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BAYREUTH AND THE WAGNERS
What is it, you sleek creatures, that glitters and glistens there?-Das Rheingold
Alone then glows the Grail . . . -Parsifal
BAYREUTH-THE GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION-LIES AT A CROSS-ROADS: strategically located between Munich and Berlin, Paris and Prague. Before the two World Wars, it was at the centre of Germany and Europe; after the partition of Germany, it was relegated to a marginal position, but it has now been restored to its place at the heart of the reunited federal Länder. It is a place of history: a former residence of margraves, shaped into an architectural jewel in the eighteenth century, with a château and a rococo theatre, a hermitage, fountains and grottoes. It is a place of literature: its sandstone houses, onion-topped church towers, beer cellars and delightful hills have been much described, and it inspired both the Romantic Jean Paul and the anarchist Max Stirner. It is a place of politics, bearing the scars of its involvement in wider German events. It was badly bombed in the last war, and has su3ered too from the questionable aesthetics of municipal reconstruction: it now rejoices in the banality of motorway flyovers and shopping arcades.
Bayreuth-the symbolic location-is the centre of the annual Wagner festivals, and its Wagner Theatre is a shrine to the art of a single composer. It is this that has defined the town for the wider public: Bayreuth, to the world, is synonymous with Wagner. The Fest-spielhaus, established by Richard Wagner and built to his precise plans, has presided over the town on its famous green hill for over a hundred years. In this building, constructed in the simple style of a factory as a deliberate contrast to the ornate and opulent court opera houses of the period, Wagner's works are performed every summer to an audience from Germany and beyond.
The reason for this exclusive identification of the town with the mission of its summer festival-the perception that Bayreuth 'belongs' to Wagner, more completely, for example, than Salzburg belongs to Mozart-lies in a peculiar interplay of real, historical factors with imaginary, spiritual and mythological ones. This interaction of contradictory forces is similar to that found in Wagner's scores, in which at some points a dynamic plot is linked to music which creates a timeless present, and at others music drives the plot forward when the action is in danger of being lost in reflection. The Wagner-Bayreuth nexus (we can call it Wagner's Bayreuth to distinguish it from the geographical Bayreuth) is formed from a similar integration of contradictions: the antithesis between reality and consciousness, between history and myth, generates a certain dynamism-albeit one that is checked by the eternal recurrence of the same works.
Wagner's Bayreuth is the product of a constant collision between real and unreal elements: between the reality of a festival town in the present and the past, and an image in the collective consciousness. The fusion is not so complete, however, as to make the constituent parts of the phenomenon impossible to analyse. In one sense, for example, the Fest-spielhaus is nothing more than a festival theatre, a seasonal operatic enterprise with all that that entails: problems of sta3 and casting, stage sets and lighting designs, union agreements and safety regulations, a box o3ce and computers, often in need of repair. The Fest-spielhaus is a cultural business. As such, of course, it does not stand in isolation, but has always operated in conjunction with the rest of society, with its rights and powers, its wishes and demands. Even though it took shape rather magically before the composer's eyes, once upon a time, with the unreality of a folly, there still had to be a real king of Bavaria, and behind him a Bavarian state budget, to bring the whim to life. There had to be willing town fathers, private benefactors, associations prepared to undertake the pilgrimage, as well as a circle of propagandists, paladins and pressmen. All this has since changed only insofar as the structures of those political institutions, businesses, and media outlets that surround the Fest-spielhaus have themselves changed.
The real Bayreuth was and is linked to its context, and to the conditions which that context o3ers or dictates. It forms part of political history and reality, and of the cultural evolution of the nation. For in Wagner's Bayreuth, culture is defined first and foremost as German: cultural identity is reflected and confirmed through the image of the German nation. This has much to do with the composer's own understanding of himself, even if this self-understanding is not always clear from his operas and writings. Wagner regarded his theatrical revolution as both an allegory of, and a stimulant to the reshaping of German culture as a truly national art.
The continual repetition of Wagner's works, the almost incredible continuity with which they have been staged-from the days of Ludwig II, across two World Wars, to the present-signals the continuity, simultaneously disturbing and reassuring, of a particular strand of German history. This history reveals itself through the quasi-monarchical succession of the festival directorship, with its reigns and regency periods (this interpretation is no more and no less justified than any other attempt to humanise the historical process by emphasising the role of 'kings and queens'). Each new era of festival history brings its own drama and excitement, regicides and usurpations, revolutions and new beginnings. If the story of Bayreuth can indeed be understood as a microcosm of a broader political history, then the defining feature it shares with the outside world is its preoccupation with power-understood both as possession and as the ability to command. This preoccupation is also present, of course, in Wagner's work. Given that Der Ring des Nibelungen, that summum opus whose very execution demanded its own theatre, is concerned above all with the transfer and exercise of power, the preoccupation may justifiably be labelled as the Ring-principle-and the Ring-principle may in turn be identified with Wagner's Bayreuth.
The Ring-principle plays itself out through contestation and power struggle, both within the family and against various outside forces. Even the core of the Fest-spielhaus, the stage, has become an arena in which rivalries are fought out, particularly since the late 1930s, when the tendency for directors to try to stamp their own identity on the Wagnerian stage was first established. The stage becomes the arena in which artistic capabilities and reputations are tested. In this way, it assumes a revelatory character, exposing subtleties and deficiencies of character: success or failure there can a3ect a contender's position in future leadership struggles. The stage is never a purely aesthetic domain: it projects the glittering symbol of the golden ring deep into the structures of political power.
It is not the dominance of the Ring-principle alone, however, that causes Bayreuth to be identified as 'belonging' to Wagner; after all, every opera house, every political party, every sizeable business experiences similar power struggles. There is another aspect of the Ring whose presence is exclusive to Bayreuth, however: this is the mythical dimension, one which has been observed and described on numerous occasions. Emblematic representations of the Festspielhaus, particularly those dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, often show a mysterious light emanating from behind the theatre, surrounding it with a kind of halo: the house is literally radiant. Light, however, can have di3erent iconographic meanings, and the light here is not the result of the sun of Enlightenment having been cast on the house; rather, it is an indicator of the mystical significance of the building. This is proved not only by the writings of Wagner's followers, who had always preferred a religious model of theatre to an intellectual and critical one; it is demonstrated also by the arguments of Wagner himself, who had always conceived of his theatre as a place where the renewal myth would be fulfilled, as a German equivalent of Delphi.
In contrast to the archetypal 'village church', situated in the middle of a community and therefore likely to engender a sense of the community belonging to its people, Wagner's theatre towers high above the town, framed by a dark pine forest, a sacred grove. The arrangement of the auditorium as an amphitheatre recalls the theatres of antiquity. The audience is squeezed together-imprisoned, almost, in mind and body-and drawn in to the total work of art, forced to surrender to what is happening on stage. The lowering of the orchestra pit turns the orchestra into a mysterious oracle, in line with Wagner's intention to create a 'Dionysian' e3ect (as correctly analysed by Nietzsche). The sound swells up in the dark, seemingly without origin, so that the music seems to be a hallucinatory figment of the imagination; the simple timber structure is thus transformed into a theatre of orgiastic ritual. The mythical quality of the experience is further enhanced by Wagner's choice of subject matter-heroes and knights, gods, swans and dragons-which leads the imaginations of his audience back towards half-remembered legends.
Wagner's Bayreuth could not exist without this superstructure: the mythical Bayreuth is a constant companion to the real Bayreuth, anchoring it against the bu3eting of struggles and upheaval. This quality of timelessness is symbolised by the Holy Grail, an image drawn from the Christian-Germanic myth that was Wagner's principal source. The Grail encapsulates all that is magical and sacred about Bayreuth; as in Parsifal, it is radiant, illuminating the entire community. Its radiance has a quite di3erent quality to the seductive 'glitter' of its temporal counterpart, the Ring, since that brings disaster to whoever wears it. We can therefore identify a Grail-principle which stands alongside and opposite the Ring-principle; it is the interaction of the two principles that created and creates Wagner's Bayreuth.
The Grail-principle seeks to safeguard whatever is timeless, constant, mysterious. It was most strikingly personified in Wagner's life by his desire to use Bayreuth to lend a timeless, cultish character to his own work, an aim pursued most elaborately in relation to Parsifal itself, that 'farewell to the world' intended to be performed exclusively at his own theatre. This intention had repercussions beyond his own lifetime. The story of the 'Lex Parsifal' (Cosima Wagner's attempt to persuade the Reichstag to prohibit performances of the piece outside Bayreuth) and the Wagner family's use of the term 'Parsifal theft' to describe the performances that took place in Amsterdam and New York before the expiry of the thirty-year copyright period are good illustrations of the interaction of the Grail-principle with the dynamic forces of progress, the collision of myth and history. It is a moot point whether we should condemn the act of abduction as an attack on the Holy Grail, or, in a more enlightened mood, welcome it as the demystification of the archaic in favour of progress, emancipation and democracy.
Wagner's Bayreuth was constructed from the combination of various elements of Wagner's work with physical characteristics of the Fest spielhaus itself: the acoustic consequences of its architecture and its remote, elitist location. However, there is another important element that has allowed the Bayreuth myth to endure even in the most secular of times: this is Wahnfried, the Wagner family's private residence, symbolically situated in the centre of Bayreuth. This classical villa, adjoining the gardens of the margraves' palace, was a personal gift from King Ludwig; after Richard Wagner's death his widow Cosima lived there, and with her and after her, Wagner's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Real as this villa was with its promising name,* its mythical significance was still greater. The inhabitant of Wahnfried was also the director of the festival: Wahnfried therefore came to symbolise the domestic history of the festival. Leaders were bred here, family alliances forged and enmities fomented; it was the home of that theatrical family whose family life was itself compelling theatre.
At one level, of course, Wahnfried is a physical inheritance, a town house with garden and outbuildings, and the Ring-principle operates at this level, too. However, it owes its mythical status to the unusual circumstances under which it is bequeathed: it is not just a legacy to be administered, but also a spiritual inheritance, a commitment that must be nurtured and passed on from generation to generation. The family guards an archive of European significance, and is obliged by the provisions of a legacy to 'ensure the festive performance of the works of Richard Wagner' Admittedly, the text of this stipulation is found in the will of Siegfried Wagner, not Richard: there is no last will and testament in Richard's hand, and Siegfried himself had merely been charged by his father to preserve the legacy in an 'ethical [and] moral' manner. As he was only fourteen when his father died, his mother Cosima initially assumed the Bayreuth regency. On Siegfried's death his English widow Winifred would inherit both the Festspielhaus and Wahnfried. She in turn would be succeeded by their children, and so the pattern has continued.
Every family with an awareness of its own ancestry constructs its own saga. Precedents may be found in the impressive genealogical tables in the Bible, and royal and imperial houses have always sought to legitimise their authority by demonstrating the longevity and purity of their bloodline. The bourgeoisie rushed to emulate these examples, gaining a sudden interest in their family tree as soon as it became distinguished by property, or, as in this case, by artistic achievement. In most cases, the beginning of a dynasty is marked by a clear act of foundation, establishing a purpose within the family and a claim towards the outside world. In this case, that act was the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus, the moment at which the Wagners' history became clearly distinct from that of other composers' families. Ownership and operation of a festival theatre sent the family's prestige soaring, and bestowed a certain aura of spiritual superiority upon them.
Although they were not endowed with castles and coronets, only with debits and credits, the Wagners became likened to royalty in the public imagination, and various versions of their family saga were disseminated. Their actual history was so coloured by hearsay that reality became fairy tale, an archetypal nineteenth-century myth.
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Excerpted from The Wagners by Nike Wagner Excerpted by permission.
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