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| The art of transition. The Walkyrie Vita Matiss So civilized, even back then. A magnet for the European aristocracy soon after its opening in 1844, the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich exuded refinement, luxury and discretion. Nestled in its private park, with a majestic view of Lake Zurich and the Swiss Alps, the hotel was a refuge for potentates and the otherwise mighty who wished to shield themselves from the brusque realities of the world of mere mortals. | |
| The Hotel Baur au Lac remains exceptional today, a privately owned family hotel that greets the greats of the 21st century at the airport with a Rolls Royce, which then conveys its illustrious clients to their Zurich oasis, where they can contemplate the swan-dappled canal in the morning, all the better to prepare themselves for the afternoon's ruthless business on the adjacent Bahnhofstrasse. Difficult to imagine Richard Wagner, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, in such a setting. Let alone a performance of Wagner's anything but discreet music within this plush and hushed interior. Yet it is here, at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, that the premiere of The Ring of the Nibelungs in its prose version took place in a series of readings by Wagner over four successive nights in February 1853, and where purportedly, the world premiere of The Walkyrie in musical form took place as well, with Franz Liszt at the piano and Wagner himself singing the starring roles. Or so the present-day publicity materials of the Hotel Baur au Lac claim. Whereas the story of the February 1853 readings is well-documented, it is not so clear to a non-specialist whether the assertion that The Walkyrie was first publicly performed at the hotel by Wagner and Liszt has any corroborating evidence (that they actually did perform the piece there, however, is affirmed by the Master himself in his memoirs), but given that Wagner specialists are few, and millionaires a dime a dozen, can the Baur au Lac be blamed for embellishing a bit upon an already good story? One must admit that the spectacle of Richard Wagner belting out all of those "Hoyotohos" - imagine the swinging chandeliers! the all-round ruckus! - within the walls of this bulwark of the haut-monde is a riveting one. Wagner's presence in Switzerland was directly related to his contentious, contradictory nature, as he had been banned from Germany for his participation in the revolution of 1848. Against the serene backdrop provided by Swiss scenery and civility however, the Ring was conceived, The Walkyrie composed, and the exile years proved to be altogether fruitful ones. The conception of a new world took place in serene surroundings, but the impetus for the creation of the world of the Ring was given by the revolutionary events of 1848, as Wagner himself, late in his life, was to admit: "Only '48, the spring of the people, had constant fine weather from March onward; ...I believe I myself should never have conceived the Ring but for that movement."1 Another added stimulus to the genesis of the Ring was the presence in Zurich of Mathilde Wesendonck, the love of Wagner's life; the Wesendonck family arrived in Zurich in 1851 (their first residence was the Hotel Baur au Lac) where Mathilde was to be Wagner's inspiration, and Mathilde's husband Otto his benefactor, over the next ten years. Unfortunately for Wagner, but luckily for musical posterity, Madame Wesendonck remained unattainable to him, and thus two of Wagner's most passionate desires - his yearning for the perfect love and his aspirations for an ideal social order, remained unfulfilled. Despite his predilection for the finer things in life and his innate sense of superiority, Wagner was on much more familiar terms with the irrational, with the revolutionary, than he was with the more staid world of order, reason and propriety. When Wagner began the Ring, he seems to have intended it as an allegory for his own century, as a warning as to what would befall the world - and more specifically industrialized Europe, if it continued on its materialistic, power-mad, wealth-seeking course. Wagner proposed a radical change in this course, as can be attested to by his close alliance with the revolutionary movements that flourished in Germany during the period leading up to the failed uprisings of 1848-1849. During this period he is an avid reader of Feuerbach and Proudhon, personal friend of Herwegh and Bakunin, and envisages a classless society based on an idealized Greek model. Yet both Wagner's life and work are too vast and full of contradictions to fit into any such schematic political reading - be it socialist or national-socialist, and if Wagner began the Ring as a political allegory of his time, then in the process of writing it he himself acknowledged that it was shaping itself from some source beyond his conscious control into something he himself did not fully understand. Wagner's musical myth, at the most profound level, is not about the 19th, 20th or 21st century; it takes place outside of time, within the territory of the soul. The Ring describes first and foremost a psychological, as opposed to social and political reality. Wagner understood that myth was a form of primitive psychology, man's first attempt to make sense of the world around him, Wagner understood that myth has always been as much about the psyche as about the cosmos; what myth tells us is that the crucial dilemmas of the psyche within, and of the cosmos without, are one and the same. Wagner was certainly not the first to make this connection, but he was the first to bring this connection to the forefront of the European mind in the 19th century. Even in Latvia, in their discussions and notes over their joint "Man of the Future" project in the late 1890s, Rainis and Aspazija look to Wagner as a model, Aspazija writing to Rainis: "I'm enclosing here a clipping of a review of Wagner, read it my dear ...Shouldn't one say that for all nations their striving for primeval truth has as its foundation various myths?" The production of The Walkyrie which premiered at the Latvian National Opera in March 2007 is a production which takes place outside of time, a production which explores the territory of the soul, rather than the ever-shifting landscape of political and social reality. Director Viesturs Kairišs and Designer Ilmārs Blumbergs have eschewed both the realistic, nature-based interpretation (complete with live horses who inevitably misbehaved on stage in a most un-godly way to the amusement of audiences) so much in vogue in Wagner's time, and an interpretation focusing on the conflicts of a distinct historical time period (industrial revolution, fascism), an approach which became popular in the later decades of the 20th century. Kairišs and Blumbergs have stripped the epic story down to its essentials, creating a minimalist, yet symbolically cogent setting, which fuses almost seamlessly with Wagner's music and the talented singers (and actors!) who provide for the main emotional impetus of this production. Difficult to place this production within any concrete time frame or century, which given The Ring's own unique sense of time, is a fact to be lauded rather than regretted. Not only is The Ring a story set in the other-worldly space of myth, but the story almost never places its characters and action within a specific context of days, weeks or years - impossible to situate the events on a time scale. How many years, centuries elapse between The Rheingold and The Walkyrie? Perhaps not even Wotan knows for sure... In The Ring external actions take place at an almost comically frenetic pace, while the "movement of the soul", or interior actions, such as Wotan's monologue in Act Two of The Walkyrie, take their own time, both literally and figuratively. Most importantly, Wagner's musical sense of time in The Ring is a significant departure from what the opera canon had beheld up to that point (and not only by the length of the oeuvre) - a strict architectural form is replaced by a pliable one, the art of seamless transition from one musical mood to the next, with no perceptible break in the line is fundamental, as Wagner was to point out himself: "I recognize now ... the characteristic fabric of my music... I should now like to call my most delicate and profound art the art of transition, for the whole fabric of my art is made up of transitions; ...That, then, is art! But this art is very much bound up with my own life. Extreme moods in a state of violent conflict will no doubt always remain part of my nature."2 So too, the story of The Ring itself is not a linear, chronological one, but a story written in reverse, from the present back to the origins, a circular tale. Given the intemporality of The Ring, and this successful LNO production's tasteful attempt to place The Walkyrie within a timeless setting, the few details that manage to thrust one back into contemporary reality jar all that more callously. The idea of portraying the Walkyries as cheerleaders is an amusing and effective one, given the context of the Act II "fight" scene in the amphitheatre. Yet the "cheerleader" is a very time and place-specific being, i.e. circa 20th century America. These "pom-pom girls" are often objects of satire in their place of origin, and to a European eye can even more quickly become objects of derision. The Walkyries with their "Hoyotoho! Heiahas!" already verge on the ridiculous, but when you add to the already ridiculous the ludicrous, what you get is burlesque, not drama. Whereas all of the other costumes in the LNO production of The Walkyrie are stylized and in neutral tones, only the Walkyries wear costumes that are easily identified as to time and place, and with color accents to boot. Was it not possible to give a more stylized twist to the cheerleader outfits as well, and to replace the very recognizably modern (and ugly) yellow latex with a more ageless yellow material? In the same vein, could the movements of the Walkyries not be choreographed in such a way, so that their "cheerleading" was a serious business, and not a parody? Wagner was much preoccupied with the question of the nature of freedom during the composition of The Ring as can be attested to by a letter written to his friend August Roeckel in 1854, a letter which sounds a strikingly contemporary note: "One thing counts above all else: freedom! But what is ‘freedom'? Is it - as our politicians believe - ‘licence'? - Of course not! Freedom is: integrity."3 The Ring is a dramatic allegory about ethics, and the dramatic action of The Walkyrie focuses on the conflict between love and power, yes, but this conflict in itself is but a catalyst for the essential question: what is freedom? What is a free man? What is the essence of human freedom? Three confrontations in Act II of The Walkyrie provide varying responses to this question: the confrontation between Wotan and Fricka, the confrontation between Wotan and Brunnhilde, the confrontation between Brunnhilde and Siegmund. Let philosophers embellish upon the multiple ramifications of these varied responses, as Wagner was wont to do in his own discursive meanderings on the subject. Whatever the nuances of the analysis, the essential message is clear, as Wotan himself unequivocally declares: "I am caught in my own trap, I am the least free of all men." The greater the power of the god, the greater the power of the office, the stricter the servitude. Wotan is not the free man of the future that Wagner took such pains to describe in his prolific writings, but then who is the free man? Siegmund? Siegfried? Perhaps the free man of the future - is a woman? Brunnhilde is the only character in the Ring who dies know-ingly, willingly, freely, forgoing power and gold for the sake of love... Another German who spent a good part of his life in Switzerland, the writer Hermann Hesse, in his book The Glass Bead Game, also created a hero - Joseph Knecht, who became the supreme rule of another ideal Kingdom of the Grail (in this case Castalia, not Walhalla), yet of his own free will, knowingly, bravely, freely gives up his godlike status for a mortal existence, for the purpose of bettering the condition of simple mortals, for love of humankind (and ultimately, for death). The name of Hesse's hero - Knecht (slave in German), is immediately revealing: like Wotan, Knecht is "the least free of all men" while he remains the Magister Ludi. Knecht ultimately defects from Castalia, making the transition from the world of the masters to the world of mortals. In a key passage of the book, one of Hesse's most famous poems is quoted: Serenely let us move to distant places And let no sentiments of home detain us. The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.4 In the book, Knecht has written the poem as a young boy, emphatically entitling it "Transcend!", a title later changed to the more modest "Stages". Only at this late stage in his life does Knecht realize that the poem could also have been called "Music" or "The Nature of Music", for the poem was really about the nature of music, its serenity and resolution, "its quality of being constantly present, its mobility and unceasing urge to hasten on, to leave the space it has only just entered".5 The nature of music is transitory, and Knecht, as he is about to leave Castalia, finds that music is a good metaphor for life, or life as it ought to be: "My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind..."6 Neither life in Castalia, nor life in the more plebeian world is an ultimate stage, they are only temporary resting places; neither a haughty Nietzschean elitism nor a revolutionary socialism is the utopian panacea to society's ills, but a tempered dose of both could be felicitous; we are neither entirely godly and virtuous, nor irredeemably base and evil, but a bit of both. The art of transition, the art of embracing the divine and the mortal, the capacity for movement, the capacity for propelling oneself to a higher stage, to a wider space - this is the mark of a free man. In the background of the Kairišs-Blumbergs-Nelsons production of The Walkyrie looms an electronic screen displaying different variations of a straight coloured line throughout the opera. Perhaps the line has been added just for decorative and dramatic effect - indeed, this is one of the few points of colour on stage, but as The Ring is dense with symbolism, leitmotifs and multiple meanings, I cannot help but wonder what this line represents. The Ring is a circular tale, a ring itself is round, and the paths of the lives of Ring characters, and of human life in general, tend to be a circle, or a spiral or whatever, in any case their paths are anything but straight. In summing up his own life, Hesse's hero Knecht says it most succinctly: "Straight lines evidently belonged only to geometry, not to nature and life."7 ______________________________________ 1 Ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mach, Cosima Wagner's Diaries, Vol. I (New York and London, A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 753. 2 Trans. and Ed. By Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 475. 3 Ibid., p. 301. 4 Hesse, Hermann. Magister Ludi. The Glass Bead Game (Bantam Books, 1986), p. 345. 5 Ibid., p. 346. 6 Ibid., p. 368. 7 Ibid., p. 356. | |
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