Das Rheingold ala Boulez
Though I possess a complete digital copy of Solti’s Bayreuth production, in addition to the complete cycle on vinyl by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonik, I must say I have yet to experience Wagner’s magnum in its entirety. With most parts perused, and many others mildly interpreted, I found myself savoring the thorough experience of actually viewing the festival, cover to cover. So it was with this in mind, a few Belgian Ales in glass, and three different translations of the full libretto in hand, that we embarked toward the Absolute.
The 1976 Bayreuth collaboration between then 31-year-old Patrice Chereau and Grand Wizard of the avante garde Pierre Boulez is hotly contested. On one hand, they produced an innovative, inherently “modern,” and imminently pre-industrial Marxist interpretation of Wagner’s rich, folkloric, and imminently Dritte Reichian music dramas. On the other, the production spawned a monsoon of cultural criticism and agitated calls of heresy. Boulez prohibited the orchestra from playing the score with their typical hurricane-like Wagnerian intensity, the lead vocalists were considered better actors than Wagnerian dramatists, and no one knew what Chereau really had in mind.
But it is clear the temporal tides have waxed a tad and Boulez is generally now revered as providing a clean, transparent, and realistically proportioned sound-scape, while Chereau succeeded in reinforcing the expression of the personal on the grandest scale. He focused on maintaining and controlling the human element within each character and their hopelessly captivating social strata. At times, the drama even outshines the scores. In addition, to set the cycle around the time of their actual conception (1850s, 60s, and 70s), we can visualize the forces at work in the economy of Wagner, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer, and can more thoroughly conceptualize the piece’s subterranean themes without gnomes, fairies, and beasts. We witness socio-economic systems and individual power conflicting with one another, and ultimately synthesizing in a new epoch set to the glistening stars in the twilight of our idols.
You can say anything at all about the Wagner hegemony surrounding Bayreuth to this day and the social sediments of racist hatred that were left in his wake, the same sediments that provided the artistic silt for Hitler to sludge through on his quest for cultural “renewal.” Wagner was anti-semetic and his music indeed glimmers with shards of racist allegory (Read: Nibelungen=Jews?); and it proves hard at times to connect with the extraordinary innovation and genius that he produced because of it. But his understanding of the early modern world, his revolutionary methods of blending the emotive oppulence of the opera page with the drama of real life by fusing Teutonic myth and legend with the will to power and knowledge prevalent in the 19th century nevertheless stands the test of time and can always teach someone something they do not already know, if not dialectically. Boulez and Chereau’s production helps the modern viewer reinterpret the staging in a capitalist framework and so offers a more accessible experience for those more well versed in proto-Che commie talk than Nordic lore.
I personally recommend researching, listening to, and contextualizing Wagner’s epic before strolling into this version. I found myself at the right place at the right time viewing it, but I had recently been dwelling on Wagner’s on again, off again correspondance with Nietzsche and how both ultimately diverged philosophically. I found the experience stellar and rewarding. You feel, understand, and interpret the illustrious complexities of the score and its modalities when you hold the script and see the faces. In addition, their production seems as topical to our current focus on economic agendas as Adams’ Nixon In China Act I, Scene 2.
Founders do come first, then profiteers.
