The much anticipated RWVI 2019 Congress in Venice promised a number of unique events and special programs of great interest to Wagner enthusiasts. Unfortunately, seasonal high tides, to which Venice is particularly vulnerable, struck on November 12 with the second highest tide in the city’s history. Flooding occurred in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi (the Congress venue) as well as Teatro La Fenice, Piazza San Marco, and other important city sites. Subsequent high tides occurred in succeeding days, which caused additional damage and hampered cleanup and repair efforts. Luckily, tide levels dropped enough that cleanup could begin, and the Congress began as scheduled with a special Concerto per Cosima at Teatro La Fenice on November 28. Those in attendance were not deterred by the remaining water in the streets and walkways, but many arrived wearing rubber boots which were exchanged for dress shoes before entering the theater.

The Delegates’ Assembly, a very formal meeting conducted in three languages, began the next day at 9:30 a.m. with a full agenda, including the reading of a letter from Bayreuth Mayor Merk-Erbe and greetings from Eva Wagner-Pasquier, who attended the Assembly. The item of greatest interest to the Delegates – Festival ticket allocations – was not listed on the agenda due to a late development. Three days earlier Bayreuth Festival management had written to RWVI society presidents informing them that ticket allocations for the 2020 Festival to these presidents would occur despite its earlier announcement to the contrary, and that further information would be announced at the Congress. Out-going President Horst Eggers stated that Festival management would allocate 100 Ring tickets, along with 80 Meistersinger and 80 Tannhäuser tickets to the overseas (non-European) societies, as well as a separate allocation for European societies and that distribution will be managed by the new Board. It was apparent that the President’s efforts, along with other RWVI Board members, were instrumental in convincing Festival management to reconsider its earlier decision, and appreciation was extended to the Festival management.

Dr. Stefan Specht, Geschäftsführer of the Richard-Wagner-Stipendienstiftung, gave an abbreviated report about the Richard Wagner Scholarship Foundation. Since the 2019 Congress was late in the year, Scholarship Week 2019 had already occurred and it was too early for any details about 2020. Festival management had indicated that it might take over the program, although as of January 2020, this had not been clarified. Incidentally, WSNY plans to send a stipendiate for Scholarship Week 2020.
The main item of business was election of new officers and directors for the prescribed five- year term.  President Eggers and some others did not stand for reelection, and there were only two contested positions. Two candidates ran for President and addressed the delegates, and Rainer Fineske was elected for a five-year term. The only other contested race was four German Board of Director positions for which six individuals applied. RWVI practice was to have formal written ballots for each position, including those with only one candidate, and the counting of ballots was time-consuming. The Assembly did not adjourn until almost 2:30 p.m., leaving only a short break before the 3:00 p.m. Symposium.

The Symposium had two parts. The first was listed as “Wolfgang Wagner: The Festival Director, The Stage Director” and included a discussion of Festival revival after 1945 and its subsequent productions. This segment was about Wieland Wagner and did not really discuss Wolfgang Wagner’s role before Wieland’s death. The second part was a conversation with Katharina Wagner about her recollections of her father and the Festival, from her childhood forward. This very full day at the Assembly and Symposium was capped with another special concert at La Fenice titled “Love and Death in Venice” and featured vocal selections from Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde.

On Saturday, November 30, and Sunday, December 1, a number of optional tours were offered, including several walking tours and a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. I did not participate in these, but I did visit the Richard Wagner Museum, located in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi (CVC), which on Saturday opened an exhibition titled Richard Wagner in Venice. The museum is located on the second floor of the CVC in space Wagner rented in September 1882 and lived in until his death on February 13, 1883. The CVC is a 16th century palace that was renovated around 1850 to include a heating system of stoves in each room, which reportedly is the reason Wagner selected the space. The museum contains an extensive collection of scores, art work, performance programs, letters, and other items, and there is an ongoing effort to restore the rooms to their appearance at the time Wagner resided in them. A plaque on the outer wall of a ground level courtyard commemorates Wagner’s death in 1883.

On Saturday evening a number of Congress participants attended a performance of Don Carlo at La Fenice. Flooding had caused the theater to cancel rehearsals and then move them to a different location, but theater staff worked around the clock and received clearance from safety inspectors to resume performances. The Royal Box was set aside for RWVI on Saturday, and all who attended enjoyed the performance and the beautiful theater.

This was my first RWVI Congress. I deeply enjoyed the experience, not only for the musical feasts but also because of the people I met, all of whom are Wagner fans committed to the goals of RWVI. Many expressed appreciation to the outgoing Board for their effectiveness and integrity.

Author and Photo: David Hughes
A Society member, David Hughes is the Society's International Liaison, and was our delegate to the RWVI Congresss in November 2019.
© Wagner Notes, February 2020, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.
 
ADDENDA:
Jacques Bouffier, 4th Vice President, who has served faithfully throughout his five-year term, sent a final communication. He noted that the new President Fineske will follow the path that Eggers initiated with the Bayreuth management, and that Fineske understands the special needs of the overseas societies. Hughes personally expressed our gratitude to Bouffier and Eggers. They were pleased that WSNY had a delegate to the Congress; Hughes succeeded Hannelore Wilfert, who was our excellent delegate to several Congresses. (If a society does not have a delegate, there is a provision for proxy, which Bouffier was for three years.)

Andrea Buchanan, who has succeeded Bouffier as 4th Vice President, is well known to WSNY for her reviews and clarifications of RWVI matters. She reported that it was one of the best congresses she could remember. The music was wonderful: an excellent Don Carlo and a superb chamber string orchestra playing Venetian music, Mendelssohn, and the “Siegfried Idyll.” “I just wanted to let you know how much I look forward to working with you and the other overseas societies in our common cause.” She has coordinated the ticket allocations for the non-European societies, and ours have almost entirely been sold.

The RWVI performs many services for its nearly 130 member societies throughout the world, the most important to us being access to Bayreuth ticket allocations. These societies report their activities
in the online Jahresbericht (annual report). The RWVI also produces an excellent online bimonthly newsletter which gives an amazing amount of current Wagner news around the world for everyone’s benefit. Do check it out. Individual members of Wagner societies may sign up for this newsletter (with choice of language): https://www.richard-wagner.org/rwvi/en/news/newsletter/. We are able
to add our Society’s information directly through a specific login. We need a volunteer to do this for WSNY. Please let us know if you would like to do this by writing to wagnerring@aol.com.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. S. Jakubiak, O. von der Damerau; D. Kirch, A Clayton, W. Koch, M. Gantner, C. Fischesser; K. Petrenko, Bavarian State Opera; D. Bösch, Dir.; P. Bannwart, Sets; M. Nielsen, Costumes; F. Herold, Video; M. Bauer, Lighting.  Performance of July 27, 2019.

Sachs (Wolfgang Koch) and David (Allan Clayton) in Sachs' workshop.  Photo: Wilfred Hösl

As usual, Meistersinger closed out the annual Munich Opera Festival, a month-long celebration at what many feel is the finest opera house in the world today. That reputation is certainly built on world-class casting, a vast and rangey repertory, and dramatically thought-provoking and powerful productions, but mostly it is built on unstinting musical excellence. And credit for that must go to Kirill Petrenko, who is about to finish his tenure as the company’s General Music Director as he begins his leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic, the most prestigious conducting job in classical music. The Bavarian State Opera’s (and opera in general’s) loss is Berlin’s (and symphonic music’s) gain. Petrenko’s conducting of Meistersinger, and of an Otello we saw the previous week, affirmed my sense that he is the single greatest conductor I’ve seen in 35 years of regular opera and concert-going, with the possible exception of Carlos Kleiber. Watching him, and watching the orchestra, and watching the communication happening between him and the orchestra, is a joyous phenomenon.

The overture was surprisingly fleet. Surely, I thought, the players will never be able to maintain clear articulation at this pace, and the fugue section will become messy.  I was wrong: I’ve rarely heard such precision and such vertical clarity. And – better yet – the unfolding of each new section of the prelude felt exciting, as if the orchestra couldn’t wait to share each new treasurable moment, and yet there was no sense of rushing, nothing peremptory. The rest of the opera flowed with the same kind of passion, with constant attention to little details of instrumentation and, at the same time, a delirious surrender to the big moments of emotional overflow. I’ve never heard the haunting sonorities of Sachs’s “Melancholy” motif, which opens the third act prelude and ends so many of the big, joyous moments in that final act, played with such a sense of mystery and profound, ambiguous sadness, as if each new statement dug deeper into the protagonist’s soul. Petrenko conveyed these complex sentiments and yet also conveyed the sheer, radiant beauty of the score, clearly shared by the musicians who positively beamed from the pit.

Director David Bösch took a grim approach. He had directed a terrific Verkaufte Braut which we saw earlier in the week, set in a rustic, modern agricultural commune (complete with live, scene-stealing pig). His Meistersinger was similarly updated to a working-class present. The overall pictorial approach was dark and gritty; contemporary Nuremberg was portrayed – accurately – as a town balancing kitschy tourism with industrial work.  Sachs’s workshop was a run-down trailer, parked in a graffiti-filled section of the town. The fight at the end of the second act was (as in many modern productions) bloody and brutal. The competition in the final scene was a televised Eurovision Song Contest, complete with big-screen projections and calls for audience applause. A particularly humorous extension of this conceit was the Entrance of the Masters before the contest began. Each was accompanied by a dramatic 5-second video vignette showcasing the particular Master in a dramatic revolving pose, straight out of a WWE arena match. Beckmesser wore an embarrassing silver glam costume, desperately attempting to look cool and young. His utter failure drove him to despair and, in the final moments, to bring a gun on stage which he turned on himself as the curtain fell.

This final depiction of suicide was just one of several dark, ugly moments. I did not care for many of the choices Bösch made, although there was certainly an integrity to his approach. There were some concepts that did pay off, including the delightful portrayal of Walter as a jeans-and-leather-jacket-wearing, guitar-carrying rebel, a perfect contemporary expression of the character.  And ultimately, the dramatic elements were somewhat irrelevant in that the conducting and playing were so thrilling that all else seemed to fall aside.

Five days before the performance, we received an email from the Bavarian State Opera stating that Jonas Kaufmann would be sick for our performance on the 27th as well as the subsequent performance on the 31st. One could suggest that Kaufmann has an uncanny ability to foretell the state of his voice and his health days in advance, but the more convincing, and sad, conclusion is that he has abandoned a sense of professionalism and now sings by whim and not by obligation. His replacement, Daniel Kirch, a Stuttgart-based tenor, acted decently, but the voice is strained and lacks the requisite glamour for the role. Wolfgang Koch was a sturdy but not particularly revelatory Sachs. Christof Fischesser was a solid Pogner. Martin Gantner fulfilled the production’s complex vision of Beckmesser with skill and excellent vocalism (he is one of the few who can belt the high note at the end of the Act III workshop scene with Sachs). David was the excellent tenor Allan Clayton. Sara Jakubiak had the vocal amplitude and proper intensity for a convincing Eva. Okka von der Damerau was a gusty Magdalene.

Erick Neher
Erick Neher, a Society member and contributing editor for The Hudson Review, is a writer on classical music, opera, theater, and film. By day, he is the Vice President of Marketing for Hearst Magazine Media.
© Wagner Notes, November 2019, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.

Principals: S. Gould, L. Davidsen, E. Zhidkova, M. Eiche, S. Milling. Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, V. Gergiev and C. Thielemann (8/13) cond., T. Kratzer, director; R. Stellmaier, sets and costumes; M. Braun, video. Performances of July 28 and August 13, 2019.

A team of young creators headed by a director sporting a baseball cap; a black performer in drag; extensive use of video: the new production of Tannhäuser in Bayreuth this summer had enough advance buzz to generate pre-opening jitters for another regietheater production expected to provoke and shock the audience. Happily, the director Tobias Kratzer, a winner of the Faust Award for Excellence in German Theater for his brilliant Götterdämmerung in Karlsruhe, gives us a fresh and captivating take on the story of a singer who strays from society for sensual pleasure, only to be punished for his sin, then redeemed by the sacrifice of a woman. I was fortunate to attend two performances, on July 28 and August 13, the latter conducted by Christian Thielemann in place of Valery Gergiev. This afforded me an opportunity to savor the details of the production, which could become a classic.

The production team provides a helpful discussion of their concept in the written program. They view the opera Tannhäuser as a journey experienced by Wagner during his turbulent time in Dresden, of “disillusionment and expectations.” As the overture begins, the curtain opens to a full video screen with an arial view of the Wartburg Castle, which is the setting of Act II of the opera. A van travels through the forest; the scenery gradually changes to a contemporary urban setting. The van’s occupants are an eccentric mix: Tannhäuser in a clown outfit, Venus in glittering form-fitting pantsuit, a dwarf in the image of Oskar in Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum, and a drag queen named Le Gateau Chocolat. They steal gasoline and their Burger King dinner, using a fake credit card with Wagner’s 1849 invocation “Frei im Wollen, Frei im Thun, Frei im Geniessen” (free in willing, free in doing, free in enjoying).  Venus runs over a policeman, whereupon Tannhäuser comes to his senses and throws himself off the van, to awaken in the vicinity of the Bayreuth Festival House. The pilgrims, formally dressed, line up at the lamppost as they approach the “Mecca.”

Tannhäuser (Stephen Gould) and Venus (Elena Zhidkova) at Burger King. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.	Tannhäuser (Stephen Gould) and Elizabeth (Lisa Davidsen); Act iii. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.

Act II features the storming of the Bayreuth Festival House by Venus, Oskar, and Chocolat and their confrontation with the police.  The stage shows a “traditional” enactment in the interior of the Wartburg Castle, and a screen above depicts “the back story”: Elisabeth, Tannhäuser, and other performers getting ready for their entrance. Venus and her two companions, whose van crashed into the barrier of the Festival House at the end of Act I, gain access to the House from the balcony, and the disparate worlds of static opera and real life perfor­mance collide. Venus sneaks onto the stage disguised as one of the singers. The physical presence of Venus in Act II makes her a more interesting character, contrasting the two women who vie for Tannhäuser’s attention. Elena Zhidkova, who was a late replacement for Ekaterina Gubanova after the latter’s injury during the rehearsal period, was perfect for the physical demands of the role, moving with athletic energy and ease.

The invasion by the outsiders is brought under control as Katharina Wagner summons the police (shown on screen) and several police men and women storm onto the stage. Tannhäuser is arrested as he sings of “Rome.” Elisabeth, by no means a simple saintly figure, was shown earlier as a troubled wrist-cutter and almost steps out of her rarefied surroundings into the world of Tannhäuser at the end of Act II but returns to her society.

Act III takes place in a desolate area with the broken van and other metal scraps and the pilgrims as homeless vagrants. Elisabeth appears and shares a meal with Oskar.  She has sex with Wolfram, who disguises himself as Tannhäuser by donning the clown outfit, and then commits suicide by slitting her wrist. As Tannhäuser cradles her body, we see on the above screen the happy pair embarking on a road trip in the van, this time with Tannhäuser (and not Venus) in the driver’s seat. The last scene, with its swelling and dramatic music, ends as the pair rides off into the sunset, in Tannhäuser’s imagination. This was one of the most moving and hopeful endings of the opera I have experienced.

On August 13, with Thielemann at the helm, the orchestra was in top form. Stephen Gould showed again, with his stamina and powerful but nuanced singing, that he is the reigning Tannhäuser. The young Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, hailed by many as the next great Wagnerian soprano, impressed with her huge and brilliant voice that became creamy in soft singing. Markus Eiche was a sympathetic and warm-voiced Wolfram. Stephen Milling headed a strong ensemble of singing knights.

The success of this production rests on the meticulous care taken to develop the four main characters in a modern interpretation. Unlike the Castorf Ring, it did not distract me from enjoying the music, because the director, who had a good understanding of the opera, giving precedence to the music. A delightful bonus of an outdoor performance by Tannhäuser’s companions during the first intermission attracted not only the festival-goers but also the local audience who were not attending the performance. A splendid integration of theater with real life.

Ako Imamura
Ako Imamura, a Society member, is a familiar face at international performances and a reviewer for "Bachtrack."
© Wagner Notes, September 2019, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.