Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival production of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was recorded in HDTV 1250 and Betacam Digital 16:9. A boisterous, colorful interpretation, this “Meistersinger” follows the original stage instructions and respects the historical framework of the piece. Beneath a stylized globe symbolizing the universal validity of the artist’s search for his role in society, the action unfolds in an intricately choreographed interplay of solo scenes and ensembles. Daniel Barenboim’s musical direction was unanimously acclaimed by the press. Le Monde, for example, wrote that he “fully possesses its spirit: poetic, fluid, very slender, his instrumental discourse is irresistible”. Among the vocal soloists, Peter Seiffert (as Walther von Stolzing) and Robert Holl (as Hans Sachs) have been consistently singled out for their superb interpretations in the past years. Emily Magee confers a subtle, youthful grace upon the coveted young daughter of the goldsmith Veit Pogner, sung by Matthias Hölle. The cast also includes Endrik Wottrich as David, Birgitta Svendén as Magdalene, Andreas Schmidt as Beckmesser, Bernhard Schneider, Roman Trekel, Hans-Joachim Ketelsen, Torsten Kerl, Peter Maus, Helmut Pampuch, Sándor Sólyom-Nagy, Alfred Reiter, Jyrki Korhonen as the Mastersingers and Kwangchul Youn as the night watchman. Prepared by Norbert Balatsch, the chorus of the Bayreuth Festival once again masters the exceptionally demanding choral part of this opera, which reaches a climax of intricacy at the end of the second act and culminates in the grand finale of Act III.
Tristan und Isolde
This production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” was premiered at the 1981 Bayreuth Festival and recorded in its third year on the Bayreuth stage, in 1983. With the celebrated Wagner tenor René Kollo as Tristan and the American-born soprano Johanna Meier as Isolde, supported by Matti Salminen (King Marke), Hermann Becht (Kurwenal) and Hanna Schwarz (Brangäne), the production was an uncontested feast of vocal mastery. This was underscored by the “wondrous gold of the score” that “flowed from the orchestra pit in a luminous symphonic flow.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung) Responsible for the inspired and transparent musical direction is Daniel Barenboim, whose sensitive treatment of the orchestra provides the ideal counterpoint to the interpreters on the stage. In his interpretation of “Tristan und Isolde” – his one and only production for the Bayreuth Festival – the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle refused to follow the fashionable trend of seeking to update a work at all costs. His interest lay chiefly in the psychological treatment of the action, whereby the sublimated love of Tristan and Isolde becomes a nocturne of emotional and psychological depth. His alteration of the end, in which the events of the third act are depicted as a dream sequence experienced by the dying Tristan, provoked considerable criticism in the first year, but was rendered more clearly understandable by Ponnelle in the following years. Ponnelle adapted his production for its audiovisual recording, ensuring that all the magical effects visible in the theater are as stunning and evocative on the screen.
Tannhäuser
“Thunderous applause, elation”, wrote the prestigious Germany daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Rome’s La Repubblica noted the “triumphal success and storm of applause” that greeted Giuseppe Sinopoli and the ensemble at Tannhäuser’s 1989 Bayreuth Festival premiere. Directed by Wolfgang Wagner, Richard Wagner’s grandson, this Tannhäuser production was one of the high points of the Bayreuth Festival during the latter part of the 1980s. The abstract starkness of Wolfgang Wagner’s production is underscored by the crystalline clarity and vigor of Giuseppe Sinopoli’s conducting, which particularly highlights the progressive aspects of the score. This Tannhäuser production gathers together some of the great Wagner singers of our time such as Cheryl Studer (Elizabeth), Wolfgang Brendel (Wolfram), Richard Versalle (Tannhäuser) and Hans Sotin (Landgrave).
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Wolfgang Wagner’s universally praised Bayreuth Festival production of “Die Meistersinger” most clearly demonstrates the originality of its conception in its treatment of Beckmesser. Refusing to caricature Beckmesser, to represent him simply as a fool or a pedant, Wolfgang Wagner allows the character the status of a genuine poet with a melancholy, almost elegiac quality. The production dispenses with the usual clichés and the excessive pathos which often lend the opera an overly “German” quality, and concentrates on the specifically human aspect of the characters, which other productions have tended to neglect. Hans Sachs is seen not as a solemn patriarch, but as a likable middle-aged man; Stolzing emerges as a sensitive, thoughtful individual drawn towards the bourgeoisie, rather than as an aggressive aristocrat. Wolfgang Wagner has succeeded in liberating “Die Meistersinger” from its aura of Teutonic heaviness and retrieving the light and color of the original: late medieval Nuremberg truly comes to life.
Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)
For his production of “The Flying Dutchman”, premiered in 1978, Harry Kupfer chose the original Dresden version of 1843, which has a rougher, more muscular texture than the subsequent editions. When “The Flying Dutchman” was performed in Zurich and Munich, Wagner himself revised the work, softening the instrumentation and appending the “redemption” conclusions to the overture and the third act. What was the reason for the heated disputes which took place between the conservative Bayreuth Wagnerians and the more progressive lovers of the composer’s music? Harry Kupfer’s production presents the entire story of the Flying Dutchman as a hallucination, a figment of Senta’s disturbed imagination. She is seen by the director as a highly neurotic, even schizophrenic young girl, whose yearning for the eternally wandering Dutchman puts her into a trance-like state, in which her own internal drama is acted out in the form of a vision. By having the character leap through the window to her death at the end of the opera, Harry Kupfer has placed a highly personal interpretation on Wagner’s notion of “redemption”.
Götterdämmerung
In 1988, conductor Daniel Barenboim, stage director Harry Kupfer, set designer Hans Schavernoch and costume designer Reinhard Heinrich came to Bayreuth to realize their vision of Wagner’s Ring. They firmly turned away from the work’s time of origin and set their sights on a “critique of the history of mankind and of the entire evolution of culture, the destruction of which we are actively furthering” (Kupfer). While Wagner’s “critique of mankind’s destructive frenzy, its coldness and alienation” (Kupfer) was rooted in Germanic mythology, Kupfer’s team locates its Ring in a present that also embraces the past and the future. The place where present, past and future converge is the “road of history”, which sets the scene for struggles of power and love, and takes us straight into the depths of the human psyche. “Harry Kupfer has created a production of great coherency, hard, cutting, transparent, which will delight those who see in Wagner a contemporary and will displease those who consume Wagner like some consecrated artifact in a museum. The entire mythological apparatus is demolished bit by bit: what remains is what Wagner himself wanted: the ‘pure humanity’ of the myth. […] The entire ‘Ring’ unfolds like an intellectual adventure that provokes unforgettable emotions.” (La Repubblica)
Tannhäuser
This is the first complete television production recorded at the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Director Götz Friedrich sees the minstrel Tannhäuser as a rugged artistic individualist, much as Wagner was himself, misunderstood by his contemporaries who seek to throttle his inalienable right of expression. He turns his back on a regulated, stifling society and retreats into the world of his own impossible dreams. Whereas other productions of “Tannhäuser” show the minstrel acutally biding time in the court of Venus, in Friedrich’s version Tannhäuser’s harp triggers an imaginary Venusberg, in which the strings become a tangled web of pure sensuality. Tannhäuser discovers that a completely anything-goes society is just as restrictive in the end, and he returns to the real world. But Tannhäuser can’t go home again. Once again he lashes out at his hypocritical associates, who condemn him. His only defender is the saintly Elisabeth, who in this production is played by the same soprano who sings Venus – two sides of the coin in the eternal feminine. She prays for her own death, so that thereby Tannhäuser’s soul leaves this restrictive world for a better one in which his genius is appreciated.
Lohengrin
“Lohengrin” was premiered in Weimar in 1850 under the direction of Franz Liszt. The performance was a triumph for the composer, who, however, was unable to attend: he had been exiled for taking part in the 1848 uprisings in Dresden. The Bayreuth Festival production has many of the same haunted, obsessive qualities that mark such Werner Herzog films as “Aguirre, The Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”. The internationally acclaimed filmmaker’s heroes (often played by the late Klaus Kinski) are generally lonely, enigmatic men; in Lohengrin, Herzog found a truly congenial subject. With its probing images and lavish settings by Henning von Gierke, the production is not only intelligent, fascinating and coherent, but also simply gorgeous. The press unanimously hailed Paul Frey’s “limpid and tender voice” and Cheryl Studer’s “marvelous musicality and transparent timbre”.
Götterdämmerung
It began with a scandal, became the object of heated discussions, turned into a sensational success and finally blossomed into a legendary, standard setting production: Pierre Boulez’ and Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth, the “Centennial Ring”. When the production was premiered in 1976, there were brawls in the venerable Festspielhaus, with the audience divided into one mob roaring in favor and one screaming against. The main reason for the protests was Chéreau, who set the work in the time in which it was written and focused on the all-too-human passions that motivate gods and men alike. The grimy industrial era with its robber barons and suffering masses supplied the ideological underpinnings of Chéreau’s concept. Musical conservatives felt betrayed and cheapened by this association. The tide began to turn in 1977. Certain features were altered and the production began to have a more homogeneous feel. Finally, in 1980, its last year, the Ring concluded with a 90-minute ovation and 110 curtain calls. By the time Philips released the complete recording of this production in 1992, its legendary status had already begun to take shape: “Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez not only wrote a major new chapter in Wagner interpretation with their Ring, but also carried out a revolution that affected all of musical theater. Since then, no production of the Ring has been able to come near to the concept put forward by Chéreau and Boulez.” (FonoForum) Unitel’s production, the first complete recording on film of Wagner’s Ring, marked the beginning of Unitel’s exclusive association with the Bayreuth Festival.
Parsifal
Parsifal is Wagner’s last opera. He named it “Consecration Play for the Stage,” and in so doing, tried to give the proper framework to what is in almost all aspects a sacred Christian play with music. Wagner also included mythology, mysticism and ancient Indian ideas in this work, whose origins he drew from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s famous courtly epic “Parsival”. But even earlier sources related to the legend of the Holy Grail were used by Wagner as a source for his poetic work. For 30 years no theater other than Bayreuth was allowed to perform “Parsifal” by order of Wagner. Only in 1914 did the work spread across the globe. Wagner achieved the essentially sacred atmosphere of the music through an instrumentation that evokes organ registration and often uses the instruments in groups (woodwinds, brass, strings). The leitmotivic work is less dense in Parsifal than in the Ring of the Nibelung. The brilliant songfulness of the world of the Grail is set against chromatic harmonies which, e.g. in the prelude to the third act, anticipate the twelve-tone music of the New Vienna School. The musical direction of this performance from the Bayreuth Festival is in the hands of Horst Stein; the stage director is Wolfgang Wagner, who also designed the sets. In the lead roles are renowned Wagner singers Siegfried Jerusalem, Hans Sotin, Bernd Weikl and Eva Randova.