A REVOLUTIONARY RING

Martin Bernheimer

Richard Wagner created the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 in order to see his unique fusions of music, poetry, and drama performed without interference from a prosaic outside world. It was at Bayreuth that the Master's works were supposed to be given their definitive interpretations, always under ideal performing conditions. It was also at Bayreuth that Wagner's music became irrevocably associated with the would-be power and glory of a self-proclaimed master race. The festival has not always lived up to its reputation either as a haven for artistic perfection or as a bastion of Nazism; it hasn't even remained a place that invariably reveres the letter as well as the spirit of Wagnerian law. At its lofty best, however, the Bayreuth Festival has treated Wagner with loving care, which could be either invigoratingly rough or soothingly gentle.

After Wagner's death in 1883, his widow Cosima kept the festival going while worshiping his ghost and reinforcing the universal impression that hers was a holy mission. The sacrosanct directorial duties eventually passed to her son Siegfried, who cautiously introduced staging elements modern for his time without altering the inherent performing concepts. Siegfried's wife and successor, Winifred, concentrated essentially on preserving the status quo, until her reign expired in 1944, shortly before the defeat of Germany in the Second World War.

When Bayreuth reopened in 1951, the composer's grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, were now in charge. For most practical purposes, the conservative Wolfgang minded the store while Wieland created a startling, healthy, and controversial revolution. Wieland decided that a literal presentation of the heroic, fantastic Wagner mythos could only result in Disneyesque cartoons. No one, he felt, could take seriously a world of overstuffed Briinnhildes in breastplates, beefy tenor-heroes, Peter Pan mermaids, and cardboard-realism sets embellished with hokey-smoky magic tricks.

Wieland wanted to restore the poignancy of Wagner while banishing the trivia and purging the pomp. His Wagner was abstract, symbolic, stark, psychologically oriented, much involved with light painting, little concerned with a tradition predicated on ritual and kitsch. Sometimes Wieland actually dared contradict the text. His productions aroused violent protest at first; the old German guard was, of course, offended. Then gradually his way became the Way: the only way Wagner could be interpreted and appreciated by serious contemporary audiences, the lazy way emulated by less imaginative stage directors everywhere.

Terror struck Bayreuth when Wieland died at the age of forty-nine in 1966. Wolfgang could keep the festival doors open, but few observers regarded him as an innovative force. For a while, the Wieland productions were revived without the benefit of his galvanizing eye. Wolfgang continued to contribute his own productions, neat and appreciative fusions of old-fashioned piety and newfangled iconoclasm. It was obvious that something had to change drastically.

It was generally assumed that the change would occur in time for the centenary production of the Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy in 1976. Still, no one was quite prepared for the Ring of Patrice Chereau and Pierre Boulez, which originally stirred Bayreuth audiences to the state of near riot and which perplexed American audiences via Public Television installments that began in January.

The devout followers of Bayreuth were resigned to the fact that the new guardian of the dramatic Grail would not be a Wagner. They were not prepared, however, for the fact that the guileless fool in question would be a virtual novice in the realm of opera production, an enfant terrible from the so-called legitimate theater, a modernist without traditional perceptions or scruples, a creative virgin in matters Wagnerian, and, perhaps worst of all, a Frenchman. Nor were the devout ecstatic at the prospect that the musical interpretation of this lOOth-anniversary Ring was to be entrusted to another Frenchman, a reportedly cool and calculating conductor who happened to be best known as an avant-garde composer.

Chereau and Boulez formed a remarkably bold yet mutually sympathetic partnership. They had their own ideas about the Ring. They saw it as a sprawling allegory of the corruption of the industrial revolution—George Bernard Shaw had pointed the way for that view—and they had no qualms about confronting modem political and sociological issues. They were willing to play slow and loose with conventional values of time and place, and eager to introduce symbolism, naturalism, elements of satire, even Brechtian alienation, into an epic that had begun to resemble a fossilized festival of stylization. The Chereau/Boulez Ring pointed the way to a second Wagnerian revolution in Bayreuth.

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Not everything in this revolutionary Ring worked as its creators planned or hoped, especially in the beginning. Some effects misfired. Others got distorted in the process of realization. Contradictions, in both detail and tone, abounded. Understandably restless, Chereau made refinements and changes every time the operas were repeated.

The ultimate result could only disquiet those who like to sit back, relax, and enjoy familiar Wagnerian rides. On the other hand, it could provide genuine illumination to anyone willing to regard the Ring as valid, philosophical, modem theater and not as a quaint museum piece.

Ironically, Chereau often demonstrated more respect for Wagner's specific instructions, not to mention the dynamic flow of the music and the definition of the characters, than Wieland had. It was the unorthodox visual context first imposed and then contradicted with seeming perversion by the young Frenchman that caused the confusion and the ire. Chereau's Ring actually combined melodrama with agitprop devices, archaic ritual, and musicotheatrical parody.

He used the ultra-Teutonic never-never-land mythology of the original merely as a recurring point of narrative reference. He began his Ring in the Germany of Wagner's day and ended it in the Germany of the Krupps, permitting numerous temporal zigzags in between.

He established his independence instantly, with a clever shock effect at the outset of Das Rheingold. The erstwhile Rhinemaidens had become hearty whores who happen to ply their ancient trade in the vicinity of a huge, steamy hydroelectric dam rather than at the bottom of a riverbed. Alberich, their antagonist, was no evil dwarf but an unhappy, bedraggled laborer in heroic quest of love or, failing that, power.

To Chereau the godly Wotan family represents no dignified collection of singing statues but a rather prim and bored salonful of upper-bourgeois schemers decked out in brocades and silks. The facade of Valhalla, a bizarre conglomeration of architectural styles and periods, lurks behind a scrim, which the effete Donner raises at the climactic moment of liberation. Loge, the mercurial god of fire, is now a wily, almost Chaplinesque butler. Fasolt and Fafner are bona fide giants, for once. Two oversize bassos are lugged about the stage on the shoulders of brawny weight lifters hidden beneath the singers' grimy flowing robes.

When Chereau wants the drama taken seriously, he treats the characters as figures of flesh and blood. No empty operatic emoting is allowed; no cliches are permitted. When a little distance seems desirable, he reduces the action to a not so profound play within a profound one. At the end of Das Rheingold, for instance, as the self-deluding gods weave their dizzy way across the rainbow bridge to Valhalla, Loge smirks at the audience in knowing vaudeville style and personally draws the curtains closed. The maneuver works brilliantly.

In Die Walkiire, Hunding's hut has become an empty warehouse with a fake tree plunked in the middle. Hunding is now a wealthy factory owner surrounded by thugs. Wotan sings his crucial monologue of self-realization while removing his eye patch in front of a full-length mirror. A pendulum suggests the waning vitality of the old order, and Wotan—a cross between Lear and Nixon in his tragic abuse of power—stops its circular motion with his own shaking hand when he foresees the end of the universe.

Chereau's chief of the gods is a surprisingly active, extraordinarily volatile participant in the tragedy. Contrary to the dictates of the libretto, Wotan impales Siegmund with his own spear, only to embrace the youth's corpse in immediate remorse. He knocks his daughter Briinnhilde—a nurse in armor—to the floor when she defies him, yet cradles her sleeping form at the end of the Farewell as if he were carrying a vulnerable little girl to bed.

Not all the images are so eloquent, so psychologically apt, or even so appealing. All, however, are striking. Erda, the mysterious, primal earth mother, crawls and squirms about the Bayreuth stage like a shrouded mummy temporarily transformed into a worm. The magical reptiles in Das Rheingold look reasonably fearsome, but Chereau throws credibility to the brass in Siegfried, where the dragon emerges as a charming antique on wheels pushed about the stage by visible stagehands. Siegfried, who bullies the Wanderer like a Hitler Youth who somehow strayed into A Clockwork Orange, encounters the forest bird in the guise of a pet canary in a cage hanging from a prop tree.

Even when Chereau confuses the viewer, he still fascinates. His worst moments are more challenging, more introspective, than the best moments in productions that rely on blind homage to yesterday's conventions. And his best moments give Wagner degrees of vitality and illumination one might have thought impossible after a hundred years of dutiful interpretive wear.

One such moment occurs at the close of the first act of Siegfried. The sympathetic dwarf Mime, whom Chereau depicts as the victim of Wagner's philosophical antiSemitism, thinks the muscle-bound dolt Siegfried can offer him salvation. The smart, craggy, bespectacled little man putters about his basement kitchen, methodically concocting a poison eggnog while Siegfried repairs his noble sword with the convenient aid of a huge, unabashedly phallic, electric forge. Just as the climactic curtain falls, Mime drapes a towel across his stooped shoulders, turns a stepladder into a throne, raises his wooden spoon like a scepter, and in a gesture of triumphant, whimsical satisfaction crowns himself with a cooking pot. For one glorious moment of self-deception, Mime is king of the world.

Amid the crumbling mythological empire of Gotterdammerung, Chereau invokes the moral and political corruption of the present day, making use of the obvious metaphor of the Krupp family. Gunther, the leader of the Gibichung clan, sports an elegant, modem tuxedo, a costume that Siegfried later emulates. Chereau reveals the Rhinehookers staggering about a hydroelectric plant that is now devoid of water, presumably a comment on the international abuse of natural resources. Briinnhilde undergoes her noble immolation in front of an old waterfront tenement, before a stunned audience of workers and innocent children, the latter signifying the possibility of a renewal of faith.

For all his eccentricities, Chereau jolts the viewer to attention. He dares us to follow his meticulously plotted ambiguities, to unravel his expressive convolutions, and he never tramples the score or its meaning in the process. His Ring may not be the most accessible or the most consistent in memory—it will be replaced in Bayreuth this summer with a new, presumably less taxing, version by Peter Hall— but it must be the most stimulating and the most refreshing. The most stimulating and refreshing, that is, since Wieland's.

Musically, the centenary Ring made complementary iconoclastic sense. In the wondrous covered pit, Boulez thumbed his nose at the heavy, thick, grandiose, slowmoving, climax-prone tradition of Germanic indulgence, which is essentially what Chereau did on the stage. Boulez's Wagner was light, bright, sensitively detailed, exceptionally clean, clear, and poised. It never dawdled, never exaggerated, never gilded the emotional lily, yet it capitalized at every turn on tasteful restraint, on architectural logic and precisely gauged tensions.

The Ring represents one of the most daunting, most serious, and most significant challenges ever to be undertaken on television. For all its aesthetic and technological successes, it also creates a fourteen-hour headache for media moguls and viewers conditioned to expect neat little program packages.

As taped by Unitel in 1979 and 1980, the Ring on the whole looks wonderful. Brian Large, the television director, filmed full acts at a time, not snippets, and managed to convey the spontaneity of a live performance even though the sessions in question were staged at the Festspielhaus for the cameras alone.

Most of Chereau's intimate effects gain in screen translation, and Large has reproduced those effects with theatrical fidelity reinforced by a keen sense of the musical pulse. One of the few regrettable visual lapses involves the giants, hulking monsters when viewed in the opera house from a distance, harmless hulks with scarecrow arms when seen up close. The cameras take kindly, in any case, to Richard Peduzzi's fanciful sets and to Jacques Schmidt's evocative, multistyle costumes.

Oddly, the artists who were most compelling in the theater are not invariably the most impressive on the screen. Jeannine Altmeyer, for instance, seemed the Sieglinde of one's dreams in Bayreuth during the summer of'79—childlike, radiant, opulent in tone, passionate in demeanor. Captured for posterity a year later, she seems markedly less spontaneous, her soprano tired and a bit ungainly. Similarly, the close-up cameras and microphones do little to perpetuate the fiery innocence with which Peter Hofmann had matched Altmeyer as her twin brother, Siegmund. Manfred Jung's trying puppet-brute Siegfried, especially his young Siegfried, is afflicted with chronic pitch problems and histrionic crudity. The mannered though remarkably girlish Briinnhilde of Gwyneth Jones affords decreasing pleasure with every shriek. Wagnerian heroes and heroines may look better now than they did in the past; unfortunately, they don't necessarily sound better.

Still, there are hefty compensations in the character roles. Heinz Zednik is the craftiest of Loges and, in Siegfried, a Mime of unforgettable poignancy and wit. Donald McIntyre brings just the right impression of gruffness masking sensitivity to a vocally solid, profoundly touching portrait of Wotan, and he is counterbalanced by the suave and sexy Fricka of Hanna Schwarz. Hermann Becht makes Alberich a figure of tragic rage. Franz Mazura embodies the weakness and decadence of Gunther perfectly, and Fritz Hiibner brings surprising sympathy plus genuine black-basso heft to Chereau's crumpledproletariat vision of Hagen.

The videotaped performances are superb at best, fascinating if flawed at worst. The packaging of those performances for America, alas, is problematic. In their infinite corporate wisdom, the PBS authorities have chosen to spread the Ring telecasts over five months, splitting each uncut "show" into one-act or, at most, two-act segments and interpolating hibernation-length intermissions. Die Walkure, for example, ended on February 28, but the Ring doesn't resume with Siegfried until April. Under the circumstances, all hope of cumulative impact is lost. It may be worth noting that the more civilized BBC presentation of the same Ring tapes offered one act per week for ten consecutive weeks.

The telecasts concentrate, thank goodness, on what is happening on the stage; the cameras never wander into the pit—as they do in comparable ventures involving Karajan or Levine—to gaze upon the maestro in distracting action, and most scene changes are managed without a break in dramatic continuity. The American producers do get nervous, however, during preludes. Their European counterparts are content to let us listen to the crucial, scene-setting music while staring at the closed Bayreuth curtain. PBS, however, insists upon offering us a credit crawl over a filmed drive up the hill to the Festspielhaus—while the orchestra tells us we are at the bottom of the Rhine—or an irrelevant view of a Wagner bust.

To inaugurate the series, PBS assembled an illuminating if somewhat disorganized, once-over-lightly documentary about the production. The program benefits from an intelligent script by John Ardoin, suffers from some painfully selfconscious elementary introductions by Wagner's granddaughter Friedelind, and gets downright silly when George Grizzard, the show-biz narrator, mispronounces virtually every German word he encounters.

Friedelind and Grizzard return for a variety of filler programs devoted to relative trivia: a tour of Bayreuth, a visit backstage, a survey of Wagneriana in objets d'art, a quick look at King Ludwig, a wrapup biography of Wagner. There are hardly any explanations or disclaimers, however, regarding the peculiar Chereau interpretation of the Ring; the subtitles refer to mermaids in the Rhine, for instance, but we see prostitutes at a hydroelectric dam. Even more damaging, there is no discussion of Wagner's musical style. If the word leitmotiv is heard on the soundtrack once, this listener missed it.

PBS further compromises the impact of the operas by letting Hollywoodish previews of coming attractions get in Wagner's way and ours. Das Rheingold builds to a shattering climax after two and a half uninterrupted hours. But before the listener can catch his breath following the final cadence, a flash-forward to the love scene from Die Walkiire floods the screen, the love music obliterates the Rheingold climax, and Friedelind is in there pitching the next show. It is outrageous and selfdefeating.

The first Ring to be televised anywhere in toto deserves to be edited with greater discretion. The work, in all its sprawling complexity, remains an epic virtually beyond comparison in Western culture. Even if the Nielsen and related ratings prove disappointing, more people will see the Chereau Ring on television this year than have seen the Ring in all the stage performances during the past century combined.

It is a very sobering thought.

The Chereau/Boulez Ring cycle has been available as a set on Philips Records since 1981. In conjunction with the PBS airing, Philips will release each of the four operas individually.

The soundtrack of Hans'Jurgen Syberberg's Parsifal is available on Erato (RCA Records).