The Mists of Ecstasy

At midafternoon almost every day this month, mannerly crowds file into the drab and muggy Festspielhaus in Bayreuth to witness an opera by Rich ard Wagner. It is nearly midnight when they file out again -- hungry and exhausted, perhaps, but elevated by a sense of hard cultural accomplishment. The music, as always, has worked its mystic wonders on them, but -- except for that band of initiates known as Wagnerites -- the drama has left them plagued by the kind of metaphysical confusion that comes from attending services at somebody else's church.

Down on Your Knees. This year is the 150th anniversary of Wagner's birth, and Bayreuth Festival pilgrims whose health can stand it may see, in a single week, the complete Ring (14 1/2 hours), Parsifal (4 1/2 hours), Tristan and Isolde (4 hours) and Die Meistersinger (4 1/2 hours). Among each night's full house are a dozen or so operatic masochists who attend every festival performance every year--an annual dose of 111 hours of straight Wagner swallowed in only 28 days. If this regime is not enough to cure them, there are museums that boast such exhibits as "Silver Toothpick Belonging to R. Wagner." Wagner's house, his books, the couch on which he died--all have been preserved, along with some 5,000 assorted volumes addressed to the man and his work.

But even with the exquisite degree of scholarship that has been expended on Wagner, he remains the most disputed composer of all the masters. Few deny the immensity of his musical genius (one Italian critic listens to Wagner recordings only while down on his knees). The world's orchestras have been permanently reformed and enriched by his advanced ear for harmony and color. Still, there are those who insist that Wagner's music should be outgrown by 20, like acne, an opinion that seems as eccentric as Wagner's own sham intellectualism. He was everything from eugenicist to antivivisectionist to amateur Buddhist, but recent and serious studies of his work still call him as much a philosopher as a composer.

Merely a Monster. Wagner is, indeed, the only composer in history whose work amounts to an authentic ism; no one ever speaks of "Bachism" or "Mozartism," but Wagnerism has emerged as a way of life more than once, usually with unfortunate results. Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria, was an ardent disciple, but Wagner's most disastrous convert was Hitler, who said that an understanding of Nazi Germany required an understanding of Wagner. Hitler became a vegetarian in imitation of Wagner and liked to think that his SS embodied the spirit of Parsifal's Knights of the Grail. While listening to Wagner, friends reported, Hitler became lost in the same mists of ecstasy Wagner himself once breathed.

Hitler's devotion is hardly the composer's fault, but Wagner had much in common with his disciple. He was a worshiper of force, a captive of the primitive and irrational, an anti-Semite and a Teutonic racist. In private life, he was merely a monster--a welsher on debts, a ranting and insolent braggart, an emotional bully who riffled through other men's wives like playing cards as he searched for a woman who was also a Wagnerite. Said his grandson, Wieland Wagner: "In his dreams, Grandfather always had a naked woman at his side."

Two-Headed Calves. His worldview was just as feverish; in pursuit of his pan-German political ideal, he risked gunfire at riots, wrote jingoist music and poems as gifts for the government and, off and on, spent a dozen years in exile. Eventually he absorbed Christianity into Wagnerism, but like a snake's swallowing a pig, the maneuver changed his appearance more than his character. His mystic world remains an alien place, populated by collapsing heroines and atavistic heroes dwelling in such dark locales as the Rhine's swampy bottom, raving at each other in some of the ugliest German ever written, praising dreadful old gods with long beards.

Now, 80 years after Wagner's death, his opera has dwindled in popularity at an astonishing rate. At the turn of the century, five of the ten most frequently produced operas at the Met were Wagner's; in the last decade only one was among the top 20. "The demands of Wagner are excessive in every way," says Boston Symphony Orchestra Conductor Erich Leinsdorf. "He asked for the largest orchestra ever, incredible sets, and singers in each role who have a double voice--singers as rare as two-headed calves. Once we had Melchior and Flagstad. In recent years--only Birgit Nilsson."

Metropolitan Manager Rudolf Bing, who confesses to a private distaste for Wagner, echoes Leinsdorf: "You cannot do Wagner without the greatest voices--and these voices no longer exist in enough number to support many productions. What's more, the damn things last five hours, and they cost a fortune. When you consider all these things, you decide: let's do Puccini instead."

The Gift. A conspiracy of taste and circumstance has thus spared the music world further serious concern with what Wagner had to say. What survives is his music--played in edited orchestral versions that spare listeners both the unendurable length and the muddy message of the complete operas. The prelude to Die Meistersinger was the work most played by symphony orchestras in the U.S. last year, and close behind it were orchestral excerpts from Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser. Such music is perhaps the most glorious ever written, a gift to the soul as much as the ear.

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