Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

30/07/2007

Tradition, revolution and reaction in Bayreuth

Marianne Zelger-Vogt on Katharina Wagner's ambitious Bayreuth debut with the "Mastersingers of Nuremberg"

The media coverage before the premiere was almost unprecedented, and even surpassed the hype around Christoph Schlingensief's "Parsifal". Because this new production of "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg" was not only a festival directing debut, it was also that of a potential festival director. The 29-year-old Katharina Wagner is the daughter and preferred candidate of Wolfgang Wagner, who at almost 88 has headed the festival - founded by his grandfather Richard - since 1951. In her media appearances Katharina Wagner has clearly shown she doesn't lack ambition, and her first directing work at the festival (and only her fifth independent directing project overall) is not lacking in ambition either. But does ambition alone suffice to stage a coherent performance of Wagner's monumental comedy?



All photos courtesy Bayreuther Festspiele

Katharina Wagner and her set designer Tilo Steffens locate the first two acts in a spacious school auditorium. Peter Konwitschny's Hamburg production of "Lohengrin" comes to mind, and the hunch is proved right again and again that Wagner's great granddaughter - how could it be otherwise - must have seen a good many Wagner productions by now. The school - with galeries on the side and rooms at the back - is clearly an academy for music, theatre and dance: a sombre, ugly building.

The masters of the opera are teachers. They sit at cumbersome tables wearing doctors' caps and gowns - except for the chain-smoking shoemaker Hans Sachs, who appears barefoot in a black shirt. Eva and Magdalene (Carola Guber) appear as childish twin sisters in prudish grey (costumes by Michaela Barth), while the apprentice David busies himself at a photocopier. And this is where the young squire Stolzing is supposed to sing? This lanky boor who mixes up the house rules even while the masters are explaining them?



Klaus Florian Vogt (left) as Stolzing, Michael Volle as Beckmesser

Stolzing's failure to enter the guild enrages him. At the beginning of the second act he sprays paint wildly about him, before putting his energy to creative use by painting Eva's dress. A huge hand tips over just at the right time, and serves the pair as a pedestal. Stolzing's rage is just the beginning; absolute chaos breaks out in the fight scene, shoes fly about the stage, Campbell's Soup tins are dumped from the balconies - a stage battle without parallel. Nothing in the optics of this "Mastersingers" production would indicate that the Bayreuth Festival needs to save on cash. The acoustics are another story, however (more on that score later).

In fact, the anarchic fight should really be the key scene in the opera, but when and how the the three male protagonists come to have a change of heart cannot be made out here. After the second intermission everything is simply different. Sachs meditates in an elegant salon wearing shoes, a white shirt and a suit, while behind him appear the old German masters - Richard Wagner among them, of course - as huge masks. They then get down from where they're stationed, chain Sachs and whirl in a grotesque satyr's dance. A rather mysterious scene in which only so much is clear: Sachs resigns, and with him a stage crew very much like that of the production, who takes their bows in pantomime.



Klaus Florian Vogt (left), Amanda Mace as Eva and Franz Hawlata as Sachs

A parallel scene follows Stolzing's prize song. Stolzing has become part of the mainstream, and is led around by an historically dressed opera singer. He receives a golden stag as a prize and poses, surrounded by the "leading team," with the check of an imaginary sponsor bank. But between these two applause scenes there is also the appearance of Beckmesser: the turbulent happening of a reactionary who has discovered his creative potential in the fight scene and now outs himself as a performance artist.

Sachs resigns, Stolzing conforms, Beckmesser becomes an action artist giving a new twist to the art scene - a commentary on today's opera in general and the Bayreuth Festival in particular? Perhaps. Yet it all remains too intellectual, on the one hand filled to overflowing with ideas and props, on the other hand a void - the entire history of the ideological reception of the "Mastersingers" as "Nazi opera" is blended out, for example, while Katharina Wagner remains focussed on the performance aesthetic. There is hardly any interaction between the figures (Eva wrapping her scarf around the widower Sachs can hardly be called interaction as such). And whether the director can deal with a chorus or not can't be judged, because it sings for the most part from the wings, and first appears on a tribune like that of the festival lawn, whereupon it quickly transforms into a premiere audience.

The elements that differ in this performance from customary stagings seem too deliberate: there are two Nuremberg puzzles but no blackboard where Stolzing's errors are chalked up during his try-out song; instead of banging on shoe soles, Sachs hammers on the keys of a typewriter; the sheet with Stolzing's prize song is a theatre brochure; and the song-baptism is portrayed as a bourgeois family idyll. The two women, moreover, are simply ridiculous. They are fully out of place here, also as far as singing goes.





Amanda Mace, Franz Hawlata

With her shrill, poorly resonating soprano, Amanda Mace as Eva is one of the two major vocal weak spots of this production. The second is Franz Hawlata as Sachs, whose baritone lacks power, sonority and reach in equal measure. It helps little as a counterweight Klaus Florian Vogt, one of the up and coming young German tenors, sings the role of Stolzing. On the night of the premiere he got better from act to act, but his role is poorly defined and he didn't quite achieve the full-blown brilliance with which he elated audiences in the Geneva "Mastersingers" last December. Other positive points include Michael Volle as Beckmesser, the only one among the soloists to cultivate the art of being understood, and Norbert Ernst as an agile, yet not at all lightweight David.



Klaus Florian Vogt
The singers of this production could hardly benefit from the Bayreuth theatre's celebrated acoustics, as conductor Sebastian Weigle wound the orchestra up from the word go. His tempi are fresh and avoid pathos, yet they lack form and balance. Above all, however, the sound lacks nuance, structuring and instrumental finishing touches. As a result massive boos accompanied the applause at the end of the evening, for the directing team, for the singers, and also for the conductor. It remains unclear from her "Mastersingers" debut whether Katharina Wagner is suitable as festival director. But what is certain is that as an opera director she still has to find her style.

"The Mastersingers of Nurembert" premiered at the Bayreuther Festspiele on July 25. Further performances: August 4, 8, 16, 28.

*

The article originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on July 27, 2007.

Marianne Zelger-Vogt is a theatre critic at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Translation: jab.

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

Functions like DNA

Monday 31 October 2011

In 2007 the rap duo Kinderzimmer Productions disbanded with rapper Henrik von Holtum, alias MC Textor, publishing a ranting manifesto against the rap scene in the Tageszeitung. But Kinderzimmer Productions is back with a new live recording of their old songs - with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Nina Apin from the taz talks with MC Textor about rap, classical music and the question of aging gracefully.
read more

Beyond the groove

Tuesday 19 July 2011

TeaserPicSearching for new sounds to take the party to new highs, club music is turning to classical and new music. Prominent techno DJs such as Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer are working with the recordings of Deutsche Grammophon and ECM. Alexis Waltz samples some bewitchingly beautiful and psychedelically absurd results. Photo Ricardo Villalobos © Stefan Stern
read more

Lady G and the dead industrial product

Tuesday 1 June, 2011

TeaserPicDesigned to appeal to everyone over the age of six, Lady Gaga's new album "Born this Way" is basically funfair techno – with a dash of hilarious mock German. Diedrich Diederichsen explains why this is not how good pop music happens.
read more

What, yet another neglected genius?

Tuesday 27 July, 2010

This year's theatre festival in Bregrenz hosted the world premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Auschwitz opera "The Passenger" from 1968. His biographer David Fanning introduces the life and music of this incredibly prolific composer, whose work somehow failed to emerge from the shadows of the Iron Curtain.
read more

Composed in delirious time

Tuesday 22 June, 2010

TeaserPicRobert Schumann was born 200 years ago on June 8. The conductor and composer Heinz Holliger, who has devoted his life to the study of Romantic master, talks to Claus Spahn about the his labyrinthine imagination, erudition and incredible modernity. He also dispels a string of clichees that have consigned so much of the Schumann's work to musical oblivion.
read more

The apathy and the ecstasy

Friday 22 January, 2010

Riding the retro wave, singers from across the spectrum of popular music have brought back falsetto with a vengeance. While this is mostly in homage to bygone styles and idols, it has also introduced new nuances of meaning. Ueli Bernays traces falsetto's high-pitched passage from expression to gimmick and back.
read more

What was eating Wagner?

Thursday 9 April, 2009

In this, the Mendelssohn bicentennial year, Martin Geck looks at why the wealthy middle-class composer, who was Europe's most successful musician in the final decade of his life, brought out the very worst in Richard Wagner.
read more

Julia Fischer: Virtuosissima!!!

Thursday 10 January, 2008

At the New Year's concert in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt the audience's excitement was palpable. It was patently clear to all assembled that they were either about to witness the disgrace of one of the world's greatest living violinists, or the triumphant birth of a new piano virtuoso. By Arno Widmann
read more

Kylwyria - Kálvária

Wednesday 24 October, 2007

Ligeti the gesamtkunstwerk, Ligeti the Socrates-Ligeti, Ligeti the volcano. Hungarian composer György Kurtág spoke at a memorial session of the Order Pour le Mérite in Berlin about his lifelong friend, György Ligeti, who died on June 12, 2006.
read more

In the cradle of the Phaedra myth

Thursday 27 September, 2007

Hans Werner Henze's fourteenth opera "Phaedra" almost cost him his life. Now the premiere has taken place in Berlin. Volker Hagedorn visited the eighty-one-year-old composer at his home above the Tiber valley, where he has lived and worked since 1953.
read more

Nonchalance out of the depths

Wednesday 26 September, 2007

Benjamin Biolay is France's new Serge Gainsbourg. He is pioneer of the "Nouvelle Chanson," even if he rejects the term. And basically he sings about one thing: love, nothing but love. By Elke Buhr (Photo © Bruce Weber, courtesy Virgin Records France / EMI)
read more

Mann and his musical demons

Wednesday 18 July, 2007

Thomas Mann was enchanted by German classical music but was also wary of its seductive powers. In his novels, he anticipates its instrumentalisation by the Nazis, who used it as the gateway to bourgeois German hearts and minds. By Wolfgang Schneider
read more

La Scuola Napoletana sings again

Friday 25 May, 2007

Conductor Riccardo Muti describes rummaging through Naples' venerable music archive, where he discovered a number of slumbering opera manuscripts, among them Domenico Cimarosa's "Il ritorno di Don Calandrino," which opens the Salzburg Whitsun Festival tonight.
read more

Arnie of the ivories

Wednesday 2 May, 2007

After brilliant beginnings, bodybuilding pianist Tzimon Barto's career crashed as spectacularly as it started. Now the bizarre mixture of rancher, writer and keyboard collossus is back, with a fabulous new recording of Ravel. By Kai Luehrs-Kaiser
read more