And suddenly he went back to the interrupted Siegfried, and when he’d finished and there were more things to say he went farther backwards and wrote Die Walk?re, and finally Rheingold, which opens the tetralogy. Such achievements imply hard work. In his working habits, Wagner was a bourgeois – pedantic, writing clean pages, keeping regular hours; but in his conception he was entirely the opposite.
Tristan und Isolate completely reverses Wagner’s lofty theories on the poet ruling the musician. Triton is a musical masterpiece. The music – the orchestra – always comes first. The words often retard the plot or, at worst, create boredom. No one goes to Triton to listen to the poetry. It’s the music that matters.
Mesitersinger is Wagner’s finest work. The libretto had genuine humor and great poetic beauty and the music both drama and charm. It is everything a comic opera should be, though not according to Wagner’s theories – but fortunately he didn’t bother about those when writing the work. Compared the hallucinations of the suffering, feverish Tristan, who is an artificial creation and a bore, Hans Sachs is real and human, and proof that Wagner was a poet. Ironically, Sachs reaches greatness not when he is on stage, during the Fliedermonolog or Wahnmonolog, but when he is talking to Eva, or to Stolsing, or in the quintet of the third act
All composer are glad to be performed; Wagner, however, the incurable egomaniac – Thomas Mann called him a “theatromaniac” – demanded to be performed in his own shrine, a monument to his Musikdrama, and – as he later saw it – a Valhalla to the German Empire that had emerged in 1870. Wagner, the former revolutionary, had come full circle. He had been in Bayreuth as in impecunious twenty-two-year-old conductor one summer evening in 1835, and exclaimed, “Ten horses couldn’t pull me away from here”; he was given to extravagant statements even at that early age. Within a day or so he set our for Nuremberg, to conduct a concert, and he didn’t return for thirty-five years. In 1870, when he was trying to finish the Ring,, he revisited Bayreuth. He’d for some time wanted a theater of his own. “I’m going to build my own house and educate my own artists,” he wrote. “I don’t care how long it takes”.
He went to Bayreuth to see whether its baroque Margravian opera house, which then had the largest opera stage in Germany would answer his requirements. He immediately decided it wouldn’t. The auditorium was too small and the acoustics were nothing special. Then he walked up the nearby Green Hill, a wooded slope a mile north of town, and concluded that its summit would make a splendid setting for his theater. “Nowhere else! Only here!” he said. The city fathers of Bayreuth, overwhelmed by his enthusiasm, made him a present of the site. On March 22, 1872, the cornerstone was laid. Wagner composed his won Imperial march for the occasion, and afterwards he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, his favorite. He was convinced he had a “mandate” from Beethoven.
The Festspielhaus was opened on August 13, 1876. On opening day there was formal procession of notables and musicians from the center of Bayreuth to the top of the Green Hill. The first festival was an artistic success but a financial failure (the deficit was 150,000 marks), and Wagner couldn’t afford to put on another until 1882, the year before his death. On July 26, Parsifal was first performed. Wagner had assembled a topnotch cast; Hermann Winkelmann Parsifal), Amalie Materna (Kundry), Emil Scaria (Gurnemanz), and Theodor Reichmann (Amfortas). The honor of conducting this Christian B?hnenweihfestspiel was given to Hermann Levi, a Jew. Parsifal is really two things, depending on whether one is exposed to it in the mysterious dimness of the Festspielhaus or analyses it in the cool light of next morning. As a spectacle, it is an emotional experience with moments of indescribable beauty. It is impossible not to be moved by he Transformation Scene, the scene of the flower maidens, the divine beauty of the good Friday music. But afterwards one has second thoughts. There are times when it becomes a “children’s play for retarded adults”. The mumbo-jumbo around the Holy Grail is strictly late Cecil B. De Mille. Parsifal is only sincere in the passages where the composer’s imagination triumphed over the self-imposed religious-metaphysical bonds, where the irrepressible creative force of the musician overcame the calculating preoccupations of the thinker: everywhere else Parsifal is false and mere theatralism. Wagner is a better magician that Klingsor, the magician in Parsifal. Klingsor remains a parody. Wagner hypnotizes us with beautiful music.
Perhaps he isn’t the composer or logical-thinking people – and thus will always be assured of a worldwide audience and perennial popularity, though he will have his ups and downs. Richard Wagner raises the philosophical, ethical question whether genius makes badness permissible in man. And perhaps this question cannot be answered simply, but one thing is sure. Richard Wagner was a complex man whose music and whose ethics will amaze, baffle and intrigue audiences for years to come.
Bibliography
Detwiler, Harriet “The History of Opera”. New York; Barrett Press, 1978.