Layers of the Past

Parsifal at Bayreuth 2008

by Daniela Zimmermann

from an original German text

translated into English by the author

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2009. Copyright © 2009 Daniela Zimmermann and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

THEATER

Page I

“On va à Bayreuth comme on veut, à pied, à cheval, en voiture, à bicyclette, en chemin de fer, et le vrai pèlerin devrait y aller à genoux.”

—Albert Lavignac, Le voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1900)

Few people travel to Bayreuth on foot—or horse, or bike, or even their knees nowadays. In the 21st century the traveller uses other, possibly more exhausting methods of getting from A to B.

However that may be, in August of last year I made my way from the east coast of the United States to see and hear Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, the so-called ‘“Bühnenweihfestspiel”’ at Bayreuth. I came by plane across the Atlantic, landed in Frankfurt and approached the ‘holy place’ as a sort of modern pilgrim, travelling by ICE, (German high speed train), and finally the regional railway.

In the late nineteenth century it still took more than 17 hours by train from Paris in order to get to Bayreuth. Today one needs about the same amount of time to travel from the American East coast to the little Franconian town, in Bavaria, South Germany.

Once embarked on the small, leisurely railway—which I joined, exhausted, after a 10 hour night flight and high speed train from Frankfurt to Munich—I began to consider how, nowadays, it is possible to overcome huge distances in such a short span of time, by prodigious speed. And the process of thinking about the shrinking of time in relation to space seemed to give the mysterious main motive of Parsifal—“here time becomes space”—a contemporary and relevant meaning. I had travelled thousands of kilometres at incredible speeds. I now understood Parsifal’s motto as my own, and felt well attuned to the opera.

The further I moved away from the nerve centres of the world, the closer I came to Bayreuth, the more the relation of space and time seemed to change. Time seemed to expand, space became smaller. After a while, the latter was only a tiny, provincial detail of the big wide world I just had come from. The train chugged through little villages, school children got in and out, mothers with babies in their arms made their way to the next town, the friendly conductor spoke the broad Frankonian dialect with the softly rolling “r”. Undeterred by the turmoil of history, everything continued at its unchanging and peaceful pace.

The train crawled slower and slower with each kilometre. It seemed finally as if time was withdrawing from the future, beginning instead to reach back into the past.

“On part le matin de Nuremberg et on l’arrive à Bayreuth à 1 heure, en traversant de délicieux vallons, abondants en sites sauvages, avec des rochers étrangement déchiquetés par la nature ... ressemblant à des châteaux en ruine ou à des monstres l’apocalypse.”(1)

What a certain Gustave Fischbach described in the year 1882 has not changed much until today.

Calmly traversing the gentle, hilly landscape and remote, wild valleys, admiring strange, naturally eroded rocks that seem to resemble mysterious ruins or apocalyptic monsters from primeval times, it becomes easier to understand that the deeper one wants to look into the world and its past, the smaller the detail one must choose to observe. Then, space and time take on a different, reciprocally deepening relationship, the linear passing of time opening up into an expanding moment.

I realized that I had to alter my previous understanding of the phrase “here time becomes space.” Time was not meant to shrink in order to overcome space as quickly as possible. Time had to become space, and therefore become wider, reach back further.

I arrived at Bayreuth’s small train station and made my way to the hotel. Crossing the town by taxi I decided, as part of my journey back in time, to overlook the architectural sins of the present and concentrate my admiration on the pretty baroque sandstone buildings of the old town. Deliberately, I disregarded the pedestrian precincts of the city centre with their ugly, cheap chain shops and huge shop windows cut brutally in to the fragile 18th century facades, trying, on my way to the Best Western, to catch a first glimpse of the “House on the green hill”, as the Bayreuth opera house is nicknamed.

Somewhere in the far distance, I had caught sight of it for a second, and realized that it was no longer located outside the city as in Wagner’s times but that the city had sprawled up the hill towards it. When Pjotr Ilitsch Tschaikowsky was working as a journalist for a Moscow newspaper and visited the festival in 1876, he reported that the opera house was a considerable distance from Bayreuth, surrounded by fields. Today the fields are almost gone—apart from some free spaces for car parking. It certainly is not a place set down in the midst of nature, in “some beautiful isolation,”(2) as Wagner had conceived and known it. But I hoped, due to my stubbornly idyllic imagination: I had heard that it was meant to be surrounded by a park—that once I was there, at least I would feel as if I was in a sort of countryside, even if that was an illusion.

My journey back in time came to a sudden end after arriving in the Best Western hotel. There was no pretence any more, I had to look the here and now in the eye. The unsatisfactory situation regarding accommodation in Bayreuth, already criticized in the nineteenth century, has not improved in the last a hundred and thirty years—it is just keeping up with the times. In the past, it was customary during the festival season for Bayreuthian citizens to offer accommodation in their living rooms, and thus make a little money. Nowadays one puts oneself in the mood for the Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk” in a branch of a modern worldwide motel-chain surrounded by a car park.

In 1871, Richard Wagner visited the sleepy little town Bayreuth for the first time, searching for a suitable place to host his planned music festival. Since 1850 and during the conception of the Ring der Nibelungen, he had been preoccupied with the idea of a festival that could present his operas in a completely new framework, a place surrounded by the natural world and far from the busy centres of modern life. “In a summery and free evening air,” as he wrote in his preface to the Ring der Nibelungen, the visitor to the festival was meant to experience in seclusion “a previously unknown understanding [...], which fills him with a new warmth, and inflames within him the light by which he becomes aware of things he had no idea of.”(3)

The insignificant yet idyllic little town Bayreuth was the place he was looking for, and the festival house’s foundation stone was laid on the 22nd of May, 1872, Wagner’s 59th birthday. The Festival opened with the Ring-Cycle on the 13th of August in 1876. At Bayreuth, Wagner hoped that the regenerating forces of nature would free the festival visitor from the yoke of modern civilization and the destructive forces of its decadent social and cultural conditions. By connecting art and nature, Wagner hoped that his vision of the “human being of the future”(4) would be fulfilled, that everybody could take part in the celebration of art. And the “Festspiele” was conceived as a “public festival of contemplation” for the “human being of the future”, created equal in his need for true art, and at the same time free and democratic.

Wagner’s missionary ambition, his demand for art to be regenerative in order to counteract a threatening modernity was born of the spirit of the 19th century. And the Romantic idea that art should educate and guide people towards ideal sensibilities, was fused with critical thoughts about the process of civilization according to the spirit of Rousseau. With Wagner, the call “back to nature” took on a new meaning.

It is difficult to tell if the Rousseauian vision of the “individual freed from the chains of civilization” had already manifested itself as the “human being of the future” in the festival visitor of the past, or only in the one of today.

Then and now it is the same ritual every year. Between the 26th of July and the 26th of August, faithful followers make their way from all over the country and across the world to Bayreuth. In Wagner’s time, artists and art enthusiasts of all kinds, from Tschaikowsky, Stravinsky or Debussy to Rudolf Steiner were visitors. Today, the public consists mainly of the money-aristocracy, politicians, and tv-talkmasters. Years of waiting for a ticket and the related, lucrative black-market which forces up the prices—unless you are well connected or a member of the festival society (“Förderverein”) and donate generously—seems neither democratic nor liberated from the chains of civilization.

The collection of cars that gathers every year for four weeks in front of the Best Western does not encourage the assumption that Bayreuth is a public festival for the common man either, but rather a vanity fair for the wealthy and educated privileged classes. That said, the brave idea of the new festival director and great granddaughter of Wagner, Katharina, to broadcast the performances live in the streets and under summery skies in order to be enjoyed by everyone, together with beer and sausages, seems, under the above mentioned circumstances to be an excellent starting point to reintroduce Richard Wagner’s democratic views.

A substantial amount of fresh air cannot do any harm—taking into account the length of the performances. They last up to five hours and have to be endured on warm summer days in the sticky and hot opera house, which operates without such comforts for the modern man as air conditioning or comfortable seats. A week in Bayreuth, which is by no means unusual for the convinced Wagnerian, can become quite exhausting for anyone who is privileged enough to be in the possession of tickets.

Already Friedrich Nietzsche had observed the sickly and palish condition of the Wagnerian. He admittedly traced this sad state back to the music this species was exposed to. He found it to have the same effect as an “infection and the advanced use of alcohol”(5) and therefore was able to knock over even “the strongest ones like bulls.”(6)

Mitigating feelings of weakness relating to oxygen deficiency or the “ruining of the nerves”(7) due to being a victim of “Wagner’s mystery-art”(8) (Nietzsche again), the two long intervals during the performances can help.

In both or one of these, the Wagnerian can strengthen himself with champagne and culinary delicacies on white laid tables under the blue sky. He can thus combine the enjoyment of art and nature (thank God the petit bourgeois terrace-houses that have settled on the green hill up the way to the “Festspielhaus” are not visible from here), and he can pretend to be totally in tune with Wagner’s intention to flee “our urban civilization”(9) at the same time as exhibiting his and her festival finery! A first reciprocal gaze at the latest festival fashions is, of course, far more interesting to everybody than long civilized conversations about the fair art in general or the quality of the recent production. Wagner’s noble vision of spiritual and sensual immersion in the music during the performance, and the subsequent exchange about this experience in the interval, probably had already given way, even in his day, to the more primitive instincts of dressed up people at special occasions—i.e., to behave like rival gregarious animals who need to define their hierarchy. Intellectual reflections come later.

Concerning the question of fashion, it has to be mentioned that we are in the heart of Germany, and not for instance in elegant Paris or a little bit further East in Salzburg, where the local music festival takes place at the same time. We are in Bayreuth, and even the Austrians are more dashing than the Germans when it comes to dressing up their ladies—not to mention the French. One has to say that Bayreuth is not the centre of stylish elegance, lightness or even wit. But never mind. After all, one is there in order to be part of the “sublime, the deep and the overwhelming.”(10) (Again Nietzsche, the cynic). What does it matter in view of this grand prospect, if one takes last place in Europe in terms of fashion and style?

Art is more elevated, and so the trumpet players step out on the so-called “King Ludwig roof” of the opera house to summon attention with their fanfare. The musicians take up a musical theme from the act that is about to follow, and we understand that their appearance signals the end of the interval, that the performance will shortly begin again. Chit chat ceases, one listens in reverence, and when the last sound dies away, the crowd moves towards and enters the temple of art. This is a moment of true solemnity.

Wagner conceived his opera house following the model of the classical Greek amphitheatre in Epidaurus, at least as far as the design of the building’s inner space is concerned. From the outside, the “Festspielhaus” is a simple, square block of unplastered brick and a few exposed wooden beams, and shows nothing of the usual 19th century belle-époque splendour. Wagner had taken over plans by Gottfried Semper for an opera house in Munich, adapted them according to his vision, and then had them realized by the architect Otto Brückwald.

The “House on the green hill” was built to represent democratic ideas. The auditorium, which consists almost totally of wood, is designed in amphitheatre form and describes an eighth of a full circle. In contrast to most theatres of the time, there are no elaborate decorations to be found, just some small gold leaf decoration on the walls and the ceiling, nor balconies or stands. No distractions were allowed to take attention from the stage, no hierarchies in the audience to create comparisons. This corresponded to the original idea of the festival: for each member of the audience to be completely devoted to the experience of listening and seeing—at least during the performances.

Each of the simple and rather hard wooden folding seats offers a direct and undisturbed line of sight to the stage. Visually, the so-called “Scherwände” (a sort of vertical beam), attached to the left and the right hand walls, shorten the perspective of the room. They are decorated with pillars and direct the view even more to the stage. But apart from their visual significance they are also of acoustic importance, enhancing both angle of reflection and the reverberation of the orchestra sound.

The heart of the Bayreuth festival house is the orchestra pit, the design of which Wagner considered with enormous care and attention. One of his most significant ideas was to remove the barrier between audience and stage created by the sight of the orchestra and the conductor. Wagner designed the orchestra pit to be much deeper than is usually the case, and made it appear sunken and invisible: a large part of it is located under the stage, with a shield built above so as to partly cover it. The pit is not only invisible due to the shield and its depth, but it also has room for a large orchestra of 124 members—the number of musicians needed for the Ring der Nibelungen: originally Wagner had designed the opera house especially for the Ring-Cycle.

The exceptional and unique sound of the opera house is achieved not only by the unconventional design of the orchestra pit but also by the unusual order of the orchestra. The weaker sounding instruments, such as the many strings, are placed in front under the shield, and the stronger sounding instruments, like wind, brass, and percussion, are located further back, under the stage.

Wagner defines his most important musical and dramatic aim as "the freeing of thought into sensuousness"—to be experienced in the “Gesamtkunstwerk”. And as a result of his design, initially the sound wave from the instruments at the back of the orchestra pit is thrown to the front, into the arched shield. There it merges with the strings, then reverses onto the stage where it unites with the singer’s voices and, finally, pours out into the auditorium which, at that moment, feels to the audience like a wooden resonance box. The listener is engulfed by sound, and believes himself to be in the inner body of an instrument. Thus, nothing stands as a barrier to the pure enjoyment of the great “Gesamtkunstwerk”—the synthesis of the arts—which consists of the unity of what is heard, seen and spoken, and combines music, drama, and poetry as a whole.

The Wagnerian idea of “the freeing of thought into sensuousness”, as well as the mutual fusion and penetration of different genres into a whole, was certainly not realized in the most recent Bayreuth production of Parsifal in 2008 by Stefan Herheim. One recognizes that the intention was to create a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, yet the production failed because of its adaptations, which tried to do too much.

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