Playing with Toys at Bayreuth

By Martha Duffy

"I feel like Orson Welles when he first came to Hollywood and cried, 'This is the most beautiful toy in the world.' " So said French Theater Director Patrice Chereau, 31, as he contemplated the prospect of staging the centennial celebration of the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's longest, densest and most puzzling creation. The results were on display last week at the somber brick Festspielhaus, which Wagner himself designed, and they brought on a storm of booing deep and raw. A few people both booed and clapped at once. Shouting matches broke out between husbands and wives in splendid evening clothes. Some of the crowd had brought old-fashioned trainmen's whistles, shrill enough to make a hound bay. Nonetheless, Chereau came out to take curtain calls, wearing blue jeans, a shiny mod belt and a patient smile. Said he later: "I was very amused at the booing."

Bayreuth has known--and absorbed--protest before, notably in the early '50s when Wagner's grandson Wieland introduced the stark, abstract productions that have remained influential ever since. Wieland's brother and successor, Wolfgang, knows his conservative local constituency very well--he staged an undistinguished Ring cycle of his own in 1971--but for the big five-week-long birthday he went out to hire men who would shake things up the way they must be shaken periodically if an opera house is to command international attention.

To conduct he chose Pierre Boulez, known for his readings of modern works but not particularly for his Wagner. He then approached Berlin's Peter Stein to be director, and the word around Bayreuth is that the irreverent Stein proposed a Ring cycle without music. Wagner's next pick, suggested by Boulez, was Chereau, the current enfant terrible of the Paris stage, whose only previous ventures into opera were an iconoclastic Tales of Hoffmann in Paris and Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algeri at Spoleto. ("You should watch this young man," said Luchino Visconti, director of The Damned and Death in Venice, in 1969. "This is me at the age of 27.")

Painful Fun. Chereau obviously does not want to be confined to either a realistic Ring or a symbolic one. Says he: "I don't believe in pat solutions. What interests me in Wagner are the contradictions." So he has staged the Ring largely in the "modern dress" of 1876, the year of its first full performance. To that basic idea he has added touches of surrealistic humor. For example, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who gain the magic ring in Das Rheingold in payment for building Valhalla, lumber around on the sagging shoulders of two local weight lifters hidden beneath their cloaks. This joke is painful fun, since Bass Bengt Rundgren, who plays Fafner, is 6 ft. 4 in. tall and weighs 300 lbs.

Along with the jokes, Chereau provides some murky social commentary. Hunding, the cuckolded husband of Sieglinde, lives not in the traditional hut but in a drafty mansion. A thuggish factory owner, he eats off silver dishes, using a corner of the tablecloth as a napkin. In the new industrial age, the Rhine maidens no longer swim in the river but work at a power dam. Says Chereau: "It is not necessary to show the Rhine to indicate nature. Anyway, I love dams. I think they are poetic."

Chereau is not the first to apply social history to the Ring (George Bernard Shaw made a similar but cleverer political reading of the cycle in The Perfect Wagnerite). No such interpretation, however, can work in the truly mythic story of Bruennhilde, which dominates more than half the Ring. She loses her godhood trying to protect the incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, and she finally brings down Valhalla for the lost love of Siegfried. Bruennhilde is also Wotan's favorite warrior daughter, and the current direction never looks more confused than when we see her still in the traditional armor at the side of her father, who looks like a nice chap out of Chekhov. The incongruity does not faze Chereau. Says he: "In any play I do, I have disagreements with the author."

The state of the singing was typical of most recent Rings--that is, discouraging. The great roles were mishandled, the less demanding parts often excitingly well sung. Gwyneth Jones, the Bruennhilde, has worn out the beauty of her voice by forcing it. If there is anyone now who can sing Siegfried, it is not Rene Kollo, who sounded tired and almost querulous. Donald McIntyre is the best Wotan on the Wagner circuit, and he turned in his usual impeccably sung performance, marred as always by fanciful flights into totally incomprehensible diction. His conception was palpably at odds with the views of Chereau, who sees the god as almost vicious. McIntyre's Wotan is always noble, and in the Ring's big moments--for example, when he renounces Bruennhilde and puts her to sleep on the rock--Mclntyre is proved right.

Among the young singers, two stood out. Peter Hofmann, 31, who sang Siegmund, has a rich tenor with the dark baritone quality that often marks a young Heldentenor. Someone should put him to sleep on a rock for a few years until the premature offers to sing Tristan and Siegfried die away. For Americans, at least, the real revelation was Heinz Zednik, 30, who sang Loge, the god of fire in Rheingold, and the wretched Mime in Siegfried. Zednik is a light tenor buffo and the best actor at Bayreuth. As Mime he whined, cringed, scuttled, fawned and bullied his way with the stern Wotan and the muscle-bound Siegfried. He was really too good: the performance lost its momentum after Siegfried dispatched him.

The most coherent interpretation of Wagner was offered not onstage but in the pit. Boulez did not take the established romantic route that leads through sweeping statements of the various themes to resounding climaxes. His tempi were fast and light, the orchestral fabric pliant and almost transparent. In the more complex parts, one could hear all the themes because no single one was allowed to dominate. This was not the most spellbinding way to play the Ring, and it proved unequal to the cataclysms of Goetterdaemmerung, but its intelligent, Mozartean clarity refreshed the ear.

Boulez is still refining his first Ring. After three more summers of festival performances, he says, "we hope that the entire thing will be perfect." One of Bayreuth's contributions is that it gives a conductor like Boulez a long time to reconsider his ideas. Most of this year's performers will be back again.

Wagner Gossip. There are those among the town's Wagnerians who think that the only way Boulez can improve matters is to take his detached, cerebral view of the Ring back to France and encourage his friend Chereau to stick to movies. An old man who played the viola in the Bayreuth orchestra for 40 years stomped out of Siegfried after the second act, crying: "Boulez will bring down Bayreuth." It would be hard to exaggerate the fervor with which the town and its summer visitors take their music and their traditions. In any coffeehouse or tavern, there is but one subject of conversation and one name that recurs incessantly in the buzz of talk--Waaahgner, spoken with a long, dragging a. A few other people are mentioned too, with easy familiarity: Wieland, Wolfgang, Eva, Wummi, Gottfried. There is no need to mention last names--they are all Wagners. Along with the esthetic arguments, there is always some good gossip. This summer has been particularly spicy. Recently divorced Wolfgang Wagner, 56, last week married Gudrun Mack, 37, a former Festspielhaus secretary. At the moment both the town and the family are wondering whether the lady will turn out to be another iron-willed Cosima Wagner, who ran Bayreuth for 25 years after Richard Wagner's death. Wolfgang is publicly at odds with his own children, including Eva, 31, his former casting director, who disapproves of the marriage. His late brother Wieland's children are also rebellious, especially Wieland's son Wummi, 33, who has told the press that he himself would make a good Festspiel director.

The dissident young Wagners can be seen sitting together at a table in the large Festspielhaus restaurant complex during the hour-long intermissions that are a Bayreuth institution. If Chereau's stage tricks sometimes fall flat, the show outside never does. The women's jewels go beyond mere fashion--watches belted with diamonds, ropy pearls on the young girls, brooches of kaleidoscopic intricacy on their mothers. For Wolfgang's party after Siegfried--and the night before his wedding--Africa seemed to have disgorged her mines.

At the end of each intermission, the Wagnerians strolling about the Festspielhaus grounds are summoned by musicians who stand on a balcony and play a theme from the upcoming action. The crowd clambers across the rough floor boards, seats itself on the hard, wood seats--decreed by Wagner for the sake of sound. Physically nothing has changed in the Festspielhaus auditorium since Wagner designed it, and its acoustics are among the best in the world. The old man would probably relish the scene in 1976: the full house, the well-dressed crowd, the impresarios gathered from several continents. As for Chereau and Boulez, Wagner would probably be one of the people who were both booing and clapping.

Martha Duffy

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