, actually, Joe Volpe didn’t really understand it, but he was a smart guy; he knew that some of the people who had supported “Einstein” were some of the wealthiest people around. And they said James Levine was going to conduct. I was a big admirer of Levine’s. He had a deep interior sense.RAYMOND HUGHES (then the Met’s chorus master) Wilson saw his artistic concept all the way through the piece. It was about light and darkness. It was not monotonous, but it was black and white.JANE KLAVITER (prompter for the original run) I remember he never raised his voice, and he was totally personable. But he didn’t joke at all; he was very austere. I remember him wearing black. I don’t remember him smiling much.HEPPNER Each character had a resting position. For Lohengrin, it was the arms to the sides but not relaxed straight down; the fingers were together and the thumbs pointed slightly forward. And each character had his or her own set of arm movements, I would say maybe five or six.VOIGT I have always used my body and moving it as the impetus to get air moving and as a means of support, and with Bob you are having to really stand still, and that’s really difficult. Then Elsa’s entrance is so static, and the music is so still, that it’s extra difficult. It’s musically challenging unto itself — and, by the way, don’t move. His style is “Kabuki Position No. 2” moving into “Kabuki Position No. 10,” and you have five minutes to do it.HEPPNER Your arms were never to be relaxed; he wanted isometric tension there. I said, “You understand, if I do that, that tension will climb into my chest and throat, and by the second act you’ll be looking for a new Lohengrin.” He sort of didn’t have an answer for that. He also asked that I not have any facial expression. I said, “If I don’t have an expression, it will sound expressionless.” That also wasn’t his favorite.VOIGT I remember one of the first rehearsals, and Bob said to Ben, “OK, I want you to sing that line to Debbie but look into the house.” And Ben said, “But Debbie’s behind me.” And Bob said, “Yes, I know, but I want you to look out there, and look at your hand when you do it.” His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept. I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself. He was not going to spoon-feed that to us.KELLER I know both Debbie and Ben struggled. Bob gives you the choreographic form, and it’s your job to fill in what I call the Stanislavski part. It was challenging, but eventually we got there. They understood they had an enormous amount of freedom to fill up that form.WILSON The singers were struggling, and it was not Jimmy’s cup of tea. But the mood was not negative.KELLER Everybody felt really committed. It was hard and intense, but it wasn’t fascistic or terrifying.HUGHES What I loved was that the chorus could just stand and sing. They had those numbers projected down by the prompter’s box. Like, 3 meant you hold your shield up; 2 meant you hold your sword up. This was an arrangement that made them sound fantastic. “Lohengrin” had not been done at the Met since 1986, and it’s one of the biggest chorus operas of all time. So we worked really hard.“His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept,” said Deborah Voigt (right, as Elsa, with Heppner). “I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself.”Metropolitan OperaVOIGT Bob did get it; he understood that it was difficult. He respected when you really put yourself into it. It was difficult, but I was also finding it very interesting.WILSON It was just another world for them. There’s no training for what I do.BURCROFF That show brought in the modern era of opera here. We still haven’t done anything like it. Because we’re a repertory theater, we use a lot of the same lights in every opera — especially in those days. But very little about that “Lohengrin” utilized any of our repertory equipment. All of it was custom built. And all those light boxes that flew in from the sides, and popped up from the floor, putting those up and taking them down every day was a monumental task because of the size. Some of the boxes were 60 feet long. The swan was our first foray into automation. It was literally driven by one of our stagehands with a joystick, sending it across the stage and hoping it wouldn’t go into the orchestra pit.KELLER On the back scrim there were constant minuscule lighting changes, so your brain was always getting stimulated.WILSON My problem with Levine was he was so inconsistent with timing. For the prelude, I had these light cues that are so complicated and they’re on a computer, and you can’t change them, but he would vary three or four minutes sometimes in the timing. But we had a good rapport; he had a dialogue with everybody.HUGHES The Kabuki influence, the very stylized acting that he coaxed out, was absolutely convincing, particularly at the beginning, when Lohengrin and Elsa are still rather one-dimensional characters. I found it riveting when she sang “Einsam in trüben Tagen” and she was slowly — very, very, very slowly — walking across the stage. It lent Elsa such a lonesome dignity.KLAVITER The challenge was that the singers couldn’t turn their heads; they weren’t supposed to move. That made it harder for them to see me in the prompter’s box. A lot of prompting is eye contact.KURT PHINNEY (Met chorus tenor) The costumes were rather rigid, I think with the idea of giving a kind of hardened look. They were difficult to bend or move in, but we weren’t permitted to do much of that anyway. I think one chorister wanted to put a portable chair under his costume so that he could sit unobserved, some mechanism that he could find a posture of rest somehow.HEPPNER You have to have fun with these things. If people I knew were coming, I told them to wait for a specific moment, and at that point I would slowly move my fingers into the Spock gesture from “Star Trek.” I didn’t take it as seriously as some people did.At the curtain calls on opening night, March 9, 1998, the cast was cheered. The production team, not so much.WILSON My god. Never in my entire life, 57 years working in the theater, have I had such a hostile reception. I was told the Wagner Society had organized it. And it was violent.HEPPNER The noise seemed like it actually moved the velvet curtain.MATTHEW POLENZANI (star tenor who back then played the tiny part of a noble) It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard.KELLER We were all really shocked at the provincial attitude of the New York audience.The reaction was much calmer when the staging was revived that fall. Levine once again conducted, and cast changes included a new Elsa: Karita Mattila.KELLER We were very happy it was going to come back. It was an expensive production. The light boxes, the remote-controlled pieces. In the men’s chorus, each singer had a neck-to-ankle tunic, and it was all boned, with hundreds of nylon bone inserts. I think we also made the enormous graphite spears.VOLPE It took the revival for people to fully understand the production. I think that the singers became much more comfortable with the stage direction, and I think Bob became much more comfortable with the singers.KARITA MATTILA It was the first time — I think the only time — that I have actually gone to the administration. I went to [the assistant general manager] Sally Billinghurst’s office and told her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” And she gave me a good talk, just encouraged me to try and make it work, don’t do anything yet, just give yourself a little time. And I needed some pantyhose, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that a man was following me. I went to the cashier, and I was really nervous; I felt he was quite close, and I turned. And before I said anything, he said, “Excuse me, are you Karita Mattila?” “Yes?” “Oh, me and my wife, we are so looking forward to seeing you in ‘Lohengrin.’” It was such a wonderful lesson for me, a reminder to never let down your audience for some personal reason. If it is a challenge to understand, take the challenge. And after that incident at Saks, I was back, with a different attitude. There was no way now that I would want to give up.KELLER By then, we knew how to rehearse it better, how much time everything would take. And we loosened up. We didn’t loosen up the vocabulary. But if Karita said, “I can’t do this gesture now, I’m singing,” we’d say, “OK, do it a bar later.” We were true to what Bob wanted, but we listened to what the singers had to do. And he loved it: “Do the gesture here, do the gesture there; I don’t care.”Karita Mattila, who took over the role of Elsa when the production was revived, told the Met’s administration, “I’m not sure I can do this.”Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan OperaMATTILA I thought I might be doing things differently than some others. And I wondered what Bob Wilson would say. I remember when he came to the first stage rehearsal, I felt a little bit defiant or defensive before he said anything to me. I was going to defend my changes. But to my surprise he was very, very encouraging: “You have understood this perfectly.” I actually felt quite good in the end with the production. I felt like a poet, not a senseless puppy.The production was brought back a final time in 2006, starring Mattila and Heppner, and with the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt making his Met debut as Lohengrin in the final two performances. It was Volpe’s swan song; Peter Gelb took over as general manager that summer.PETER GELB I don’t know if Bob was part of the rehearsals for the revival that season. I was told at the time that the singers were not necessarily embracing his stylized movement the way he planned it.WILSON I was supposed to do “Lohengrin” again. This was some years ago. I don’t know what happened. But Peter Gelb and I talked about doing it.KELLER Robin Guarino had left the Met; I was the last man standing from the old production. They asked me to build a schedule for how many chorus sessions it would require, and their eyes got quite wide. There were probably 10 people left in the chorus who had done the show, so it would have been a lot of time to teach them the gestures, and X amount of time rehearsing in the costumes. At that point, the administration determined it would be as expensive to do a new production.GELB I planned to bring it back, without having first checked on what condition it was in. And I discovered from our technical department that it was in very bad condition physically. All our scenery is packed into these shipping containers in a lot in Newark, and over the years the “Lohengrin” had suffered the ravages of time. Especially the large fluorescent light boxes; they had partially disintegrated. The production would have had to be completely rebuilt, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that.Twenty-five years after the production’s premiere, it’s possible to see its effects on the company.VOLPE Bob brought the Met along; because of Bob, we were in a different place. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but for me it was a wonderful production. It was time for the Met, and it was time for me, to produce something forward-looking, something different. I believe in opera, in traditional opera. But in a way, this was traditional. Everything that was supposed to be there was there; it was just a different way of presenting it.KELLER For me it was a really seminal experience at the Met. It was kind of the intersection of what I wanted to do as a youth — wild, crazy avant-garde theater — and traditional opera. The Met was trying to be avant-garde, and I think they succeeded, and Bob really wanted to have a show at the Met. This production meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to help him get his vision done on this grand scale, and have it come off so seamlessly. I think it was a crossroads for the Met, that yes, there’s an audience for this. I would take the 1 train home, and there would be people saying they loved it, people saying they hated it. How much of a reaction can you get out of an audience these days?BURCROFF We didn’t know at the time that it was a crystal ball into the future. You think of the Zeffirelli “Bohème” and “Turandot,” when we’re bringing wagons full of scenery on and offstage. “Lohengrin” was one static set. And that became more the norm for us. Rarely do we open the curtain on Act II and it’s a completely different set. “Lohengrin” was really about the lighting. Before that, at the Met, it was about great scenery. “Lohengrin” was about the singers and the lights, and that’s more the norm now.GELB In a period that was generally known for its theatrical blandness, Wilson, who has been one of the great theater directors, really stood out. His “Lohengrin” was an early indication of theatrical possibilities that the traditional, core Met audience had not experienced.WILSON If I go to the opera tonight, if I really want to hear the music, I close my eyes and I hear much better. So can I keep my eyes open, and what I see can help me hear the music better than when my eyes are closed? That’s simply it. My responsibility as a director is, can I create a space where I can hear music? More

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      Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ Uses the Word ‘Führer.’ Keep It There.

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      In some cases, the inflammatory, Nazi-associated term has been changed out of sensitivity. What do we lose when that happens?There are some 10,000 words in the libretto of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a new production starting on Feb. 26. But the most inflammatory one comes at the end.The title character, a mystical knight who arrived in the first act to defend the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, points to a handsome youth in shining silver armor who has magically appeared out of the water. He is the lost brother.“Here is the Duke of Brabant,” Lohengrin declares. “He shall be your leader.” In German, Wagner’s text is: “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt.”Piotr Beczala will sing that line at the Met, as will tenors at the vast majority of other opera houses in the world when they put on “Lohengrin,” a repertory staple for over 170 years.But at a smattering of companies, particularly in Germany, and most prominently at the Bayreuth Festival — founded by Wagner and still run by one of his descendants — the text has quietly been changed because of the association of “Führer” with Hitler, who was a treasured guest at the festival.“Especially we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive there,” Katharina Wagner, the festival’s director and the composer’s great-granddaughter, said in a statement, “because we have a special political background and therefore also a special responsibility.”Wagner, who is also a stage director, added that she preferred to make the change — from “Führer” (“leader” or “commander”) to “Schützer” (“protector”) — in her productions of the opera.“Führer” is certainly arresting today. But when Wagner was writing the opera, in the 1840s, it was an unassuming, somewhat vague military title that referred, depending on the word to which it was connected in a compound, to varying degrees of operational command.The word got a new charge toward the end of the 19th century, when Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian antisemite who agitated for pan-Germanic nationalism and harbored fantasies of ancient Roman revival, took it on as the name his followers would address him by. (They also embraced “heil” and the rigidly outstretched, so-called Roman salute as a greeting.)Von Schönerer’s ideas and his gift for propaganda were inspirations for Hitler, who in the early 1920s began to use “Führer” as his title, along the lines of the success of Mussolini’s self-styling as “Il Duce.”As with Mussolini, the word became central to what was soon the fully cultlike worship of a charismatic would-be national savior, and “Führer” was the foundation of Hitler’s official title starting after the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. One of the Nazis’ omnipresent slogans was “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One Nation, One Realm, One Leader.”Anja Harteros, front, and Piotr Beczala in Yuval Sharon’s staging of “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleSomewhat surprisingly for non-German speakers, the word is still found all over that language as part of compounds. A train conductor is a “Zugführer”; a driver’s license is a “Führerschein.” At Bayreuth, Katharina Wagner herself carries the title of “Geschäftsführer,” or managing director.But for the term to stand alone, especially as a military or political title, is basically verboten.And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after his death, by Hitler’s enormous affection for his music and the dictator’s friendship with the Wagner family.Hence the “special political background” that Katharina Wagner referred to, the source of the sensitivities that she has worked to address. Some years ago, the festival unveiled a large display on its grounds about artists killed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise affected by the Nazis. Several stagings — including Stefan Herheim’s “Parsifal” and Barrie Kosky’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — have dealt explicitly with Wagner’s and the festival’s political legacy.The change of a single word seems like it could hardly be a subtler interpolation. At Bayreuth, which lacks supertitles, it is likely that almost no one would have noticed had there not been a small flurry of coverage of the issue last summer. And deference toward sensitivity might make sense, given the festival’s history.Yet the erasure of “Führer” is a missed opportunity. It also doesn’t quite make sense, with the unintended consequence of seeming not to take Wagner’s text and his careful word choices seriously. “Schützer” is used elsewhere in the libretto to describe Lohengrin’s role within the plot as a kind of transitional figure after Gottfried, the lost brother, has disappeared. The energizing question of the story is, in a leadership vacuum, what comes next? It’s therefore misleading, after Gottfried’s deus ex machina reappearance, to refer to him as “Schützer,” since he, unlike Lohengrin, is entitled to actually take political and military command.And if we’re rooting out Nazi associations in “Lohengrin,” why stop at “Führer”? Early in the opera, ominous reference is made to armed action against the German “Reich,” and stentorian choral “heils” proliferate, like something out of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” In “Meistersinger,” why then preserve the ending, when the kindly cobbler Hans Sachs suddenly, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art,” a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd?Any of these changes might be made out of respect, but they also let us in the audience off the hook. Wagner’s works are as ambiguous and ambivalent as we are, pulled between the desire for freedom and the desire to be led and commanded. This should not be something to erase, but rather something to explore — for us watching and for the stage directors who shape Wagner’s vision for us.Yuval Sharon, who directed the latest Bayreuth “Lohengrin” but had no part in the decision to change the text, said in an interview: “I feel like it’s part of your responsibility every time you restage this opera, the same responsibility you have with any opera that has fraught language or fraught ideas. The visual aspect gives you an opportunity to offer a counterpoint to that original.”In other words, how should a staging represent Gottfried if we are to take in the nuances of what might be meant by him returning as Führer? Presumably, in 2023, it’s not as an unironically perfect Aryan boy in gleaming armor, an unquestioned savior. Sharon depicted him symbolically, as a verdant flowering of nature; Hans Neuenfels, whose “Lohengrin” preceded Sharon’s at Bayreuth, had an adult-size bloody newborn emerge imperiously from an egg.There are as many options as there are productions. But simply taking out “Führer,” with all its connotations, softens the complexity of the society depicted in the opera — a restive, angry one willing to submit to a leader who will quickly and easily solve its problems. The libretto’s medieval Antwerp is not so different from the Germany that blindly followed its own Führer.It is often said that we shouldn’t anachronistically import into Wagner’s works the ways in which they were heard and used long after his death. In the case of “Lohengrin,” later history actually illuminates this unsettling opera; changing a word out of an excess of sensitivity distorts it.“I think editing it feels a little bit like a whitewash,” Sharon said. “It can dull the edge of what makes the piece so potentially dangerous and disturbing. The opera carries in it the DNA of so many utopian visions, and simultaneously the very beginning of totalitarian thinking. Both coexist in his works, and you can’t have one without the other. Part of what’s amazing about Wagner is engaging with those impulses, in both directions.” More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      ‘A Stone in the Mosaic’: A Director Enters the House of Wagner

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      At 33, Valentin Schwarz is taking on the monumental “Ring” cycle at the theater Wagner built for it in Bayreuth, Germany.New productions of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, a 16-hour epic taking place over four evenings, are always a highly anticipated event, and even more so when they take place at the annual Bayreuth Festival.Opera houses most often roll out stagings of the four “Ring” works — “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” — over multiple years. But Bayreuth, which is still managed by the descendants of the composer himself, presents the entire cycle all at once. And its newest production, by the Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, opens July 31.Since World War II, there have only been nine Bayreuth productions of the “Ring” — among them Patrice Chéreau’s storied 1976 staging, which introduced critical, political dramaturgy to the piece, and the most recent one, a divisive 2013 interpretation by the Marxist firebrand Frank Castorf.A new “Ring” had been scheduled to premiere there in 2020, taken on by a team of surprisingly fresh faces: Schwarz, 33, and the Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, 42. The pandemic delayed the project, and last week, Inkinen fell ill with Covid-19 and had to miss crucial rehearsals. He was replaced by Cornelius Meister, who had originally been engaged to lead “Tristan und Isolde.”In between recent rehearsals, Schwarz discussed his vision for the “Ring” in a video interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How are you holding up in the heat?Well, the coolest place in Bayreuth is on the stage. The audience generates the heat.And the building sort of cooks all afternoon, right, when people are about to take their uncomfortable seats?Yes, and I think this kind of torture has to have its reward — especially a “Ring,” which is basically one week of torture. You should get one big plot, one tale, one big story that you enjoy each evening and have the feeling that you want to know how it’s going to turn out in the next piece.What is your approach to the cycle?It’s long and there’s an Everest-like quality to it, but, in fact, it’s not so many characters for these 15 hours of music. It’s 30 or 40 people. It reminds me very much of the typical stories of today — TV series, big novels — where you can dive in and experience getting to know the characters in a way that is not only one-dimensional.We follow Wotan, we follow Brünnhilde, we follow Siegfried, and never get just one impression that one is a hero and the other is purely evil. Instead, we get to know the scratching, the deep dive into unconscious motivations. The “Ring” is mainly about one big family. We take this tale through different generations, through children and grandchildren, and this long stretch of history within the people and this family.There are guests — wanted and unwanted — who interfere in this family story. The basic conflicts are Greek conflicts. Motivations of anger, of hatred, of love, the will to power. This stays within this family, and that informs my, you could say, Nietzschean approach. What is the thing that motivates every person in the piece? It’s knowing the end: that they will die, that it will end, that time ends. All of them are trying to find a solution for this.This summer’s production will have many singers switch roles between productions instead of, for example, casting one single Wotan and Brünnhilde throughout the entire cycle. Is this related to that generational approach, or is it a more prosaic choice?Like most things in a theater, there’s the basic mundane thing, which is that we have not so many Wagner singers, and they are reducing in number every year. There’s maybe five people in the world who can sing Wotan. Bayreuth gives those singers a chance for singers to evolve within the pieces. Over time, someone can sing Fasolt and go on and sing Wotan afterward, for example.For the casting, I was of course very involved with Katharina Wagner. In many cases, it’s interesting to show how the role, the character changes between pieces. Irene Theorin, for example, sings Brünnhilde in “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” and in between, in “Siegfried,” it’s Daniela Köhler. To make this big transition, it was great to see — at the end of Walküre, Irene Theorin is trapped on the cliffs by Wotan behind the magic fire, but this person is changing.When you talk about approaching the work as a TV series or film, is this something that at least partly comes from the filmic quality of Wagner’s music?Most modern medieval movies and TV series are unthinkable without that Wagnerian aspect. Even in “Game of Thrones,” as soon as it’s medieval, it has to sound like Wagner. What you describe as filmic is for me more about Wagner being a very practical man of theater. He knew about filmic effects long before movies existed. He built the Festspielhaus here at Bayreuth precisely for this work. It’s democratic. You can see the same stage from every seat. The invisible orchestra. He wanted to have this approach — you could call if filmic — from a visual perspective as well.From the structural side, it’s even more interesting, because of the leitmotifs. He figured out how to construct this piece as a collage. I’ll take this idea from the Eddas, I’ll take this from the “Nibelungenlied,” I’ll invent something there. It’s not a myth; it’s a myth of other myths. And to make it not just a car crash but something which fits together well, also musically, over a 30-year creation time with a long break from composing, there’s this narrative structure in which the orchestra, through its use of the different musical motives, is an all-knowing storyteller. It’s not a logical thing about knowing all the motives before you enter but something that comes from an unconscious layer of enormous emotionality, which makes it approachable for everybody.That all-knowing storyteller quality might clash with the immediacy of storytelling in a TV series, no? So much of the piece isn’t action but people describing things that have happened or will happen.Of course it has to be psychologically gripping. I have to know why this person is telling us the thing that happened half an hour ago. Wagner didn’t think we were so stupid we would forget. In most cases, the interest is that it’s not a monologue where someone stands onstage and sings into a mirror, but someone who is communicating to someone else. Psychologically speaking, this act of speaking is the first step in therapy. In many of these monologues, the characters give their own approach to the thing that has happened, and their position changes within the monologue.The second thing is that it has to do with the relationship of the characters to the myth. Everyone in the piece knows about the ring, has their imagination of what it does. But knowledge of different things in the piece moves like a telescope; it shifts position and zooms out and in. We explore this three-dimensional sphere of the myth and the story. It grips me that these moments, when they tell us things that have happened, are creating the past itself.You’re directing this work in the house that was built for it. What is that like?You arrive, and you are baffled. You sit down in the audience for the beginning of “Rheingold,” and the sound comes out of nowhere. This experience is singular. To come to this place is also to come to the history of this place. We know that there were very dark hours in the history of the festival. They have done a good job in the last years of reflecting on these: to hire Jewish directors like Barrie Kosky, to process the past and try to create something new.It’s enormous, in this place, how the common knowledge of Wagner still exists, in every orchestral musician, in every stage technician. They remember that this is where Wolfgang Wagner wanted the curtain to rise or fall. And the audience, which is the most advanced Wagner audience in the world — they know everything about the reception history of this repertoire. So it’s not my job to tell them the story that Wagner has written, but instead it forces us to have a new vision and approach every time.In the last few years, I realized that the intrinsic feature at Bayreuth — where the works cycle and nothing lasts forever — means I don’t have to make the “Ring” production for all time. I am making something for this moment, not something that lasts. A stone in the mosaic of the big picture of the history of Wagner. This makes me humble, feel down to earth, reminds me of what small insignificant pieces of stardust we all are in the end. More

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      Wagner’s Early Operas Shouldn’t Be Mere Curiosities

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      A survey at Oper Leipzig provides an opportunity to reassess the youthful efforts that have been excluded from the composer’s canon.LEIPZIG, Germany — How quickly Richard Wagner changed his mind about “Rienzi,” his first successful opera.In his self-aggrandizing memoir, “My Life,” assembled at the request of the Bavarian King Ludwig II and dictated to his wife, Cosima, Wagner described the 1842 opening night as something like the apotheosis of his artistic coming-of-age. “No subsequent experience,” he said, “has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of ‘Rienzi.’”Granted, that was written before bigger achievements: inaugurating his Bayreuth Festival Theater with the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, or premiering his final work, “Parsifal,” six years later. But Wagner nevertheless regarded “Rienzi” with affection.Affection, and then indifference. By the time he was working on “Lohengrin,” in the mid-1840s, “Rienzi” had become, he said, “a work that no longer interested me” — a welcome, much-needed source of income, but not a reflection of the poetry, mystery and singular musical language that would come to define his mature operas.And so, when the non-“Ring” and “Parsifal” works were slowly introduced to the Bayreuth stage by Cosima after her husband’s death in 1883, she stopped short of “Rienzi,” going back only as far as its successor, “Der Fliegende Holländer,” and codifying the 10 canonical operas that continue to be performed at the festival today.Doomed to exclusion and obscurity were his three earlier efforts, which in addition to “Rienzi” include “Die Feen,” a work never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, and “Das Liebesverbot,” from 1836. All have appeared onstage throughout the years, but they remain curiosities.Should they? At Oper Leipzig, in Wagner’s hometown, a survey of his entire stage output — a festival called Wagner 22, which continues through July 14 — offers a fresh opportunity to assess his early works in juxtaposition with their canonical siblings, and in chronological order.The trio of rarities reveals an impressionable composer who, before finding a voice of his own, knew how to expertly draw on those he admired; and who, before pioneering a declamatory style of operatic dramaturgy, rapidly developed a keen sense for theatrical storytelling and a grasp for the fashions of his time. In some ways, he is himself from the start, writing less in a mode of entertainment than of profound exploration — in the tradition of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, like “Don Giovanni,” and of Beethoven’s fiercely political “Fidelio.”Mozart especially looms over “Die Feen,” composed when Wagner was 20 years old. It came after he had abandoned an earlier work, “Die Hochzeit,” and after he had rejected a suggestion to compose an opera about the life of the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote the libretto himself, inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s “La Donna Serpente,” setting a precedent for all of his works.“I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto,” he later recalled, “for now I realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.”Renaud Doucet’s production of “Die Feen” blends the opera’s dreamy fantasy with the realism of a contemporary apartment.Kirsten Nijhof“Die Feen” didn’t premiere until 1888, five years after Wagner’s death. So he was spared the pain of the public reception it might have had in his youth. It’s impossible to say what that would have been, but from the perspective of 2022, the opera is, frankly, not very good. And that’s not the fault of Oper Leipzig, which — in a reminder that the performing arts continue to tread carefully under the threat of Covid-19 — put on its production last week with last-minute replacements for not only the two leading roles, but also the conductor.If anything, the staging, by Renaud Doucet, helps orient viewers with a work they probably don’t know, aided at every turn by the clear and luxurious sound of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the pit. Doucet’s production is set in the present, at the home of a man who tunes in to a radio broadcast of the opera, which provides a contextualizing introduction. The dreamy action begins to intrude on reality; this evening is as much about discovering “Die Feen” as performing it.The libretto features the subplots of a Mozart comedy and the Romanticism of Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Der Freischütz” was formative for the young Wagner. Stylistically, the music is indebted to them as well. These arias are designed to open up the inner thoughts of the characters, without the grace that would come in, say, the incidental ruminations of Hans Sachs or the delirium of Tristan.“Die Feen” is a number opera — far from the “endless melody” Wagner would describe in his 1860s essay “Music of the Future.” And it’s a clumsy one, attempting in the third act to weave aria pauses into a breakneck pace and an abrupt, Orphic turn. Like Wagner’s instrumental works from around that time, it doesn’t need to be taken out of the curio cabinet except for the occasional dusting.A similar fate shouldn’t befall “Das Liebesverbot,” Wagner’s first staged opera. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” it was mostly met with shrugs at its premiere. But, while still a world from the mature works, it is a skillfully, entertainingly told story with depth and resonance.The Italianate overture, which begins with a ringing tambourine and festive percussion, isn’t recognizably Wagner. But the opera’s substance is. His librettos were like subtweets; that’s why, Wagner believed, the critic Eduard Hanslick cooled on him after a reading of the text for “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” a cri de coeur against artistic gatekeeping. Here, Wagner’s target is chastity-obsessed conservatism and the bad behavior it breeds.He would later wrestle with socially unacceptable sensuality in “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde,” not without an element of autobiography. Neither of those works, though, is as barbed as “Das Liebesverbot,” which skewers hypocrisy — with crimes and punishment for the #MeToo age — while arguing that morality is a malleable thing on which we can only try to force rigidity.Tuomas Pursio as Friedrich, the moralistic governor who gets his comeuppance in “Das Liebesverbot.”Kirsten NijhofFor close listeners, there are flashes of the future Wagner. And coincidences as well; the line “Es ist ein Mann” recalls its opposite, “Das ist kein Mann!,” which Siegfried exclaims upon discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde in the “Ring.” Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal.”Much closer to mature Wagner is “Rienzi,” a sprawling, five-act adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about Cola di Rienzo, a 14th-century tragic figure of Italian politics who took on a new importance in nationalistic movements of the 1800s. If “Tannhäuser,” another transitional work, is on unsure ground stylistically, “Rienzi” is even more so: transparently an answer to the grand operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, yet also contending with a new musical language that would take shape with “Holländer.”In Leipzig, “Rienzi” was, understandably, presented with extensive cuts. Employing requisite elements of grand opera, like a plot-stopping ballet, the original version ran more than six hours. It was so long, it was later split into two evenings, “Rienzi’s Greatness” and “Rienzi’s Fall,” but reverted to one after audiences responded negatively to paying for multiple tickets.After cuts, the Oper Leipzig “Rienzi” still lasted a little more than four hours, and unfolded on an expansive scale, despite missing 21 chorus members out with Covid-19. The work is best known today for its overture, a staple in the concert hall and the easiest way to share the music, which otherwise demands a substantial investment for an enormous cast and production, along with a tenor with the stamina to endure a punishing role on the level of Siegfried and Tristan. (Here, Rienzi was fearlessly sung by Stefan Vinke, a veteran Siegfried.)“Rienzi” speaks as much to the present as its own time, and not just because it includes a scene in which a mob storms a capitol building. As in “Lohengrin,” Wagner interrogates the limits of charisma and the burden of leadership, and begins to deal in the ambiguity and complication that would course through his canonical works. And he does so in an increasingly declamatory rather than melodic mode, never more than in Rienzi’s Act V prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater.”The work was a hit when it premiered in Dresden, admired by colleagues and audiences alike. Less well received was “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which debuted at the same theater about two and a half months later and signified an entirely new direction for Wagner — one in which he would call his librettos “poems,” and in which he would bear out his vision of “The Artwork of the Future.”“The management saw itself compelled to prevent my reputation from being tarnished by putting ‘Rienzi’ back on the boards in short order,” Wagner said in “My Life.” “And now I had to ponder the success of this opera, as well as the failure of the other.”“Holländer,” as we know, won out. Yet Wagner’s achievements are now accepted wholesale, so there isn’t a need to categorize any of his operas as successes or failures — except, perhaps, for “Die Feen.” The doors of Bayreuth have long been shut to the early, worthy works of its founder. It’s time to open them up. More

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      Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

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      A new exhibition at the country’s national history museum examines the strong feelings stirred by its most famous 19th-century composer.BERLIN — Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner. Especially here in Germany — where Wagner’s work is understood as a combination of national cultural jewel and national political embarrassment — the composer’s work is laden with meaning and interpretation.Along with his music dramas, Wagner’s legacy includes his antisemitic and nationalist political writings, and the Nazi dictatorship celebrated his musical works as a symbol of the pure German culture they hoped to promote. Hitler was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where he was welcomed warmly by the composer’s descendants, and the regime used Wagner’s music in rallies and at official events.“You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany,” said Michael P. Steinberg, a cultural historian at Brown University who, along with Katherina J. Schneider, co-curated an upcoming exhibition on the composer at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. “It’s impossible.”That show, “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” opens April 9 and runs through September. The first exhibition dedicated to a composer at Germany’s national history museum, it explores the relationship between Wagner’s politics and his artistic output and influence.“If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose, he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker,” Steinberg said.Instead, Steinberg added, he is mostly remembered for the opus of music dramas that made him “without doubt the most transformational composer of the mid-19th century, without whom one cannot understand European art music after him.”Wagner was a “technician of emotions,” he said, who orchestrated collective experiences of feeling that embedded his ideas in his art. That means the music and the poisoned politics can’t be separated, Steinberg said. “The ideas come out on the stage in subliminal ways,” he added, “through worlds of feeling that are transmitted through music and text.”For this reason, he and Schneider have organized the show according to a series of emotions through which they argue the composer’s legacy can be understood: from the alienation Wagner felt as an 1840s revolutionary; to the sense of belonging as he began to be institutionally accepted; to the eros that characterizes the seductiveness of his work; and, finally, the disgust and loathing that animated the composer’s prejudices.These feelings, the curators argue, were “national” ones because the popularity of Wagner’s music helped embed them in the German national consciousness, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871.“During the Break,” a portrayal of the Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Gustav Laska, 1894.Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth – Leihgabe der Oberfrankenstiftung, BayreuthTo support their case, they have assembled objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection, combined with video clips from performances and stagings, and interviews with notable Wagnerian artists.The curators also commissioned a new audio installation from Barrie Kosky, the director of the Komische Oper in Berlin, whose Jewishness is a major part of his artistic identity. He has spent the last few years pursuing what he calls a “public cultural exorcism” of his own Wagner demons, exploring the composer’s antisemitism through a series of acclaimed productions that culminated with an acclaimed staging of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at Bayreuth, which ended with the composer literally on trial.His point of departure for the installation, he said in an interview, was Wagner’s infamous essay “Jewishness in Music.” The essay, an antisemitic screed that argues Jewish composers could only imitate, and never truly create, also lingers on the composer’s visceral hatred for the Jewish “voice.” Arguing that art music arose from race-based folk cultures, Wagner describes Jewish folk music as a “sense-and-sound confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle.”Kosky said he heard echoes of those hated sounds in the music for Wagner characters who embody antisemitic archetypes: the pedantic critic in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for instance, or the gold-hungry dwarves in the “Ring” cycle.Kosky’s sound installation plays out in a small dark room at the museum. Visitors hear jumbled-together recordings of synagogue music, excerpts from old recordings featuring the “Jewish” Wagner characters and sentences from “Jewishness in Music,” read by a woman, in Yiddish. Kosky called the effect “deliberately nauseating.”The entrance to Barrie Kosky’s installation “Schwarzalbenreich” in a chapter of the exhibition called “Ekel“ (“Disgust”).Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerKosky said he would continue to direct the composer’s music dramas, even though there was antisemitism in them. Having completed his “exorcism,” he added, he felt personally and artistically free to approach the composer’s work from new perspectives.“It’s the combination of things: the music, text, and cultural specificity of what he is using that makes Wagner’s work, to me, so deeply problematic and fascinating,” Kosky said.Mark Berry, who leads the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has published widely on politics and religion in Wagner’s work, said Wagner had become something of a scapegoat in German attempts to come to terms with the country’s past. It was, he added, as if guilt about the murderous consequences of German antisemitism could be outsourced to one man who died long before the Nazis came to power.“Clearly there are romantic nationalist elements in Wagner’s thought,” he said, “as there were in just about any German artist of that time. If one looks at his theoretical writing, however, he is adamant that the time of national characteristics in art is over, that this is to be an age of artistic universalism.”Yes, Berry said, there were antisemitic tropes in Wagner’s music dramas, and antisemitic politics in his essays. But, he added, that doesn’t make the music itself antisemitic, and Wagner wasn’t the main conduit by which antisemitism became prominent in the German national mood, and the basis of genocidal state policy.Daniel Barenboim, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in classical music in Germany and the music director of the Berlin State Opera, has written that Wagner can hardly be held “accountable for Hitler’s use and abuse of his music and world views.” He declined to be interviewed, but in an article on his website, he describes Wagner as “a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable.”The show features objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection.Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerIn that article, Barenboim, who will conduct a new “Ring” in Berlin this October, asks: why allow Hitler to have the last word on Wagner when so many Jewish artists — singers, conductors, directors — have made careers from the composer’s work, and his work has inspired so many Jewish composers?That same essay opens with a meditation on the storm scene that opens Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” with Barenboim laying out the precise, almost mathematical structure through which Wagner sketches the feeling of being in a forest and a snowstorm, and the emotions of an alienated outsider on the run. The phrases swell and recede before an explosion in the winds and brass and an abrupt roll of the timpani. In the audience, your heart skips a beat. These are the techniques by which Wagner manipulates emotion — on the scale of a phrase, or a melody, or an opera, or a nation. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wagner

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      Rian Johnson, Patti Smith, Alex Ross and others offer favorite highlights of a composer best known for his sprawling length.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos and music for dance.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Richard Wagner, with very short tastes of his very long operas. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Rian Johnson, filmmakerThe problem with isolating a piece from any of Wagner’s operas is insidiously twofold: You’re going to miss (for my money) the real source of its power, and you’re not going to realize you’re missing it because the music is so damn good. Take the prelude from “Das Rheingold.” Put on good headphones, close your eyes, and it’ll transport you, I guarantee.But it wasn’t meant to live in a vacuum. Wagner is a storyteller, and when the piece sits in its proper place in the pre-curtain dark, birthing you from a pinprick of light into the blinding sun of elemental harmony whose theft will launch an epic, tragic saga of gods and betrayal and love — well, that’s the real stuff.“Das Rheingold”Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Katharina Wagner, Bayreuth Wagner Festival artistic directorI grew up with the music of my great-grandfather, but until today the “Liebestod” is my favorite passage of “Tristan und Isolde.” Isolde expresses her deepest feelings and sings the most beatific passage with great euphoria. Birgit Nilsson, in the recording under Karl Böhm from the 1966 Bayreuth Festival, testifies to the dramatic power and passion of her performance, the size and fullness of her voice, the beauty and purity of her intonation, and her brilliant stage acting. She is rightly considered one of the most important singing personalities of her era.“Tristan und Isolde”(Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Michael Cooper, Times editorThis is the five minutes (well, the scene) that made me fall in love with Wagner. When I first heard it in a college music survey course I was already an opera fan, but I knew little about Wagner other than his antisemitism, his reputation for tedium and bombast, and, of course, Bugs Bunny and “Apocalypse Now.”This was not what I was expecting: The sheer beauty of the orchestra and the unexpected tenderness of a father’s loving, lullaby-like farewell to his daughter was a revelation. I became obsessed that year, investing in a whole “Ring” cycle (not cheap in the pre-streaming era); buying Ernest Newman’s book “The Wagner Operas” to guide me; and scoring a seat in the second-to-last row of the top tier at the Metropolitan Opera. This was the gateway drug to what became a not-too-unhealthy addiction.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Simon Callow, actor, director and ‘Being Wagner’ authorThe death of Siegfried, the hero in the “Ring” who was to have saved the world, draws out of Wagner an astounding panoply of orchestral sounds of infinite majesty and splendor. It also represents the climax of the system of leitmotifs — melodic and rhythmic fragments associated with particular aspects of characters and their emotional history. Wagner weaves them into the texture with cumulative power so that it is as if Siegfried’s entire past passes before our ears — his energy, his idealism, his passion, so that one feels that an entire life is being commemorated. At the same time, we mourn what might have been. The sense that we shall not look on his like again is deeply affecting.“Götterdämmerung”English National Opera Orchestra; Reginald Goodall, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerYou might think of Richard Wagner as the composer of gods and myths, of the end of the world and a love that destroys — and you would be right. But if his sheer ambition makes him someone to be repulsed by and swept away with, in not quite equal measure, he was capable, too, of tenderness of the most affecting kind. His “Siegfried Idyll,” initially a private birthday gift to his second wife, Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble at their home on Christmas morning in 1870; in the later, expanded orchestration we hear more often now, its ending is a touching depiction of blissful contentment — the warmest, most humane music he ever wrote.“Siegfried Idyll”Berlin Philharmonic; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Alex Ross, New Yorker critic and ‘Wagnerism’ authorWagner’s “Ring” is, simply put, a study in the futility of power, with the god Wotan as its chief exhibit. The crux of his fall comes at the beginning of his epic monologue in Act II of “Die Walküre,” after his wife, Fricka, has demolished his delusions. He cries, “O heilige Schmach!”: “O righteous shame! O shameful sorrow! … Infinite rage! Eternal grief!” Wagner’s orchestra delivers the sound of power grinding itself to pieces, with monstrous dissonances piling up over a drone of C. In Joseph Keilberth’s great 1955 “Ring” from Bayreuth, Hans Hotter is a howling pillar, magnificent in collapse.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra; Joseph Keilberth, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Patti Smith, performerI have chosen Waltraud Meier’s exquisite performance of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” I was privileged to attend the premiere of the opera in December 2007 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chéreau, it was the most beautiful and moving production of Wagner’s great romance I have experienced.Waltraud Meier is a fine actress as well as being one of our great singers. In this piece, she projects the full range of Isolde’s devotion, desire, madness and loss. She brought to her performance humility and expertise, comprehending fully the meaning of transcendent love.Backstage, I saw her in the shadows. She was yet spattered with Tristan’s blood and still contained in her countenance something of Isolde.“Tristan und Isolde”Waltraud Meier, soprano; Teatro alla Scala Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerDo Wagner’s operas feature almost endless melodies? Certainly. But he knew how to write conflict, too — sometimes even in short bursts. Take this climactic scene from Act II of “Lohengrin.” The plot is complex, but even if you don’t know what’s being said, you can feel the heat of the moment: the sorceress Ortrud, near the entrance to a church, barring the arrival of Elsa, there as a bride-to-be. The townspeople in the chorus gasp as these Real Housewives of Antwerp go at it regarding the comparative status of their mates; you may feel yourself in rapt league with those assembled voyeurs as you listen to the mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and the soprano Elisabeth Grümmer.“Lohengrin”Vienna Philharmonic; Rudolf Kempe, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Celia Applegate, historianCompassion is at the core of “Parsifal,” Wagner’s last and, for many, greatest opera. The music of the prelude connects all living things in its embrace. It’s not heavenly music. It’s music of this world, expressing suffering, struggle, the inevitability of death and the peace of understanding and acceptance. Its slow tempo and gorgeous sounds draw you almost into a trance. But somehow, too, you feel the presence of all things on this earth — and our responsibility to care about it and for it.“Parsifal”Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Morris Robinson, bass“Das Rheingold” is just going along, with ebbs and flows, when suddenly, without warning, this incredibly loud, obtrusive, majestic musical theme “debos” its way into the score. Everyone — within the story and in the audience — realizes that something massive and potentially destructive is about to make an appearance.I’m thinking Incredible Hulk vibes, except Wagner has created a pair of Hulks, the brother giants Fasolt and Fafner. Having played Fasolt several times, I can assure you that the theme music brings the moment into focus, and also gets the singers pumped to go out and mentally invest in their characterization. I make it my goal to ensure that my vocal quality immediately following this fabulous introduction matches the intensity and volume of Wagner’s fabulous orchestration, which consists of extremely heavy brass and pulsating, pounding timpani.“Das Rheingold”Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; James Levine, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorOne word associated with Wagner is “cinematic,” in part because of his innovations at the Bayreuth Festival Theater — where the stage, surrounded in darkness, is given the focus of a silver screen, and where the hidden orchestra’s sound fills the auditorium like a Dolby system. But I also see film in his patient moments of diegetic music, such as when Tannhäuser returns from the orgiastic Venusberg, freshly earthbound. The orchestra fades, first to a clarinet solo, then seamlessly to an English horn, standing in for the pipe of a shepherd, who sings an a cappella ode until pilgrims pass through with a hymn. Wagner weaves the pipe and chorus, beautifully but with a sense of naturalism: The orchestra doesn’t even come back until Tannhäuser, overwhelmed by what he sees, exclaims, “Praise to You, almighty God!”“Tannhäuser”Ying Fang, soprano; Johan Botha, tenor; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; James Levine, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporter“Der Fliegende Holländer” is the opera that launched Wagner’s career. He was 29 when it premiered in Dresden, and it is generally regarded as his greatest early achievement, with hints throughout of the dramatic intensity and musical flow that would come to characterize his later works. The rousing “Sailor’s Chorus” from the third act shows his early mastery of grand orchestral and choral sound.“Der Fliegende Holländer”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Stephen Fry, actor in ‘Wagner and Me’Who’d present a single block from a pyramid to give a picture of all Egypt? The epic scale of Wagner is surely his signature quality. But here goes: The last five minutes of “Tristan und Isolde” offer one of the most astonishing moments in all art. Echoing the great pounding of the sea by which she stands, Isolde sings herself to death by way of a shattering musical climax. The orgasmic passage is known as the “Liebestod”: love-death. Its ravishing, horrifying rise and fall still astounds. Finally, it levels out across the sands in an exquisite release.“Tristan und Isolde”Kirsten Flagstad, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorFive minutes to make you love Wagner, and hate him. At the end of his sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” a speech from the kindly shoemaker protagonist, Hans Sachs, takes a dark swerve as Sachs warns of foreign invaders who seek to contaminate “holy German art,” his praise of which is taken up by a fervid crowd — a communal celebration turned nationalistic rally. This stirring choral melody was perhaps the first bit of Wagner I loved. But it is one of the moments in his work that for me now mingles thrill and nausea. Here it is conducted in Vienna in 1944 by Karl Böhm, whose complicity with the Nazis was profound.“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Vienna Philharmonic; Karl Böhm, conductor◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Review: Wagnerian Comedy Is No Joke in the Met’s ‘Meistersinger’

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      The sprawling opera returned to the Met after seven years, with Antonio Pappano on the podium and an excellent cast.There were swaths of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, when Wagner’s sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” returned to the house after seven years.Was it the limits on foreign tourists, lifting soon? Persistent fears about the Delta variant, despite a vaccinated and masked audience? More permanent changes to viewership habits, egged on by the pandemic? Wariness about a performance of very Wagnerian, six-hour length?It’s likely all of the above, and more; arts institutions around the country are grumbling about soft ticket sales as they reopen. But whatever the reasons at the Met, it’s a shame: This “Meistersinger” is excellent, a paean to a community joyfully bickering and making music together that touched me deeply in this period of reckoning with all we lacked for a year and a half.A love story intertwined with a song contest, set in a storybook vision of medieval Germany, it brings back to the company after 24 years the eminent conductor Antonio Pappano. He takes on one of the scores most closely associated at the Met with James Levine; the last time someone other than Levine led a run of this opera there was 1985.With Levine in “Meistersinger,” there was grandeur, richness, not heaviness but glowing weight. Pappano, the longtime music director of the Royal Opera House in London, offers a lighter, lither reading, not rushed but evenly flowing, airy even when agitated. From the prelude to the first act — more lyrical than majestic — this was tender, mellow Wagner, most notable in quieter moments: the warm curlicues of the orchestral reactions to the song rules in the first act, the glistening music of nightfall in the second, the hushed prelude to the third.As the cobbler Hans Sachs, the leader of Nuremberg’s guild of tradesmen who moonlight as singing poet “masters,” the baritone Michael Volle is fiercely articulate. He is not the kindly Santa Claus figure often associated with this role, but rather a changeable, ambivalent, even peevish, very human Sachs.Klaus Florian Vogt — the tenor playing Walther, the knight who bursts onto the Nuremberg scene with an innovative approach to songwriting and a crush on the young Eva Pogner — remains one of the oddest major artists in opera. His appeal has been his uncannily pure voice, which, emerging from classically handsome blond looks, gives him an otherworldly quality in otherworldly roles like Wagner’s Lohengrin.But that voice has in recent years been turning more nasal and glassy. While some high notes, particularly toward the opera’s end, sail out like sunshine, and while he’s an effortlessly noble presence, Vogt’s sound is ever more an acquired taste.There are no equivalent quibbles about this revival’s playful, assertive Eva: the soprano Lise Davidsen, whose voice is luminous when soft and startlingly big at full cry. Her soaring embrace of Sachs and sublime start to the quintet that follows in the third act aroused only excitement about the remarkable Met season she is embarking on, with the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Chrysothemis in his “Elektra” to come.The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was comically bumbling but sang with straightforward earnestness as Beckmesser, the officious town clerk competing (at least in his own mind) for Eva’s hand in marriage. The resonant bass Georg Zeppenfeld, one of Europe’s finest Wagnerians but an unaccountable absence from the Met over the past decade, was splendidly genial as Veit Pogner, Eva’s father. The tenor Paul Appleby was lively as Sachs’s apprentice, David; the mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke made a characterful Met debut as Magdalene, Eva’s attendant; and the bass-baritone Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with calm consolation as the Night Watchman.It is to Volle’s credit that he doesn’t stint the darkness that suddenly engulfs the piece in its final minutes, when Sachs, trying to persuade the victorious Walther to join the masters, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art.” It’s a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd, and it’s hard not to hear in it premonitions of what was to come in Nuremberg four decades after Wagner’s death.The Met’s utterly literal, quaint staging by Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, now nearly 30 years old, offers no comment on this notoriously explicit swerve toward chauvinism — nor on the sense many have had that Beckmesser represents Wagner’s antisemitic obsessions, nor on much of anything else beyond the letter of the libretto.But Volle, at least, forces us to reckon with a scene as discomfiting as any in opera — a vivid depiction of the ease with which communal celebration can tip into nationalism, a reminder that even good guys can harbor awful leanings. Sachs’s monologue isn’t a reason not to perform “Die Meistersinger.” It felt on Tuesday, more than ever, a reason it should be seen.Die Meistersinger von NürnbergThrough Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More