219 October 2015 41934 Wagnernews219 MH 13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 2

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No: 219 October 2015 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 2

Wagner news Number 219 October 2015 CONTENTS

3 Jon Vickers 1926-2015: Dame Gwyneth Jones 6 Paul Dawson-Bowling 7 Katie Barnes 8 The 2015 Wagner Society Singing Competition 9 Reflections on Bayreuth Andrew Dickinson 10 News from the Wagner Society of South Africa Jilly Cohen 12 Cosima : A new play by Robert Mansell Katie Barnes 16 Longborough: Victim of its own success? Hilary Reid Evans 18 Triumph at Longborough Jeremy Rowe 20 Six years of Longborough Richard and Sylvia Lemon 22 Performing the role of Kurwenal at Longborough Stuart Pendred 25 Supernumerary at Longborough Brian Smith Walters 26 Truimphant Ring in Dessau Jeremy Rowe 28 The Dessau Ring Paul Dawson-Bowling 31 Notes from a Wagner Virgin on the Castorf Ring Simon Empson 32 Bayreuth Lohengrin : Thankyou, Wagner Society! Sean O’Byrne 33 The Bulgaria Sofia Ring Paul Dawson-Bowling 36 Wagner’s Shakespeare Katie Barnes 38 Wagner’s debt to Berlioz John Crowther 40 Christian Thielemann’s appointment as MD at Bayreuth John Crowther 41 Wagner’s Birthplace Richard Lemon 42 Saffron Opera: Birth of a new opera company Francis Lambert 45 CD Review: The Seattle Ring Paul Dawson-Bowling 47 Wagner Symposium: Gesamtkunstwerk or not? David Edwards Barry Millington John Crowther 50 Time becomes Space + Sir John Tomlinson Masterclasses MCL Website

Cover picture of Jon Vickers supplied by his family to Dame Gwyneth Jones.

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Jon Vickers: 1926 - 2015 A FINE, UPRIGHT MAN WITH VERY STRONG CONVICTIONS Dame Gwyneth Jones My heart was filled with great sadness when I heard of the death of my dear friend and colleague Jon Vickers. I knew that Jon had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease and actually, Adrian and I made a special trip to the Sunrise Home near the Niagara Falls to visit him, despite the advice of his daughter Allison not to come; because Jon would not recognise me. He did recognise me and we spent two wonderful hours chatting together, to the delight of Allison. Of course it was heart-breaking to see him in such surroundings, but I am so very grateful that we went. Jon Vickers was one of the greatest heroic tenors of our time. He had a magnificent voice which was uniquely powerful and which had a very distinctive beautiful timbre with the facility to reduce to almost a whisper with expressive pianissimo tones. His vocal intensity and dramatic interpretation, together with his superior acting ability, made his presence on stage riveting. Born on October 29 th 1926 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a small rural town in Canada, Jon was the sixth of eight children. A man of the land who was most at home on his farm surrounded by nature and his family, he had an abiding search for the truths and essences of life. Throughout his career Jon made each of his roles something special and he has left his mark on the various characters he has tackled. He only sang roles that he absolutely believed in so that he could totally convince and move his public with the depth of his characterizations. This he was able to do through intense study of every aspect of the role, which gave him profound understanding, enabling him to project true human emotion. His expression of the words was always with true meaning, no matter whether the language was English, French, German or Italian. He expressed the words through the music and directly from his heart, so perfectly fulfilling the composer’s wishes. As he once said, “Everything I do as an actor I find a motivation for in the music” and “The voice has to be the servant of the words, of the music, of the drama, of the art form”. He was a deeply religious and private man, holding strong convictions which sometimes presented him with problems when portraying certain characters like Parsifal. I remember that we were scheduled to do a new Wieland Wagner production of Tannhäuser together at Covent Garden; but unfortunately, he cancelled on moral grounds. Then Wieland died, so it never happened. In many ways we were very similar, which made it sheer bliss to be on stage with him. We shared a great and wonderful rapport, which enabled us to enter together into the realms of the various operas which we were interpreting. I felt very strongly that once on stage we had no need to act, just to be – and allow ourselves to be transported by the music because we both totally identified ourselves with the characters. I feel so utterly privileged to have sung 42 performances with Jon and will always treasure the memories of these performances and the very special friendship which we shared. The first time we worked together was in 1968 in a new production of Aida at Covent Garden. I remember how he laughed so heartily when I entered the stage at the first dress rehearsal wearing a simply dreadful costume. “Good heavens!” he said, “What

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on earth have they done to you?” “Take a good look, Jon” I replied, “You’ll never see it again!” I wanted to see people’s reaction to the monstrous costume I had been given to wear before designing and making new costumes myself. What a fabulous Radames he was! Simply glorious! Which was all the more a pity that, for some reason, he absolutely refused to take part in the live television performance. It would be so wonderful to have him on this document now! Two years later we sang Fidelio together at Covent Garden. I can still hear his thrilling “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!” ringing in my ears as I came down the steps into the dungeon and saw how he hungrily took the piece of bread out of my hand, the desperate looks we exchanged and the sheer joy and relief of being held in his strong arms in the jubilant “Oh, namenlose Freude!” . I was so fortunate to have Jon as my twin brother Siegmund for my MET debut in 1972 and to have the joy of singing Fidelio performances again with him in Chicago in 1975. Here a rather amusing story stays in my mind. We were invited to the lovely home of Carol Fox, the Director of the Chicago Opera, after the premier for a celebration dinner. Hettie, Jon’s wife, was sitting next to me and Jon was sitting opposite us. Everything was fine until the dessert was served by two men wearing white gloves. Somehow, the man serving the custard poured the entire jug over Hettie’s head. Jon thought it was hysterically funny and his laughter rang out loud and clear. Hettie remained serenely calm and simply said very quietly “I’m afraid that I must visit the Ladies Room!” Shortly afterwards the same waiter tripped and poured an entire pot of black coffee over Carol’s beautiful white fluffy cat who was sitting on a lovely pink satin cushion. It was definitely time for us all to leave! In 1975 we sang Don Carlo together at the Staatsoper in Vienna and then in 1978-9 came seventeen unbelievably beautiful performances of L’incoronazione di Poppea at the Palais Garnier in Paris. (See photo on opposite page.) Jon was magnificent as Nerone. He had simply everything that the role required: beauty of voice, majestic appearance and a personality full of sensitivity and sexuality. Our voices blended to perfection in this music and the atmosphere we created in our love scenes totally captivated the audience. It was an extremely beautiful Günther Rennert production, with big orchestra conducted by Julius Rudel. The cast was quite incredible throughout, with more dramatic voices than usual: Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Jocelyn Taillon, Valerie Masterson and Richard Stilwell. We really set Paris on fire! What could possibly surpass these performances? The answer came in 1982 with six performances of Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden. I simply cannot begin to describe the sheer sublime ecstasy of singing the long second act duet with Jon. We were transported into heavenly spheres singing this divine music! Jon was not only a fabulous, true heldentenor. He had everything necessary to make him one of the greatest artists of our time. His interpretations of Samson and Peter Grimes are legendary and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity of hearing his Peter Grimes, whilst in Los Angeles to sing my first Turandot at the Olympic Festival with The Royal Opera in 1984. During the interval our Stage Manager Stella Chitty came to fetch me and asked me if I would go to Jon’s dressing room to try and persuade him to continue with the performance. I do not know the reason why Jon was so raving mad; but many people were just plainly frightened of him when he was in this state. I knocked very quietly at his door and entered, wondering what I would find inside. When Jon saw me, his face lit up into an enormous smile. “Hello, my dear! How lovely of you to come to visit me!” I told him –4– 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 5

how much I was enjoying the performance and how marvellous his interpretation was, which I meant truly with all my heart! We chatted a bit and all his anger was forgotten. People tend to forget what an immense stress it can be for an artist to perform such roles and how lonely and frustrating it can be, not to have someone to share a few friendly words of support with. Jon was such a wonderful colleague. He was the only tenor who always came to my dressing room before each performance and said “How is my leading lady this evening? That is the most important for me!” Jon was a fine, upright man, with very strong convictions and beliefs. He loved his family, which was very large and happy. He is survived by one sister, his five children, eleven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His Christmas cards, with pictures of the entire family, were always a joy to receive. The very fact that he stopped singing in order to nurse his dearest Hettie when she developed breast cancer shows to us what a caring and faithful human being he was. Jon has given so much joy and pleasure to so many people all over the world through his art and his beautiful voice and thankfully there are many magnificent documentations for us to treasure. He has set unattainable standards and will remain with us forever. I am eternally grateful to have had the privilege of singing with Jon so often and to have had him as one of my dearest friends.

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Jon Vickers: 1926 - 2015 THE GREATEST WAGNER TENOR OF ALL TIME? Paul Dawson-Bowling The death of the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at the age of 88 creates a deep sense of loss. No other Wagnerian hero meant so much to me, and I can only write of him in superlatives. No other Wagnerian tenor had a voice of such heroic magnitude and such lieder-like finesse. It was a voice which possessed the primordial magnetism of Pavarotti, but in Vickers any animal frisson was allied to a psychological penetration and an intelligence of the rarest distinction. This is one reason why his presence onstage at Covent Garden could guarantee an occasion of exceptional excitement and depth. I remember a thoroughly pedestrian Fidelio under Colin Davis, who had the grace to affirm later that it was only in Act II, after Jon Vickers’ great opening outburst, that the whole performance caught fire. His tension and inner turmoil as Florestan were infectious and he raised the game for the entire company, cast, orchestra, and even conductor, elevating the drama to a totally different level. It is no wonder that Karajan always engaged him for Siegmund in every one of the nine performances of Die Walküre that I went to in Vienna between October 1960 and June 1961. His portrayal of Siegmund was at the heart of my own youthful understanding of Wagner’s outsider, this mighty warrior so dauntless in adversity and yet so capable of melting and compassion and tenderness over Sieglinde. It is likewise no wonder that any Brünnhilde witnessing this Siegmund in the Todesverkündigungen should be so moved as to break her father’s orders, and no wonder that Karajan wanted him for Florestan and Tristan as well, to say nothing of Othello. His ability to convince and to move an audience stemmed not only from his supreme musicianship but from an almost occult power to compel suspension of disbelief. “Das Schiff, Das Schiff” he raged in Act III of Tristan und Isolde , staring hysterically out into the auditorium and gesticulating wildly towards the back of the stalls. Of course there was nothing there and I knew it, but under his compelling impact it was impossible not to turn back and look round nervously, only to find half the audience behind me doing the same. I was lucky enough to be at Bayreuth in the only two years Jon Vickers sang there, in 1958 for Siegmund and 1964 for Parsifal. Obtuse German critics found fault with him under the misapprehension that he had not enough power, for the simple reason that at moments like “Schwester, Geliebte!” from Die Walküre , or Parsifal’s “Es lacht die Auen” , he was ‘bel canto’, and not a leathery teutonic ‘can belto’. In Parsifal those critics cannot have been awake enough a little earlier to register that at “ Und ich bin’s, der all dies Elend schuf” , he had unleashed one of the mightiest voices ever heard at Bayreuth, and had shaken the house to the rafters. His ability to project both the spiritual agony and unearthly serenity of Parsifal were both moving beyond description, and this added something extra to the work’s redemptive potential. Both that Parsifal and that Siegmund are available on CD, Parsifal on Orfeo d’Or, Siegmund on Golden Melodram and both are conducted by the incomparable Hans Knappertsbusch. Both are treasurable, even though we miss seeing him. In point of fact, Vickers actually liked best the Parsifal which he sang with Reginald Goodall at Covent Garden. This is also available on CD, and he regarded this Goodall collaboration as one of three occasions in his life, only three, when he had really done justice to a role. –6– 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 7

No great artist was ever more self-critical and high-principled, and as a devout Christian, he was dubbed “God’s tenor”. It was commitment and principle which made him abandon the operatic stage for a year to nurse his first wife when she was dying, and although he was much missed, nobody could fail to admire his decision. Such a principled artist was bound to be as critical of others as of himself and at times this made him seem temperamental. He laid into Georg Solti in Jack de Manio’s Today programme long ago, roaring “I cannot stand prima donnas”. On the other hand, he had a happy relationship with Karajan and Goodall, and he was so outraged to learn of Rodney Milnes’ libellous obituary of Karajan, “a bad musician and a bad man”, that he contemplated legal action. Not even the briefest tribute could miss his Samson and even less his Peter Grimes. The man sitting next to us at Covent Garden for Samson said he did not really like Saint- Saëns’ Opera but simply had to take the chance to see Vickers wrap his arms round the pillars and pull down the temple of Dagon. Vickers ensured that this was indeed sensational, but there was more to his Samson than that. As with Samson, so even more with his Grimes, the sheer beauty of his voice, the loveliness of his phrasing, the depth of his musicality, and above all, the poignancy and heartbreak of his portrayal ensured that his Covent Garden DVD with Colin Davis became one of the great documents of operatic history, especially as the rest of the cast is in much the same league. His CDs of the role (on Philips) are even more marvellously sung – if that is possible. He was likewise capable of singing an exquisite Nero to Gwyneth Jones’ sensationally beautiful, semi-naked Poppaea in Paris, an example of his many successes in roles well outside his normal range. However he drew the line at Tannhäuser because of Tannhäuser’s sacrilegious belief that after his bid for salvation had failed he could simply press the Button B and go back to the Venusberg. It is poignant that he concluded his own life in the twilight consciousness of Alzheimer’s disease. But what he had achieved! For me it is not the great Dane, Lauritz Melchior, who is my desert-island heldentenor, but the great Canadian. Sadly I do not expect to find his like again, but my life is all the richer for having experienced Jon Vickers.

SHATTERING POWER Katie Barnes I started serious opera-going in 1980, and my first years at Covent Garden were Jon Vickers' last. I saw Jon as an overwhelming Peter Grimes, (fortunately preserved on DVD) in Elijah Moshinsky's classic production (Britten reportedly hated his interpretation, but my goodness, it was amazing) with a very young John Tomlinson as Hobson, as a mighty Canio, the role with which he celebrated his 25 th anniversary at the house with a disarming curtain speech in which he admitted that he drove managements to eat their carpets(!) and as both Saint-Saens' and Handel's Samson, the former of which suited him better than the latter. His wondrous Florestan carried the darkness of the dungeon with him into the brightness of the day, and one was left in no doubt that Leonore's next battle would be for her husband's sanity. I saw him do Tristan in 1982, when his voice was no longer what it was, but I have never seen, and probably never will see, anyone else come close to the shattering power that he brought to Act III. It was a terrifying exploration into the wasteland of one man’s soul.” –7– 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 8

THE WAGNER SOCIETY SINGING COMPETITION 2015 SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2015

14:00 – 18:00

AT THE DUKE’S HALL, ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC MARYLEBONE ROAD, LONDON NW1 5HT

In the presence of the President of The Wagner Society Dame Gwyneth Jones

Judging Panel Dame Josephine Barstow (Chair) Mark Wigglesworth, Music Director, English National Opera Isabel Murphy, Director of Artistic Administration, Welsh National Opera Scott Carlton, Chairman, Singers Committee, Wagner Society of New York

Once again we are delighted to announce our popular event for 2015. This year we are particularly pleased to be back in the Duke’s Hall at RAM and also delighted to have such a distinguished judging panel.

The prizes this year will once again be as follows: • A sum of money for coaching and participation in the Bayreuth Scholars Programme for the winner • Participation in the Goodall Scholars coaching programme for the runner(s) up • The President’s Award of a public masterclass with her in 2016 • The Audience Prize

After the singing competition, the audience will be able to enjoy Act III, Scene 3 of Die Walküre, directed by David Edwards with Paul Carey Jones and Lee Bissett, recipients of the Carole Rees Award for 2015.

Tickets £25 (£5 for music students) are available from Mike Morgan, 9 West Court, Downley, High Wycombe, Bucks JP13 5TG upon receipt of a cheque made out to The Wagner Society and a sae.

You can also reserve tickets with Mike and pay on the door [email protected]

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REFLECTIONS ON BAYREUTH Andrew Dickinson I’ve just come back from a week at Bayreuth as a Stipendiat , part of a group of over 250 young artists. I was interested to learn that, although the majority were singers, there were also directors, stage designers, instrumentalists and even philosophers and musicologists, highlighting the wide range of interest there is in Wagner and its “ heimat ” in Bayreuth. The main highlights of the week were of course the three performances that I saw; a dynamic and rat-infested Lohengrin , a Regie-theater impression of Siegfried and a deeply psychological portrayal of Tristan und Isolde from Katharina Wagner. I was pleased for Katharina that the show has been so well received. There is too much negative speculation about the Wagner family, most of it absolute nonsense, and there are those who frown upon the “keeping it in the family” privilege from which Katharina seemingly benefits. I find this somewhat predictable and unacceptable as opinions go and feel that productions should be judged on merit rather than any family history. I haven’t quite yet digested my impressions of these performances, although I enjoyed all of them. There is so much detail in Wagner that it usually takes me a few weeks to process my thoughts into a decent opinion! I was a Chorsänger at Bayreuth in 2009, but being in the audience this year was thrilling and reminded me of the incredible acoustic and the resultant overwhelming wave of sound that is generated by the orchestra as well as the clarity of the soloists and chorus. I remembered how passionate Bayreuth audiences are, so attentive and knowledgeable of almost every bar; their enthusiasm in applauding (or indeed booing) gives you goosebumps in a way that I haven’t felt in the UK. It was also really interesting to visit Wahnfried and the newly rebuilt Wagner Museum, as well as meeting so many artists with different paths that had led them to Wagner. I was really pleased to have been chosen to sing the Stipendiatenkonzert , however nerve-racking it may have been to have Eva Wagner sat on the front row! Although Bayreuth is steeped in tradition and is keen to preserve the legacy of Richard Wagner’s works, I didn’t feel intimidated by this. We were all so warmly welcomed, and I felt as though we were being encouraged to become the next generation that maintain this special form of opera. I’d certainly love to go back there as a soloist, and would like to thank the Wagner Society UK for this wonderful opportunity to further inspire and inform my studies in this repertoire. Photo: Andrea Buchanan, Andrew Dickinson and Kirstin Sharpin in Bayreuth The 2015 Bayreuth Bursary Award is part of Andrew Dickinson’s prize as Winner of the 2014 Wagner Society Singing Competition with the Die Meistertön und Weisen piece which he performed in the Festspielhaus following his masterclass with Dame Gwyneth Jones.

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FROM THE RICHARD WAGNER SOCIETY OF SOUTH AFRICA Jilly Cohen, Events Organizer The global opera spotlight has been very much on South Africa following the recent success of five of our young singers who made it to Amsterdam for the Belvedere Competition Final rounds from the 1320 plus candidates auditioned worldwide. Four reached the grand Final and tenor Levy Sekgapane (left) sang from his heart to win the coveted First Prize, following on the Second Prize won by baritone Siyabulela Ntlale in 2014. The formidable track record since 2009 when Pretty Yende scooped all the Firsts and shot to international status has produced other winners too. RWSSA is proud to have sponsored several of these singers and this year we were able to join in a partnership with two other small music entities in order that funding might, where possible, be shared. On the 19 th July I had the absolute delight of watching the Operalia competition live via the internet. Wasn’t that something to see? I know all you Wagnerians must have had mouths open in awe at the incredible performance from Lise Davidsen. But yet again, my heart and I confess my box of tissues, went out to our own Noluvuyiso (Vuvu) Mpofu as her golden tones and charismatic presence brought her a well-deserved Third Prize. I wonder if the magnitude of these achievements is fully understood overseas. The vast majority of our students at University of Cape Town (UCT) Opera School are black. They come from extremely poor backgrounds where the value of good education is appreciated yet mostly unaffordable. Many of the youngsters sing in choirs and if there is an opportunity some manage to get into UCT. Up to that point there has been no European cultural impact from the syllabus and they probably would not have heard any German, Italian or French. What they do have are god-given voices and for the most part the sheer guts, determination and brilliant teachers to get them through. RWSSA hosts regular Hauskonzerte during our Summer season (October to April) and we have an impressive line-up for 2015/16. Pianists Vitaly Pisarenko, past winner of the International Franz Liszt Prize and concert pianist Prof. Ingo Dannhorn are both visiting Cape Town and will give recitals for the society on 25 th October and 21 st February respectively. We are continuing the season with a trio of recitals dedicated to Beethoven variations. These will take place in March/April. We would really love members of other Wagner societies to come and enjoy these soirees with us. The venue is always at our President, Herbert Glockner’s home overlooking the sea and the evenings provide a convivial atmosphere – and copious amounts of good Cape wine! We have on occasion partnered with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra for a gala performance where the focus is on operatic voice and we hope to be able to do so again and repeat the success of our last one in collaboration with the Verdi Society when we celebrated the Wagner/Verdi anniversaries in November 2013. We also have in the pipeline to focus on recitals with winners of the various opera competitions. Why not plan an out of season trip for the end of June / beginning of July 2016 when for the first time the Belvedere Competition will be held out of Europe – in our own beautiful City! – 10 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 21/09/2015 12:47 Page 11

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COSIMA: WAGNER’S WIDOW RADA Studio Theatre, 5 th June 2015 Katie Barnes

Photo: Richard Carter Steven Berkoff, Sylvia Syms, [Winifred actress], Sam Dastor, Anne Reid, Robert Mansell, James de Lauch Hay, Louise Lydell, Vernon Dobtcheff, Tony Palmer Robert Mansell's new play, given its world première presentation in a workshop reading, directed by Tony Palmer with an all-star cast, examines how Cosima Wagner fought to continue the Bayreuth Festival after her husband's death, facing constant debt, copyright issues and the crippling problems caused by his failure to leave a will, and how, by the time she died, the Festival was financially and artistically successful. Yet he shows how all this was achieved at a terrible human cost, how Cosima's own deeply dysfunctional childhood may have warped the adult woman, and how her continual obsession with fulfilling what she saw as Wagner's wishes initiated the first of the terrible family feuds which have continued to plague the Green Hill to this day. The play begins with Cosima at Wagner's graveside shortly after his death and succinctly sets out the financial and legal problems she faced, before flashing back to Wagner's last days in Venice, clashing with both Cosima and Liszt before he is felled by a fatal quarrel with Cosima over a telegram from an “English flower-maiden” (i.e. Carrie Pringle, although she is not named) 1 with whom she accuses him of having an affair. She

1 I found this surprising, given that the Pringle affair has been the subject of much dispute, but it is dramatically appropriate in this context, given that the story may have originated with Wagner's and Cosima's daughter Isolde, who will become a central figure in the play.

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is tortured with grief and guilt over her part in his death. The play then concentrates upon her increasing determination to exclude her elder daughter, Isolde, from the family inheritance in favour of her son Siegfried, culminating in her horrendous court battle to disinherit Isolde by denying that she was Wagner's daughter, which ends up with Isolde's expulsion and destruction. The final scenes concentrate upon Siegfried's marriage and Cosima's obsession with anti-Semitism, making the very valid point that her intensive adoption of the views expressed by Wagner in his youth began the horrors that would make Bayreuth Hitler's Valhalla and have haunted the family, and Wagner's music, ever since. The final scene ends where we began, with Cosima at Wagner's graveside again, shortly before her death. The wheel has come full circle, but as she eagerly anticipates how her daughter-in-law's protegé, Adolf Hitler, will be inspired by Wagner's works to restore the might of Germany, the audience can see the disasters ahead. It has been said over the years that the continuing tragedy of the Wagner family plays out like one of his operas. Seeing Mansell's dramatisation of how Cosima's actions unleashed chaos for generations of her unborn descendants, I could not help but think how the story of Wagner and his family is reflected by that of The Ring , which in one scene Liszt blisteringly denounces for its immorality. Wagner, like Wotan, fathered a family out of wedlock, leaving them and their descendants to face the consequences of his dynastic irresponsibility, and Cosima, as implacable as Fricka, is prepared to destroy one of those children to further her own aims. The tragic Isolde is exiled from the Valhalla of Bayreuth, like Brünnhilde. The arrogant but weak Siegfried, trapped between two formidable, warring women, is as easily manipulated as Gunther. When he protests against having to fight against the sister with whom he grew up, Cosima's silencing of his objections, and his subsequent blind repetition of her views, made me think “Blutbrüderschaft schwuren wir uns!” . Adolf von Gross, the Wagners' legal fixer and invaluable factotum, is their own personal Loge. In two of the play's most striking scenes, the ghosts of Liszt and Wagner appear to Cosima, like Alberich to Hagen, to upbraid her for her behaviour. Liszt accuses her of poisoning him with morphine because his presence at the Festival was inconvenient 2, and Wagner upbraids her for her rejection of Isolde, her destruction of his correspondence, and most of all for her espousal of anti-Semitism, which he insists went far beyond what he ever intended (“I never campaigned against the entire race in the way that Bayreuth is now doing”). He vanishes invoking Erda's warning to Wotan. And when Cosima is seen at Wagner's grave at the end of the play, just as she was at the beginning, I thought of the Rhinedaughters, opening and ending the tetralogy, with evil continuing to lurk deep in the waters. The play is very fluid in structure, and in its present form could serve equally well as a stage presentation or a screenplay. A series of 16 short scenes cut or dissolve into one another, sometimes merging events of several years into a single sequence, with Wagner's

2 A stunning end to the scene, but historically debatable: Lizst's pupil Lina von Schmalhausen stated in her unpublished diary that “...the Master received two morphine injections in the region of his heart. The odour penetrated all the way to my window”: however, as morphine has no recognisable smell, commentators have suggested that what she smelt was camphor, injected to warm Liszt's body.

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music adding discreet atmosphere. It needs better pacing in the later stages, after Isolde's banishment, where I kept thinking that it was going to end long before it did. It will be interesting to see how it develops following this initial workshop. Palmer's production enhanced the filmic atmosphere, with quick shifts from one scene to the next indicated by lighting changes and use of different parts of the stage for different locations. The script is clear about when and where events are taking place, with discreet references to timing (e.g. “As you know, [Wagner] died twenty-three years ago now”). I always found it easy to understand the flow of the story. The cast had of course studied their roles in advance, but it was almost impossible to believe that they had met up for the first time earlier that day and only had time for a single rehearsal before the performance. Their mastery of the characters, relationships and situations was so acute that one could have sworn that they had been working together on the play for days. Special plaudits must go to the amazing Anne Reid, who joined the project at a late stage following Virginia McKenna's withdrawal due to illness, and incarnated Cosima in all her iron determination, self-righteousness and obsessiveness. The woman she created was a monster, yet one could understand and even, sometimes, sympathise with her. A towering achievement from a tiny, indomitable lady. The equally amazing Steven Berkoff did not so much play Wagner as walk into the mansion, take possession, and simply be the composer (Coincidentally, he has also given the most convincing portrayal I have seen of Hitler, in War and Remembrance ). With only a few short scenes to create his character, he made us understand so clearly why Wagner was absolutely insufferable, hell to live with, and yet somehow always forgivable. He, unlike Cosima, had the excuse of genius. Liszt was played most beautifully and gently by Sam Dastor, whose wonderful speaking voice was like music. Vernon Dobtcheff, [the only member of the cast who appeared in Palmer's great film Wagner (as Meyerbeer), was outstanding as Adolf von Gross, giving a compelling portrayal of an unshakeably loyal man who gradually realised how he was losing his soul in a welter of deviousness and double dealing, and ended up utterly worn down by her relentless demands. The great Sylvia Syms stole her two scenes as Anna Mrazek, whom she describes as “possibly the only nice person in the play”. Her anguished soliloquy denouncing Cosima's wickedness in rejecting her own daughter gave the play its moral compass. The younger generation was represented by two fine young actors. James de Lauch Hay succeeded in making one feel almost sorry for Siegfried Wagner, caught as he was between two formidable women while constantly battered by Cosima's demands for him to achieve the impossible in living up to his father, but sympathy quickly ran out in the face of his callow arrogance and enthusiastic espousal of his mother's views. Louisa Lydell made the blazing, bitter, doomed Isolde into a heroine after her father's own heart – and in an era when so many young actors fail to project their dialogue, it is a joy to report that I heard every word that these two uttered. Whatever one thinks of Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner, either before or after seeing this play, she was a vitally important figure in Wagnerian history and a remarkable woman by any standards, let alone those of the 19 th Century. Robert Mansell is to be congratulated on bringing her to centre stage.

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THE RICHARD STRAUSS SOCIETY

Presents an evening with Dame Gwyneth Jones

FRIDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2015 at 7pm

Francis Taylor Building, Inner Temple, London EC4Y 7BY

Members are invited to an evening with renowned soprano, Dame Gwyneth Jones, in discussion with Andrew Neill. Dame Gwyneth will reflect on 50 years interpreting the music of Richard Strauss.

Light refreshments will be served.

Tickets £10, from Helen Petchey 12 Monkhams Drive, Woodford Green, IG8 0LQ (with SAE please, & cheques payable to Richard Strauss Society). Guests welcome.

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LONGBOROUGH: VICTIM OF ITS OWN SUCCESS? Tristan und Isolde , 20 th June 2015 Hilary Reid Evans Photography by Matthew Williams-Ellis for Longborough Festival Opera There is a saying that you value more what you have to fight for. I for one am glad – no, change that to delighted – that I battled with the Longborough booking system to win my tickets for Anthony Negus’ splendid benchmark interpretation of Tristan und Isolde . Negus’ outstanding interpretation of the score was in places heart stopping (especially the Act II duet), his mesmeric, fast-paced conducting and his ear for detail exemplary. I agree with Michael Tanner of The Spectator : “how long is it since London has heard conducting on this level? Certainly, not in recent times.” Pappano et al, eat your hearts out; here is a man who lives and breathes the score, and it shows. The orchestra (61 of them I believe) have been criticised for at times sounding ragged. None of that unless I missed something due to the cloudburst that thundered on the corrugated iron roof. Their playing was passionate and the excitement rising from the pit palpable. On stage the by now customary minimalistic Longborough sets allowed the artists to shine. The emphasis was full-square on the perfectly paced drama and passion unfolding before us.

Rachel Nicholls may lack the demeanour of a noble princess, but she makes up for this in her interpretation of Isolde as a woman blown off course and confused by an overwhelming and unfathomable passion. Her Liebestod was outstanding, emotionally charged, well-coloured and unflagging.

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Peter Wedd was for me the revelation of the evening. Having heard his widely- acclaimed 2013 Wagnerian debut at Cardiff ( Lohengrin ), his voice has developed and improved even since then. Wedd has become a true lyrical Wagnerian tenor capable of being among the best in the world. He tackled the Act III ‘mad scene’ with tireless energy and clarity of tone, his dramatic intensity unfailing. In the supporting roles, Stuart Pendred performed well as Kurwenal and Catherine Carby put in a strong performance as Brangäne, her warnings beautifully voiced. Frode Olsen gave us a mature, subtle and moving King Marke. It is perhaps a pity that the excellence of these singers could so easily be overlooked due to the outstanding nature of the performances of Nicholls and Wedd. So far, so good. Not so good however was the production itself. I’ve commented elsewhere about trends and fashions in opera production. It was Kasper Holten who, back in 2013, introduced dancers to interpret the roles/souls of Tatiana and Onegin, and here we go again, Carmen Jakobi has this time introduced a pair of dancers to interpret the emotions of Tristan and Isolde. Their appearance was, in my view, totally unnecessary and a distraction, particularly in Act III, the drama and above all the music expressing all we need to know. I’m sure the individuals are wonderful dancers, but my sentiments were with Peter Wedd when he appeared to push the male dancer aside. All part of the choreography of the piece, I am certain, but I would not have blamed him had he done it anyway. Longborough has scheduled a production of Tannhäuser for 2016, with Negus again at the helm. Hopefully, as a mere Wagner Patron, I’ll be able to grab a seat. Is this booking difficulty perhaps a sign that Longborough is becoming a victim of its own success?

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TRIUMPH AT LONGBOROUGH Tristan and Isolde , 16 th June 2015 Jeremy Rowe When Bayreuth stages a new production it is invariably met with hostility: booing audiences and threats of sponsors withdrawing. When Longborough stages a new production it is greeted with a standing ovation, cheering, and much admiration. Talk to anyone backstage at Bayreuth, and they will ruefully reflect on the grim working atmosphere. Talk to anyone backstage at Longborough and they will tell you it’s the highlight of their working year, the best of times. So they’re clearly getting something right in Longborough. Perhaps it’s because the production was terribly conventional, with a big boat on the stage; but no, Carmen Jakobi’s staging was minimalist and boldly lacking in nautical bits and pieces. Perhaps it’s because the audience is patronisingly indulgent to a little country opera house; but no again, this is a discriminating, experienced and worldly-wise audience recognising a world-class achievement.

Jakobi’s clean-lined staging exposed the intimate emotions of all protagonists in the opera. With an obvious passion and understanding of the opera she focussed on the relationships not just between Tristan and Isolde, but between all the characters, highlighting the “seismic emotional activity” in the music. (Quoting the excellent programme). Rachel Nicholls fulfilled all her excellent promise with a performance that was secure and confident, finding deep inner reserves as she exposed the passion and commitment of an Isolde who was very much a full-blooded woman as well as a queen. Her voice had tremendous versatility, from the barn-storming to the quietly meditative, giving clear nuance and meaning to every phrase. As Tristan Peter Wedd created an outstanding partner for Nicholls’ Isolde. He successfully combined a gravitas of approach to a passion matching that of Nicholls, with a similarly wide range of sounds from the wistful to the frankly noisy. Nicholls’ and Wedd’s mighty pairing as Isolde and Tristan, was well supported by a remarkable cast without any weak link. Stuart Pendred (well-known to Wagner Society members) was a strong and strongly-sung Kurwenal, bringing an importance to the role rarely seen in modern productions. Frode Olsen’s King Marke was more involved in the emotional maelstrom than is usual, and again with a full-blooded tone of voice developed a strong character. He was particularly effective in the closing scene, when his dismay at arriving too late to reconcile the lovers was unusually moving.

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Brangäne is often overlooked as a minor character: but Catherine Carby’s emotional and committed passion, her love for Isolde, and her horror of the consequences of her actions brought her to prominence in all her scenes. With a voice to match the emotional roller-coaster, Carby enjoyed a notable success. All other parts were excellently well sung, and mention must be made of the virile chorus of sailors, who for once looked the part, as well as having lusty and effective voices. Perhaps the hero of the day was Anthony Negus. Heading such a strong team made his job apparently easy, but it was his formidable reading of the score which underpinned the whole amazing enterprise. It was as if he had checked and polished every one of Wagner’s notes, bringing a performance from his orchestra and singers which would have delighted Wagner himself. Every moment of the music was gripping, ensuring that great standing ovation at the conclusion. Negus has the exceptional talent of combining accuracy and emotion in the performances he draws from all musicians. Negus has been with Longborough since the distant days of the reduced Ring and has seen the house, (and especially the orchestra pit!), grow over the years. Martin and Lizzie Graham, whose amazing vision created this opera house in Gloucestershire, were clever and fortunate in their choice of Negus to lead their endeavour to this extraordinary world-beating standard. Apparently this year it’s not too difficult to get tickets for Bayreuth, such is the reputation of productions on the Green Hill. It’s harder to get tickets for Wagner at Longborough. Doesn’t that say it all? WAGNER AT HIS MOST THRILLING AND MOVING Tristan and Isolde , 12 th June 2015 Bill Bliss The sun did not shine on us but Martin Graham did with a brief on stage review of Longborough’s history and, in his inimitable way, praising all his staff, musicians and volunteers. There were high expectations of this production, led by Peter Wedd and Rachel Nicholls and with Anthony Negus in the pit. A magnificent evening unfolded. This was Wagner at his most thrilling and moving, but the costumes were most ungainly. Particularly Isolde, whose royal presence was significantly diminished by her granny’s overcoat and her tomboy haircut. My companion (new to this opera) initially thought that Brangane – the imposing Catherine Carby – was the Irish princess. She was one of the stars of the show. But then Isolde (Rachel Nicholls) sang and almost everything else was forgiven. Her voice is peerless and up with the very best. The stage action generally was a little wooden and unspontaneous, not helped by the minimalist geometric stage set. Still, better too little than too much. But then the director, Carmen Jakobi got to work with her Jungian theories. Give a director an almost empty stage and they will fill it with clutter or their own ideas. On came a male and female dancer: the alter ego and the id, half dance, half gymnastics, unbecoming and a total distraction from the beautiful sound of the orchestra and the singing. Wagner’s music is not dance music, and it showed. Generally they kept to themselves but in Act III they appeared with a baby (the abandoned Tristan) who was handed to King Marke who appeared to have arrived on an early ship from Cornwall. The audience at Longborough is brilliant. They sit in almost total stillness, barely a cough all evening and that amazing silence at the end before the applause breaks out. Well worth the £150 ticket and I shall definitely be going to Tannhäuser next year.

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SIX YEARS OF LONGBOROUGH Richard and Sylvia Lemon Five years ago we saw in Opera Magazine that Die Walküre was on at somewhere called Longborough which, to our shame, we had not heard of. We navigated to the Cotswolds simply not knowing what to expect. How could such a small theatre (we won’t trot out the old clichés of the barn’s previous uses) put on such a major work? We joined the audience with some trepidation. From the opening bars we knew we would not be disappointed. Within minutes our admiration for Lee Bissett was secured. This article is not a review, but Alwyn Mellor must also be mentioned. The Helmwige was one Rachel Nichols. There was time to fall in love with the ambience, the views and everything about the place. We were hooked! Within days a cheque was in the post to become Benefactors so that we could support the following season. For 2011 the joy of Cosi was an added bonus, but late July was the objective, and Siegfried loomed. We are sure that we were not alone in wondering if Die Walküre had been a “one off”, but we were not disappointed. Far from it, no longer just hooked but well and truly immersed. We then became Wagner Special Benefactors for 2012. What a season! The Magic Flute to start with. – “Such Fun” (sorry Miranda!). Then there was Katya Kabanova, luring us into Janá ek (we had recently seen Cunning Little Vixen in Cardiff and loved it). Our admiratiočn for Lee Bissett was renewed, what a wonderful performance! But the highlight, Götterdämmerung , concluded the season. Alwyn Mellor had moved on to pastures new, but, in typical Longborough fashion, someone stepped up to the mark! Here was Rachel, the Walküre Helmwige. Could she do it? Well, the answer is now legend, and her Wagner career took off (and what a lovely Eva she was at ENO). Oh yes, there was the Gutrune: Lee again! Our devotion to Longborough was blooming, and just as well! It was not long after the end of the 2012 season that we received a letter inviting applications to join the new Production Circle – how could we refuse (even though the Piggy Bank had to be raided)? Not just providing support to The Ring , but also invitations to a number of talks on the subject, mainly by Anthony Negus. What a man! Not just a genius (OK, that is subjective. we dare anyone to challenge us!) but also a very approachable and unassuming person. Some of the talks were in London but some nearer home in the Cotswolds. 2013 was the year of THE RING ! What anticipation. No fears now, we knew what to expect of Longborough, and of course we were not disappointed. Rachel was now the Brünnhilde throughout, and as is now a truth universally acknowledged, she took it in her stride. Of course there was also Lee as Freia, Sieglinde and Gutrune – what a bonus. To coincide with the Longborough Ring The Mastersingers put on a series of events in Blockley Village Hall titled Inside the Ring . Sadly, we only got to three of them but they were excellent. The 12 th of July and The Ring was over. How could life be the same? But, Longborough does not like its supporters to be left bereft. It was not long before another letter came from Martin and Lizzie: get your cheque books out for the Production Circle

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again, this time for Tristan und Isolde in 2015. Poor Piggy Bank: another raid! 2014 was to be a rest year from Wagner (how dare they!) but there was to be a consolation of a “Romantic Concert” with Rachel singing the Wesendonck Lieder . The concert was titled On the Road towards Tristan und Isolde . The orchestra was for once on the stage, and, naturally, the evening was a great success. The other bonus of the year was Tosca , with a certain Miss Bissett in the title role. There was also an open day with a chance to see behind the scenes. Martin took us into the pit, round the stage, out to the dressing rooms (yes, they have to go outside to get there) and up into the Gods. There is Anthony Negus’ little room, with a trap door to look down on the auditorium; the control room high at the back, all fascinating. The overriding impression was of how cramped everything is. We were now leading up to Tristan , but in the meantime we had some excellent talks by Anthony for the Production Circle. Perhaps the greatest joy was a talk at Lady Solti’s home in Sir Georg’s Music Room. We arrived in a storm and were frozen. Lady Valerie got out the malt (generous measures!) to put life back in us. 2015 arrived with the long awaited Tristan . For weeks the music would not leave our heads. Rachel was an outstanding Isolde, but that did not surprise us. Then there was the other Isolde, one Lee Bissett (oops, fan club writing again) who performed magnificently despite her pregnancy: two entirely different characters, both completely believable. During the dress rehearsal, Peter Webb (Tristan) had a heavy cold and was clearly suffering. This added to his torment in Act III. Two days later for the opening night he was on the mend, and gave a performance to equal that of any heldentenor. As for Carmen Jakobi’s staging, much was made in the press of the two dancers she employed to enhance the back story. At the dress rehearsal we were a bit bemused, but by the third viewing we saw the point, the distraction had gone and we liked them. We took two friends to the opening night who had never seen Tristan or any Wagner. They loved the dancers and felt that they added a dimension to the experience, enhancing the story! So Carmen, well done! Those attending performances at Longborough will be used to Martin Graham’s homilies at the start of each evening (we look forward to them, thank you Martin!). This year one of his subjects was the need for development. We have seen backstage, and it is not adequate. There are certainly not adequate facilities to put on Die Meistersinger , which is an objective. So do any of our readers have deep pockets, or a large piggy bank which can be raided for a good cause? Longborough is developing. There is now a General Manager in the form of Jenny Smith and imminently a new Box Office Manager. Above all, of course, Longborough is the Grahams. It is only through the vision of Martin and Lizzie that we have the Festival. It must continue as their legacy as the Bayreuth of the Cotswolds!

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PERFORMING THE ROLE OF KURWENAL AT LONGBOROUGH A conversation with Stuart Pendred Roger Lee

Photo by Matthew Williams-Ellis for Longborough Festival Opera

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Following his two seasons as Hagen in Longborough’s Götterdämmerung and then as Kurwenal in their Tristan und Isolde I asked Stuart Pendred what it is that makes Longborough Festival Opera such a special experience for artists and audiences. “Longborough is a passion of the heart. It’s a love affair with opera, but especially Wagner. The vision that has become a reality under the loving care, dedication and sheer bloody- mindedness of Lizzie and Graham Martin is nothing short of insane and mind-blowing in equal measure. “The Martins have created the most wonderful spirit and ethos that simply seeps down to everyone who has the fortune to be a part of the Longborough story. Warm, generous people, they are also very driven and uncompromising in their desire to see a vision fulfilled, expecting nothing other than the very best in all aspects of their Festival. Why these two people haven’t been honoured for their services to the arts is beyond me, to be honest with you. What a story! “The fact that they have given leadership of their Wagner productions to one of our greatest Wagnerians has been vital to its success and growing reputation. Anthony Negus’ knowledge and passion for all things Wagner is almost unchallenged in the UK. If you are beginning to realise that your voice just may be right to sing this incredible canon of music, then coming under the skill, leadership and encouragement of one of its most passionate scholars of the music is one of the greatest experiences you can have. He sets incredibly high standards, nigh on perfection for himself and so is equally exacting and demanding on his artists. But he is also willing to praise to the utmost when you have developed again, grasped something and taken further steps as an artist. He also manages to surround himself with a team of wonderful supporting staff such as Rob Houssart and Kelvin Lim, both of whom proved absolutely vital to me in the rehearsal period for Tristan .” Roger Scruton writes of “the rough, simple Kurwenal, portrayed as someone dragged into the orbit of Tristan’s destructive passion.” He also refers to his “troubled defiance”. So the role demands that a singer display high spirits, fury, despair, terror, grief, defiance, astonishment, uncomprehending resistance and to reveal, as Ernest Newmann puts it: “the wealth of tenderness that lies at the heart of the old warrior’s rough nature.” I wondered how much of this list Stuart would recognise and which elements he found it most difficult to portray. “I absolutely loved playing Kurwenal. Of all of the characters that I have sung thus far, (perhaps with the exception of Wotan’s development across the entire Ring Cycle); including Hagen, the Dutchman, Hunding, Scarpia, Marullo et al, Kurwenal is without a shadow of a doubt the character that has the widest range of emotions on show. He is definitely the most rounded ‘human’ (or ‘god’) that I have sung so far. “I love Kurwenal’s absolute loyalty to Tristan. That is a rare absolute in a world coloured by indecision, agenda and deceit. Whilst thinking about his relationship with Tristan ahead of starting rehearsals I found myself reminded of the relationship between King Saul’s son Jonathan and David as described in the Bible: And Jonathan caused David to swear again because he loved him, for he loved him as he loved his own soul. (1 Samuel 20:17) Here was an absolute devotion between the two men: a love that would go through to death. It resonated with the way in which I saw Kurwenal’s relationship to Tristan. He would, and ultimately did, die for his love and loyalty to his Lord, Tristan. I tried to show

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that level of loyalty in my relationship with Peter Wedd’s Tristan. I was fortunate enough to get on very well with Peter, both on and off stage, which helped us both in getting that aspect of their relationship across to the audience. “But it is also about self-awareness and the ability to recognise yourself within roles too. There are roles that one is suited to vocally, but perhaps even more important: emotionally and psychologically. Having that self-knowledge helps in terms of recognising what and who to concentrate on as you develop as an artist and a whole person. Perhaps this is where my background as an actor really comes into play. I allow myself to access emotions and memories that have shaped me as a man. I have experienced the horror of the early loss of a brother; my Mum, my uncle and dear friends to cancer. I am a fiercely loyal friend. I understand the absolute joy of welcoming a child into the world. I know anger and pain. I am physical in my interaction with the world. I enjoy and need solitude. I feel things keenly – perhaps more keenly than some people give me credit for – which was another reason for my joy at being given the chance to portray a role as complex as Kurwenal.” Pendred’s journey from Hagen to Kurwenal involved a significant migration in tessitura between the two roles which made entirely different demands of acting skills. I was curious as to how difficult he had found it to adapt to such disparity of artistic experiences. “I think that the most important realisation whilst singing Kurwenal was that I actually felt that I belonged there, deserved to be there. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant, but rather a reflection of quite how overwhelmed I was with Götterdämmerung in 2012, especially with the first perfomances. It may not have looked like it, but I was utterly petrified and so I threw myself back on my acting. The production in 2013 was a very different experience for far more personal reasons, with my Mum dying three days before the public dress and the funeral taking place three days before the press night. I sang for her and in many ways I think my performances were elevated by a further year’s experience and also because of what I was going through at the time. In many ways Hagen was the perfect role emotionally to immerse myself in at the time. I think that a role such as Kurwenal would have been very difficult for me to have handled at the time. I think that I was able to access some of that emotion during some of the more intimate scenes which take place between Tristan and Kurwenal at the end of the opera.”

Photo by Matthew Williams-Ellis for Longborough Festival Opera Roger Lee is Director of Education for The Mastersingers

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A SUPERNUMERARY AT LONGBOROUGH Brian Smith Walters For nine weeks between mid-April and late June I had the opportunity to sing in the chorus of Longborough Festival Opera's production of Tristan und Isolde . While Anthony Negus had asked for me to sing in the tenor section, his wife Carmen Jakobi had an idea for an extra role for two of my chorus chums and me. This was to play a non-singing acting role, often called a “supernumerary” in opera. In many of the larger houses like Royal Opera, these roles are often taken by dancers from the corps de ballet or outside actors who do not sing. As such, it was a privilege to play a role that we don't often get to do as opera singers. The three of us were regular chorus members in Act I (wherein the entirety of the Tristan chorus part lies), playing sailors just arriving in Cornwall from battle with the Irish. But in Acts II and III we were King Mark's personal guards, myself playing the captain. We had an amazing fight director in Kevin McCurdy. Though the three of us had had some sword fighting scenes in previous productions, it was great to work with someone who knew his craft so well. After Kevin choreographed the scenes and spent a few days with the production, Assistant Director Nick Fowler kept our skills sharp and led fight calls for stage rehearsal and performances. Carmen challenged the three of us from the King's guards to have very individual and personal backstories. We took the challenge and began detailed work which informed our interactions with all others onstage. This detailed backstory gave us the chance to be very involved with the stage action. Moments of static action which allowed us to observe how a large-scale Wagner production is put together. Tristan is a role into which I am hoping I'll grow. Being involved in such a full way allowed me the opportunity to watch and learn from our two wonderful Tristans, Neal Cooper and Peter Wedd.

Brian Smith Walters (right) gets to grips with Stuart Pendred as Kurwenal

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TRIUMPHANT RING IN DESSAU Anhaltisches Theatre, 23 rd – 28 th June 2015 Jeremy Rowe There was an unusually high attendance by British tour groups at the Dessau Ring , and most of the audience were delighted by this experimental and idiosyncratic staging. A few of the “rocks and trees” brigade disliked the unconventional approach, but mostly the reception to this Ring was one of great enthusiasm. Director André Bucker saw the gold of the Rhine in terms of the power which is gained by controlling communications. Das Rheingold started with the earliest experiments in moving pictures, with the Rhinemaidens cavorting in a zoetrope which through its spinning gave an early image of the Ring itself. This opening scene gave the audience a first taste of the advanced technical mechanics of the huge Dessau stage which would be used in this Cycle. André Bucker used local imagery to enhance his view of Der Ring , with strong use of Bauhaus designs throughout, both in terms of scenery, costume and even stylised movement. Edwardian Rheingold costumes were entirely white, representing the innocence of the gods, which would be lost as the cycle progressed, and electronic communication slowly took over the world. Valhalla was an enormous revolving white cube which could twist into multiple shapes. In conversation with André, I discovered that a stagehand was trapped inside the cube organising its movements – probably one of the most claustrophobic assignments imaginable! An enormous white wall with huge circular hole descended in front of the steps formed by the cube, replicating the renowned “washing machine” architecture of new government buildings in Berlin. Wotan’s family mounted the cube, symbolic of their ascent into Valhalla, and Das Rheingold ended with the gods arranged on their cube enjoying the view. A heavy structure of beams represented Hunding’s hut with the sword stuck into a giant electrical cable hanging overhead. Hunding himself was a frightening bully, with balaclava-wearing henchmen. Sieglinde was truly trapped in an abusive marriage, and her recognition of Siegmund was one of relief as well as passion. Wotan, still living on the white cube, was a Hollywood-style movie producer, and Fricka was based on Barbara Stanwyck. She had huge stage presence, and overwhelmed Wotan by her persistent approach to him, expecting a kiss on the cheek from him once she had got her own way. In an exceptional coup de théâtre , the Valkyries were spoilt Hollywood starlets, collecting dead sailors to wait upon them in a decadent bar. With multi-coloured costumes and extreme hairstyles, they showed clearly how much Valhalla had descended into an amoral pleasure ground. We were in the roaring twenties, with many images and references to Hollywood films of the time. Wotan put Brünnhilde to sleep on a ledge in the huge cube, which by the end of Die Walküre had turned black, and in another brilliant piece of staging, the cube closed, trapping Brünnhilde inside. In one of the scenes causing the most discussion, Siegfried opened in a squalid kitchen with both Mime and Siegfried playing video games, surrounded by masses of rubbish from takeaway foods. The idea was simple and very relevant to today’s society: in his innocence Siegfried was unable to distinguish between the fantasy of video games and the reality of violent life. Thus, once he had constructed the sword on his video screen and created it in a 3D printer he set out to slay the dragon with no more trepidation than – 26 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 27

slaying any other adversary in a video game. This concept gave modern meaning to Siegfried’s behaviour, and a new view of the meaning of this part of Der Ring . The Wanderer was a fugitive from Star Wars, one of many images from science fiction used to great effect by André Bucker. Siegfried was dressed in white, reflecting the innocence of the gods in Das Rheingold , but with an orange tunic – a reference to the local history of the Dukes of Orange. Perhaps it was predictable that the Gibichungs were armed with light-sabres, and they certainly made a grand impact in their Bauhaus costumes and ritualised movements. The towers and elevators of the Gibichung court were another of the great stage effects, and the final scene used the full extent of the stage. With Gunther dead in his own court at the front of the stage, an enormous space opened up, with Brünnhilde on the black cube surrounded by the Gibichung army raising their light sabres in salute to her as the massive stage revolve had them spinning slowing around the funeral pyre. Dutch conductor Antony Hermus had a slightly reduced orchestra and they felt a little tentative in Das Rheingold . From there on however all was brilliant with outstanding playing: crisp, accurate and full of emotion. Performances on stage were uniformly excellent, all the more remarkable given that most of the cast were in-house singers. Of many outstanding performances, Ulf Paulsen’s Wotan must be mentioned. He has a big sound and used it with drive and confidence, filling the stage with his presence. Rita Kapfhammer’s performances must also be noted: not only a formidable Fricka but a commanding Erda, an urgent Waltraute, a sinister Norn, and finally a full-bodied Flosshilde. To play so many roles, varying the colours of her voice part by part was a notable feat. Jürgen Müller’s Siegfried had considerable stage presence and a voice to match. His vocal stamina was notable, his range of emotions from bumptiousness to tragedy, and his physical strength, constantly on the move, were impressive. For me however, the star was Iordanka Derilova as Brünnhilde. A member of the theatre’s ensemble since 2003, this slim, slight singer has enormous potential as a future world star, and I understand she was to follow her success in Dessau with another Brünnhilde in Sofia. Starting as an innocent girl in Die Walküre , she grew in stature and voice as the cycle progressed, culminating in a towering immolation scene. This was an intelligent performance full of emotion and pathos, and she gave the audience a characterful and memorable portrayal. The end of Götterdämmerung was greeted with tumultuous applause and a prolonged standing ovation. Everyone came on stage: the cast, the orchestra, the stage hands and the creative team led by André Bucker and Antony Hermus. Rarely can such an experimental staging of Der Ring have received such a reception. Despite its many international visitors the audience was mainly local. The people of Dessau clearly love their opera house and are mightily proud of the achievement of Der Ring . Dreadful it is then to be aware that neither André Bucker nor Antony Hermus are to have their contracts renewed. Götterdämmerung was their swansong. They embraced on stage in the midst of the 20-minute ovation. It appears that they have not had contracts renewed because they organised a strike against massive local funding cuts. In January the funding was cut by 20%, and all staff at the opera house took a “voluntary” salary cut of 10%. As staff leave they are not replaced. There will be no third cycle of this important and exciting Ring .

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THE RING AT DESSAU 22 nd – 28 th June 2015 Paul and Elizabeth Dawson-Bowling The history of The Ring at Dessau is long and outstanding. It is not clear from Angelo Neumann’s book whether this great impresario and Wagnerian benefactor succeeded in bringing The Ring to Dessau in the late 1870s with the Richard Wagner Touring Opera Company, but probably his Dessau negotiations fell through. What is absolutely clear is that little Dessau experienced its own production of a complete Ring in 1893, and repeated it several times in subsequent years. A highwater mark for The Ring at Dessau came in 1919 when Hans Knappertsbusch directed the music and his success was part of the reason for his being offered the post of General Music Director. In the 1920s Franz von Hoesslin directed The Ring at Dessau and it was Hoesslin who soon made sensational early recordings of the prelude to Siegfried Act III and the Magic Fire Music at Bayreuth. Thus the Dessau Ring conducted by Anthony Hermus and directed by André Brücker, was overshadowed by some mighty precedents. Brücker’s Ring managed to cap them with something quite new because it was the first in our experience to be staged by a child of the mobile phone, Facebook and Twitter era. Brücker evidently directed its appeal to restless multitasking mentalities always wanting to tap into two or three things at once. It was apparently an axiom for him that it was never enough for the principal players to act out the drama on their own and so one hallmark of his production was a restless frenzy of images projected onto the wings and the backdrops. The scene had always to be filled with images ranging from silhouettes reminiscent of the Commedia dell’ Arte to a constellation of Bauhaus images spiralling and dissolving in a black and white kaleidoscope, or a slideshow of old masters in colour, or a newsreel of the singers themselves, videoed by a rather intrusive cameraman on stage. His depictions too were projected in black and white onto the backdrop. Nothing could have been further from this restless visual overload occurring during the first part of Brünnhilde’s plea than the mesmerising near-empty stage of Wieland Wagner with its devastating concentration on Brünnhilde and the God in Bayreuth in 1958.

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What was so frustrating was that whenever Brücker properly gave his attention to the drama, he revealed singular insights. When Brünnhilde is pleading to Wotan that only one person, ie: Wotan himself, had breathed into her the love which made her break his orders, the music briefly gathers itself half way towards the E major climax of Wotan’s farewell before breaking off, and there Brücker had his Wotan beginning a slow smile and even half beckoning towards Brünnhilde. The ice was visibly beginning to melt. Likewise the staging of their embrace at the beginning of Wotan’s farewell itself was supremely moving, wonderful, perfectly timed, and significant not only in terms of the drama but in terms of what it can teach us for our own lives. In all this Brücker was beyond praise. Such productions provide plenty of grist for intellectual analysis, but as a dramatic experience this one often missed the mark. Another problem with such a plethora was the impossibility of taking it all in, and the data overload was so extreme that at some points we have no recollection what the characters on stage were actually doing. It did not help the drama that the characters in Das Rheingold were all clad in chalk-white from head to foot, the men in a cross between court dress and cricket gear, the women in Victorian garb (complete with bustles) and the similarity in their appearance was confusing for any newcomers trying to follow the action, as two engaging German first-timers complained. It helped even less that the gods, even Wotan, were largely made out as buffoons; and the minor gods and giants were presented as halfwits, often punching the air in displays of meaningless belligerence, while the excellently sung Alberich of Stefan Adam was quite unfrightening. His Nibelheim consisted not of fearsome slave mines, but of nothing worse than a classroom of perky schoolchildren drawing cartoons for a Disney-style film while a conceited but innocuous Mime strutted over their efforts. As for Siegfried , Tom Empson in Wagner News 218 has described the Dessau forging of the sword as awesome, but we can only report it as flat and dull, because Wagner’s bravura display of vocal and physical energy was reduced to a nasty young man fiddling on his laptop until the fiddlings produced – somehow – a real sword from out of the wings. In Act III of Siegfried and throughout Götterdämmerung Brücker enlarged his repertoire to include silly walks, as per John Cleese. From now on most of the principals, though not Hagen, adopted silly walks, with puzzling purpose. Siegfried stomped around the stage like a stiff, badly programmed robot. His fixed, beamish smile throughout his Götterdämmerung Act III narration was inane enough; but what was yet more inane was his continuing stomping after Hagen had well and truly speared him in the vitals. And what was the point of the tremulous, shaky hands that they all displayed in Götterdämmerung , as if they all had the DTs or malaria? Wagner castigated Meyerbeer for his effects without causes, but here the producer had barnacled The Ring with plenty of effects for which no cause was manifest and, however perceptive his intentions, they did not work as drama. Where Dessau demonstrated very positive quality was in casting a finely sung Ring from its own company. Ulf Paulsen sang with great authority as Wotan and Rita Kapffhammer triumphed in many roles: the two Frickas and the Siegfried Erda, in Götterdämmerung as a Norn, Waltraute and a Rhinemaiden. Iordanka Derilova was a Brünnhilde of stamina and variety. Even if her voice seemed more at home above the stave than lower down. Her opening battle cry was a highlight, as was her awakening in Siegfried . Sieglinde, Angelina Ruzzafante and her Siegmund, Robert Kunzli were two of the very best in this well-voiced Ring , and Stefan Klemm gave a particularly powerful portrayal of Hunding, plainly confusing and unsettling the hapless Sigmund with his – 29 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 30

stonewall authority. The reason why Klemm was less imposing as Fafner and Hagen was solely due to the producer’s vagaries. Likewise Siegfried and Brünnhilde on the roof of the world had been blighted by their silly walks from building up any kind of mutual attraction, but Jürgen Müller certainly maintained his tireless and heroic account of Siegfried’s music. Thanks to him and to Iordanka Derilova’s Brünnhilde, the end of Siegfried became a musical gem. The extraordinary thing about The Ring is that it is possible to go to a performance and detest the conducting and the production, the singing and the acting, and yet still enjoy a great experience. It should be clear that there were many things about the Dessau Ring which were anything but detestable, but we have left describing the best till last. The best consisted of Antony Hermus, his terrific orchestra and their sensational account the music. Hermus’ approach was highly distinctive, fiery and propulsive and yet penetrating to the depths. The orchestra presented a sound of immense weight and gravity but also that deep and particular beauty which seems a special German birthright. The general impression was impassioned, with one of the most exciting versions of The Ride of the Valkyries since Furtwängler, and yet not since Karajan can we remember Forest Murmurs sounding more transparent and more lovely. At the opposite extreme the heavy brass were devastating at Siegfried’s murder. Hermus’ presentation of the music was always supremely involving, regardless of the distractions onstage, and it seems possible that he could become one of the Wagnerian greats of the future. All in all then, the virtues of this Ring, so very well sung and so sensationally conducted and played, totally outweighed the imperfections, and we would leap at the chance of going to it again.

Wagner news 220 Your next issue of Wagner News will be scheduled to arrive with the Christmas post. As well as details of the Wagner Society’s Winter / Spring 2016 programme of events you will find reports of the following: 18 th October: The Mastersingers performance of Act III of Parsifal with the Rehearsal Orchestra conducted by David Syrus. 25 th October: Chelsea Opera Group’s performance of Das Liebesverbot conducted by Anthony Negus. 22 nd November: The results of the 2015 Wagner Society Singing Competition and a performance of part of Act III of Die Walküre by the 2015 Carole Rees Awards Winners Paul Carey Jones and Lee Bisset. 19 th November: Fulham Opera’s performance of Die fliegende Holländer . For those looking for Christmas reading or gifts John Crowther will review the new English translation of Christian Thielemann’s autobiography: My Life with Wagner . In the second part of his conversation with Roger Lee, Mastersingers baritone Stuart Pendred describes his experience as a performing artist. “It’s as if every fibre of my being resonates with the rest of the universe. I am free, fully alive and being who I should be. I work for those rare moments of clarity.”

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NOTES ON THE CASTORF RING FROM A BAYREUTH VIRGIN Simon Empson I confess that the Castorf production initially left me very confused and a little disappointed – especially Rheingold which I felt was plain peculiar; indeed, a number of people near my seat left the performance; others booed for ages. After researching a little however, Bayreuth knew exactly what Castorf would deliver, and I think there are some interesting facts about it that I didn't read about or hear voiced during the intervals. I had originally thought that the Woodbird scenes (more or less fully-clothed sex, twice) departed completely from the score, but then I read that the score actually describes the Woodbird as educating Siegfried in “life and love”. So evidently Castorf had taken this into account. I also thought that the general on-stage chaos and wholesale departure from the score did Wagner (and Bayreuth) no service at all, but then I read that Castorf is, among many things, a “free thinker”. I decided to read further about this subject and this led to more web searching – on “Wagner and free thinking”. Not only did Wagner use the pseudonym K. Freigedank” (meaning: the freethinking one), but he was a revolutionary, rationalist free-thinker. So maybe Castorf shouldn't have been pilloried quite so badly – maybe it wasn't so inappropriate and inaccurate – indeed I would not be too surprised if his production might be viewed as a classic one in future. What did dawn on me during that research is that among Wagner's many personal failings, his “free thinking”, anti-authoritarian revolution-seeking actions were so comprehensively betrayed by his relationship with King Ludwig. I wonder how on earth Wagner managed to live with such a huge, life-long contradiction? Could he have decided that the work and his resulting reputation were ultimately more important than his personal and political convictions? And if that were the case, I wonder if that shows us a potential source for the very heart of The Ring's indistinct but very dark meanings (albeit that much of its score was written before King Ludwig appeared on the scene)? On the topic of the black and cream Mercedes-Benz, I wondered why Castorf had chosen a tacky, badly restored American import: a 1960s SE Convertible (a W111 with really horrible customisation) when a ’60s Cadillac would have fitted the “Route 66” theme so well. If you are going to choose a classic German Convertible, why not use a classic 3.5 in a good colour combination with correct leather and the right wheel trims? Then I realised that, of course, this was meant to be the car chosen by ‘Tony Soprano’ and used at various times by Castorf's watery trollops. OK, so I now get that part. And that got me wondering if the tacky Mercedes was the nearest Castorf thought he could get to addressing the raging 1930s controversy? I remembered that Hitler loved the works of Wagner and of the Daimler-Benz company with an almost equal passion. Choosing that kitsch, garish ragtop for the stage could well have been a way of making a statement on the Nazi connection: Hitler loved his Mercedes-Benz yet no one sees the supreme and global three-pointed star in the same tainted light as Wagner (far from it, in fact). Or am I going too far here? To close, I must recount a slightly funny story (at least I thought so). My neighbour for Götterdämmerung was a psychologist from the International Association of Athletics Federations in Munich (helping drug-taking professional golfers, of all things). When his seat became unexpectedly vacant after the first act, I guessed it was the 37 degree heat that caused his departure; so I asked his chum where my neighbour had got to. “Oh, he's gone home to watch the Bayern Munich match on TV” came the reply. – 31 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 32

BAYREUTH LOHENGRIN : THANKYOU, WAGNER SOCIETY! Sean O’Byrne I want to thank the Wagner Society for the chance to get to see Lohengrin at Bayreuth. I became hooked on Wagner at the age of about 16 when what was, I think, the Third Programme used to regularly broadcast The Ring . I would borrow the full scores from the local library (imagine finding those in small suburban libraries these days!) and follow them note by note, word by word. Maybe I wasn't a typical teenager! I always “sort of” dreamed of going to Bayreuth in a vague way, but life intervened and it never happened. I had the impression that you had to queue for ten years and more recently, with more time available, the dominance of Regie put me off, so I did nothing about it. Getting the ticket in the ballot kicked me into action so, full of trepidation about pretty much everything (not least Hans Neuenfels’ rats), I thought I must grab this opportunity and I am so glad I did. I could wax lyrical about most of the experience but the biggest joys were just being there, the amazing acoustics, and the fantastic quality of the singing and playing. Every one of the principals was outstanding. Klaus Florian Vogt had exactly the right ringing heldentenor qualities as well as looking the part. Annette Dasch made a perfect and lovely Elsa. I was totally bowled over too by Petra Lang's Ortrud. No nasty vibrato – all stunningly accurate power and evil. I have always wondered how the balance would be with a buried orchestra and Wagner certainly knew what he was doing with that design decision. The clarity of the singing was completely unencumbered by the orchestra and came across as I have not often heard before except at Longborough where Martin and Lizzie Graham borrowed the same idea! I knew about the rats in advance and normally avoid such productions these days but I could at least say afterwards “It could have been worse”. It annoys me when directors effectively say “This is what it really means: do you get it now?” and I have seen enough perspex boxes to last me a long time but “whatever” as they say. The action wasn't completely damaged and I left a happy and elated bunny.

THE SECRET OPERA RING DAS RHEINGOLD 7pm Saturday 7 th November DIE WALKÜRE 7pm Saturday 14 th November King’s College Chapel, Strand, London WC2R 2LS Directed by David Edwards and designed by Billie Achilleos. Musical Director and Pianist: Richard Black. Die Walküre was described as “superbly moving” by Katie Barnes in Wagner News 218 . Tickets: £15 advance (£20 on the door) with £10 concessions for children/students/65s+ from: www.ticketsource.co.uk/SECRETOPERA or phone 07894 830876

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THE BULGARIA-SOFIA RING 4th –9th July 2015 Paul Dawson-Bowling The astonishing thing about the Bulgaria-Sofia Ring was that it happened at all. Bulgaria is a new arrival in modern Europe, but in the long reach of history it is one of Europe’s oldest as well as its newest countries. As ancient Thrace, Bulgaria supported a powerful, highly organised society centuries before ancient Athens took shape – before Athens patterned democracy for the world. Like Athens Thrace fell to King Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and became part of Alexander’s empire. Some centuries later it became part of the Eastern Roman Empire and developed magnificent theatres, such as we witnessed, along with law and civic order, and this high-level civilisation only came to an end with the fall of Constantinople in 1451. This was a prelude to the Ottoman Empire which formed the country’s next major epoch. It continued until 1875 when Czar Nicolas of Russia liberated the country from its Muslim overlords. Until this liberation the country had in many ways been a tiny forgotten corner of Europe, and more like backward Afghanistan than an enlightened Egypt. In 1876, when Wagner first put on the Ring at Bayreuth, Bulgaria was an alien world, barely acquainted with the west and its music. It had the misfortune to join the wrong side in the two world wars and then fell into the paws of the great Russian bear, in virtue of which it remained isolated from the rest of Europe until the fall of Communism. Nonetheless it had actually been Communism that began to open up Sofia to distant European influences including its music and its opera. It was in the Soviet era that Sofia gained its Opera House, with its elegant horseshoe auditorium full of Ancien Régime ornament and elegance, albeit restrained because of finance. This was only opened in 1953, two years after the European mainstream had moved towards the bald, concrete functionalism of the Royal Festival Hall or, a decade later, the Berlin Philharmonie. Once begun, Sofia’s operatic ascent was rapid, and within a decade it gave the world Boris Christoff. However it was only in 2014 that it rose to the challenge of that operatic Everest, Der Ring des Nibelungen . There was an appealing freshness about it now, with further cycles this year, both at Sofia and at Füssen in southern Bavaria, King Ludwig’s castle country. It was immensely heart-warming how the public face of the Opera, Dimitar Sotirov, welcomed our foreign interest and enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which was soon justified by the cycle’s opening gambit, its Rhinemaidens scene. Plamen Kartaloff’s production had three beautiful young women, as superb as gymnasts as they were at singing Wagner, giving stellar performances on three trampolines, soaring, spinning, somersaulting and gyrating, even as they sang – and they sang with great beauty. (In fact, there was a fourth, a pure gymnast who chimed in imperceptibly and took over the most stunning turns). Their effect was not strictly aquatic, but their capacity to captivate the hapless Alberich was overwhelmingly believable. It was a delight to see them reappear in Götterdämmerung , still trampolining, for Siegfried. This opening Rhinemaidens’ scene was also stunningly well played, and another distinctive aspect of this Ring, instantly evident and arresting, was the unorthodox disposition of the orchestra. The brass were all lined at the back, facing out at the audience; the second bank of four horns sat just in front of the first four. This meant that at certain moments of climax the brass had a devastating immediacy. The initial black C minor chords for brass in Siegfried’s funeral music fairly knocked us into the middle of

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next week. The woodwind were also unusually distinct, and generally the sound was surprisingly rich for such a modest body of strings as Sofia could manage. The brass players, who all at times have individual parts, were by contrast fully present and correct. Eric Wächter, the German conductor, took an essentially long, expansive view of the music, never forcing his players into a quicksilver virtuosity that was beyond them. It is even possible that his orchestra had something in common with the musician bodies assembled for Wagner’s performances in Switzerland. Wagner had some principals who equalled the best anywhere, but his rank and file included worthy amateurs. Producer Plamen Kartaloff’s Nibelheim scene was just as effective as his opening scene with the Rhinemaidens, with the anvils all at the front of the stage, where they mounted a colossal battery of sound on the audience’s ears. In general Kartaloff’s production told the story of the Ring admirably, and he wisely helped his fellow Bulgarians to follow its unfamiliar action by presenting mimed representations of what the singers were describing. These representations took place on an outsized conveyor belt which slowly crossed the stage at a diagonal from back to front. Kartaloff created a strange tangle of metallic, gleaming briars for Neidhöhle which was highly evocative, and in Siegfried Act III he placed Siegfried and Brünnhilde in a crescent-shaped, boat-like structure which was strangely beautiful, even if his staging suggested nothing of dawn or the summits of the world. Not all his ideas were as convincing. The storm music for the hunted Siegmund in Act I did not really support Kartaloff’s fully staged, quickly run resumé of Das Rheingold ’s main events (even a second of the trampolining Rhinemaidens). Nor did it help that the Valkyries rode round the stage standing upright on torpedoes which were themselves mounted on trolleys. This was the case even for Brünnhilde, even throughout her scenes in Die Walküre Act II. Whether or not her positioning was as hazardous as it looked, it rendered her too far from Wotan to develop the intense bond between them in Act II. In Act III, the stage was crowded up with nine torpedoes and it often looked as if there was going to be a traffic jam or a collision. It seemed that here and certain other junctures Kartaloff’s interesting ideas were getting in the way of the drama instead of illuminating it. Happily Kartaloff’s direction of the singers was mostly positive, with ideas that enlarged the action. At the end of Götterdämmerung it seemed entirely right to have Brünnhilde, full of her new and all-encompassing compassion, embracing and comforting the sobbing Gutrune. However it must be said that at other times, Kartaloff’s ideas undermined Wagner’s. It was a denial of Wagner’s musico-dramatic genius to have Brünnhilde break away from Wotan exactly when the music tells us that they are falling into each other’s arms. It was likewise a denial to make Wotan rush off the stage after summoning the magic fire, at the point where Wagner wanted him to make his way slowly and sorrowfully through the flames. The cast of this Ring contained no Boris Christoff, but it still had singers of real distinction. There were two Wotans, and Nikolai Petrov, who took the role in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre , was outstanding, delivering a steady and fine-tempered sound and delivering the text with as much point and inner understanding as if he had lived all his life in the German of Wagner’s drama. This was true above all in Wotan’s great monologues, where he combined exceptional dramatic diction with an enviable legato. Martin Tsonev was likewise a convincing Wanderer, slightly harder of timbre. There were two Brünnhildes who could not have been more different, the first in Die Walküre and

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Siegfried being Bayasgalam Dashnyam. This singer raised acutely the question of how far a Wagnerian interpreter needs to look the role because she was truly a Mongolian, perhaps the first Wagnerian star with an ancestry in the land of Genghis Khan. She was small, solid and swarthy, but my goodness, could she sing! She delivered Brünnhilde’s battle cry with ringing conviction and this heralded a richly ranging performance; she was equally telling in the low tessitura of “Siegmund, Sieh auf mich,” with and “War es so schmählich” . She spun the long lines of Brünnhilde’s plea beautifully and expressively. As the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde, Yorshanka Denlova was a contrast, taller, and a beautiful blonde bombshell with a sharper timbre. This was probably no bad thing for her amidst the colossal orchestration of Götterdämmerung , and her immolation was magnificent. It was altogether a remarkably well sung Ring, with voices that were generally lighter than usual, but Wagner’s heroes were not less heroic on that account. Even the voices taking the heavy roles of Alberich (a fierce interpretation by Bisa Gorgiev), Siegmund and the two Siegfrieds were more slender. (In fact the presentable Martin Iliev took both Siegmund and the Götterdämmerung Siegfried). Space forbids the individual endorsements which many of the other singers would ideally deserve. Erich Wächter’s musical direction has already been mentioned for its long reach. Within that reach his way with Wagner’s basic pulse was unusually plastic and malleable, with an unforced naturalness among his many interchanging tempos. He was fiery and fast in all three preludes of Die Walküre , and yet he also achieved the right Wagnerian heft in these passages. A troubling exception was the Prelude to Act III of Siegfried , which was thoroughly insubstantial and never began to rise worthily to the crisis and the blast which are essential for this scene; Wagner described it as the centre of the world tragedy. Happily in compensation Act III of Götterdämmerung was particularly impressive, and it brought the curtain down on a performance that I am thrilled to have witnessed. Most important of all, the whole occasion had the full freshness of first discovery. My first encounters with the Ring date, Heaven help me, from almost 60 years ago, and this performance at Sofia re-awoke much the same excitement as those faraway days. Even more than with the Dessau Ring , I would do anything (or almost anything!) to have it again.

MANCHESTER WAGNER SOCIETY PARSIFAL STUDY DAY WITH PAUL DAWSON-BOWLING 5th December 2015: 10am to 4pm Anthony Burgess Centre, 3 Cambridge Street (Manchester Oxford Road Station) Debussy praised Parsifal as one of the supreme monuments ever raised to the supreme glory of music, but he jeered at its plot and its characters for being a crew of idiots, misfits and weirdos. Nietzsche went further and condemned Parsifal as an outrage on morals. Paul Dawson-Bowling takes up these claims in a manner that should engage newcomer and seasoned Wagnerian alike, and considers both the origins, the music and the action of Wagner’s ‘final card’. He indicates why it is entirely erroneous to discover Nazism in it as some have claimed. He goes into its psychological and religious depths and concentrates on its real lessons, how Parsifal models compassion and sets out ideas of how to be nobler, happier people, and how to create a better world. Tickets (£30) from Jackie Roberts: [email protected]

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WAGNER’S SHAKESPEARE German Historical Institute, 10 th September 2015 Katie Barnes As Patrick Carnegy's absorbing lecture amply demonstrated, the importance of Shakespeare's influence upon Wagner has been unjustly overlooked. His family were highly theatrical: his stepfather Ludwig Geyer gave the young Wagner his earliest theatrical experiences, including playing a cupid at the age of eight, and his eldest sister Rosalie became a successful actress in Leipzig, where her repertoire included a number of Shakespearean roles. Shakespeare's works were the nucleus of the German dramatic repertoire of the time. Wagner knew the plays inside out, although only in German translations (he once heretically suggested that Shakespeare would have been a better author if he had written in Italian!). Other important dramatic influences upon him included Aeschylus, whose influence is seen most strongly in the layout of the Festspielhaus, with its fan-shaped auditorium in imitation of ancient Greek theatres. Die Feen , written while Wagner was chorus master in Würzburg (where he also played small roles in operas and ballets!), shows obvious Shakespearean influences in Arindal's Lear-like mad scene and Ada's Hermione-like transformation from stone to woman through the power of music. Neither has any equivalent in Wagner's source text, Gozzi's La Donna Serpente , in which Ada is changed into a snake. In Magdeburg in 1834 Wagner was swept off his feet by the power of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient's performance as Romeo in Romeo und Julia , a German version of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi , and was later similarly overwhelmed by Berlioz's treatment Roméo et Juliette Symphony, to which he paid musical tribute in Tristan . Unusually he acknowledged this musical debt in the autographed score which he presented to Berlioz. Das Liebesverbot , described by Carnegy as “a very free adaptation of Measure for Measure ” is the only Wagner opera which takes its plot from a Shakespeare play. However it rewrites the play's dark, troubling ending and includes a very un-Shakespearean finale depicting a public uprising, with Isabella sounding like a Brünnhilde in embryo. The première of Der fliegende Holländer in Dresden in 1843 coincided with a sensational staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Potsdam by Ludwig Tieck, who had nurtured a lifelong ambition to stage Shakespeare's plays in authentic surroundings with little or no scenery and performances which, as described by the Chorus in Henry V , would rely upon the audience's imagination. As we now know, Wagner’s understanding of Elizabethan stagings was incorrect, being based upon one small, fanciful engraving, and the King's Theatre in Potsdam was too small for his purposes, but his designer, Johann Karl Jakob Gest (who also designed the première production of Holländer ) divided the stage into small compartments to enable the action to proceed continuously. Wagner saw it when it transferred to the larger Schauspielhaus in Berlin. It came at a critical stage in his career. He envied the success of Mendelssohn's music commissioned for this production, but Carnegy suggested that Tieck's production may have edged Wagner away from the mythical subjects which then preoccupied him to the more human themes of Die Meistersinger , another work dealing with the intrigues of a magical midsummer's night. The craftsmen-Meisters may be an echo of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals, with Sachs as the

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Tieckian ideal of the poet-craftsman. It may be significant that Wagner knew the play in a translation entitled Ein Sankt-Johannes-Nacht Träum . Beckmesser surely owes much to Malvolio. Both are proud, touchy men who are “notoriously abused” and are humiliated after misinterpreting the writing on a sheet of paper. In exile in Zurich, Wagner embarked upon a massive exploration of world drama resulting in his Oper und Drama in which he took Shakespeare's integration of comedy and tragedy as his model and recognised the dramatic advantage of moving quickly from one scene to another. Although The Ring , like his earlier works, is myth based, it creates all-too- human characters and scenes, and juxtaposes comic characters and situations, notably Mime in his bickering with Siegfried and Alberich, with deeply serious drama. Like Shakespeare, Wagner twisted his source material to suit his purposes. In the Eddas the Norns “set the laws that govern man's fate”, but in Götterdämmerung they foretell the future like Shakespeare's three witches, by whom they were surely inspired. Macbeth was one of Wagner's favourite Shakespeare plays, described by Cosima as “the whole demonic course of life set before one's eyes”. Her diaries describe in detail how she and Wagner read Shakespeare's plays aloud at Wahnfried almost every evening. Lady Macbeth, who works on her weak husband to seize power, surely influenced both Ortrud and Fricka. The latter's vindictiveness in Die Walküre is not present in Wagner's sources. In Götterdämmerung , Hagen's devious plotting recalls Iago, just as his encounter with the shadowy figure of Alberich recalls Hamlet and the ghost of his father. The finale, with one murder succeeding another, resembles a bloodstained Shakespearean tragedy until the redemptive Brünnhilde takes command. Porges' account of rehearsals for the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 records how Wagner, a gifted improvising actor, used to leap about the stage, acting all the characters, and describes him as “the complete actor of the entire drama” whose principles of dramatisation were in accordance with Shakespeare. At the end of his life, preoccupied with the complexities of the stage realisation of Parsifal , Wagner realised that the solution was the “theatre of the mind” for which he had applauded Shakespeare and which he had glimpsed in Tieck's work in Berlin. At that time audiences demanded realistic stagings, to which Cosima subsequently clung for many years, but Wieland's two stagings of Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth paid belated tribute to Shakespeare's influence upon his grandfather. His 1956 production, dubbed Die Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg , created a furore by stripping the visual references back to the minimum, leaving an almost bare stage. Joachim Herz's Leipzig production in 1960, framed by galleries which in Act III were revealed to be an open air theatre, influenced Wieland's 1963 production at Bayreuth which likewise used a galleried set. In post-War Germany, these invocations of Shakespeare were appropriate and redemptive, showing that Die Meistersinger was more than a hymn to German nationalism. Carnegy illustrated his lecture with pictures from a huge variety of sources, notably some enchanting watercolours by Wagner's daughter Isolde, engravings of Tieck's Dream , photographs of Wieland's and Herz's Die Meistersinger , with two pricelessly funny and moving video clips from the Glyndebourne Meistersinger and a stunning one from the Chéreau Götterdämmerung . He kept his audience educated and fascinated from first to last. “He was a scholar and a ripe and good one. Exceeding wise, fair spoken and persuading.” (Henry VIII , Act IV, scene ii) – 37 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 38

WAGNER’S DEBT TO BERLIOZ Symphonie Fantastique : Royal Albert Hall, 9 th August 2015 Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique John Crowther A performance on period instruments to recreate the sound world that Wagner would have experienced when he heard Berlioz conduct the Symphonie Fantastique in Paris. Berlioz’s novel orchestration gave Wagner fertile ideas to use in his own operas, especially in Tannhäuser and in Tristan und Isolde . Wagner was a musical magpie. He shamelessly thieved orchestral ideas, not only from the titanic composers who had lived before him, but also from his older peers whom he knew personally and with whom he exchanged letters from time to time. One of these was Hector Berlioz, ten years his senior. Wagner heard Berlioz conduct the Symphonie Fantastique when, aged 26, he first went to Paris to seek his operatic fortune. Berlioz’s musical language was so original that it stunned Parisian audiences and provided rich pickings for a visiting magpie. So, although there was none of Wagner’s music in the 2015 Proms, we Members of the Wagner Society had the rare opportunity to hear the Symphonie Fantastique performed on period instruments, thereby recreating the sound that so inspired the eager young Wagner. The Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantic was founded by Sir John Elliot Gardiner to present the music of the “Romantic Era” as authentically as possible, primarily by the use of original instruments. Berlioz’s score for the Symphonie Fantastique calls for over 90 instruments, the most for any symphony written up to that time. It included instruments that had never previously been used in any symphony: harps, snare drums, brass ophecleides, a wooden serpent, off-stage church bells and, most importantly, a cor anglais. Berlioz used this colourful palette to paint five explicit scenes describing an artist’s infatuation with a woman and his use of opium which leads to madness. The first movement, “Passions” was taken by Gardiner at a fast tempo with some unique phrasing, pronounced dynamics and exquisite orchestral playing which at times was very Beethovenian. Berlioz’s graceful idée fixe , representing the artist’s obsession for an unrequited love, was introduced and then re-used throughout the movement and indeed it became the backbone of the whole symphony. The second movement, “A Ball”, started as a waltz featuring four harps, two on each side of the stage for added acoustic effect. The idée fixe was woven throughout the movement, sometimes in the woodwinds, sometimes in the lush strings and I wondered if this had inspired Wagner to weave his own leitmotivs into his operas. Gardiner also used pauses to maximise the drama in the music. The third movement was a “Pastoral scene” in which two shepherds (one a cor anglais, the other an off-stage oboe) tossed an evocative melody to and fro across the Albert Hall. The oboe dropped out and the movement ended with one just one lonely shepherd represented by a cor anglais . The fourth movement, “March to the Scaffold,” was highly theatrical. It featured four goat-skinned timpani playing chords, and a full brass section including two ophecleides, making ominous, funereal sounds. The brass instruments used in this performance gave a shriller and far less mellow sound than do modern instruments, but this added to the ghoulishness of the storyline. The fifth movement, “A Witches’ Sabbath”

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was a veritable cauldron of fiery ideas and musical extravagance played with raw energy by a full-blooded orchestra. At times the strings played col legno (the strings played with the wood of the bow) and this created a primitive, eerie sound. The idée fixe was no longer graceful but transposed into a vulgar dance tune. Then the witches danced to a variation on the Dies irae from the Latin Mass as church bells tolled electronically around the PA system of the Royal Albert Hall. The applause at the end of the evening was sustained, acknowledging Elliot Gardiner’s skill in reproducing the sound world for this unique symphony. According to records, Wagner was dazzled by the originality and brilliance of Berlioz’s orchestrations using “new” instruments, some of them included for “special” effects. This no doubt primed Wagner’s ear because he later devised new instruments to create special effects in several of his own operas. Wagner first heard the cor anglais in Paris and thereafter made extensive use of it, firstly in the prelude to Der Fliegender Hollander and then in Lohengrin . Most importantly, he blatantly copied Berlioz’s idea to use a cor anglais to represent a lonely shepherd’s pipe in both Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde . The phrasing of the lone cor anglais in Gardiner’s performance also called to mind Siegfried’s amusing attempts to make a pipe in Siegfried . Perhaps Berlioz’s off-stage church bells in this symphony inspired the off-stage bells in Parsifal ? By all accounts, Wagner never formed any real friendship with Berlioz, but in later life he sent him a first edition score of Tristan und Isolde , possibly as a “thank you” for all the many ideas Berlioz’s music had given him. After Berlioz died, the ever-perceptive Verdi wrote “Berlioz had a real feeling for instrumentation and he anticipated Wagner in many instrumental effects. (The Wagnerians won’t admit it, but it is true.)” . After Wagner died Cosima burned all the correspondence between Berlioz and Wagner. Why she did this we do not know. Was it because they would have confirmed Verdi’s opinion and revealed the true extent of Wagner’s debt to Berlioz?

Berlioz conducting Symphonie Fantastique. Louis Raybauld (1846)

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THIELEMANN APPOINTED MUSIC DIRECTOR OF BAYREUTH FESTIVAL John Crowther On 28 th June Christian Thielemann was appointed to the prestigious post of Music Director of the Bayreuth Festival. This title was given to Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1931, but to nobody else since. The honour has been bestowed now because of Thielemann’s growing contribution to the Festival. He has conducted there every year since 2000 and has impressed audiences and critics alike. This season he conducts Katharina Wagner’s production of Tristan und Isolde . Thielemann’s “day job” is Kapellmeister of both the Staatskapelle Dresden* and the Semperoper Dresden. These are two companies within the same building, (the Semperoper), one for concerts, the other for operas; they share the auditorium and the players. Wagner was once Kapellmeister there, so Thielemann is truly following in his footsteps. Today the repertoire is vast but it is renowned for music by Wagner and Strauss. One of Thielemann’s “part-time” jobs is Artistic Director of the Salzburg Easter Festival; his Staatskapelle Dresden travels too and becomes the Festival’s resident ensemble. Thielemann deeply respects Wagner’s Saxon roots. When he planned the bicentennial celebrations in Dresden he included music that had inspired the “young” Wagner as well as excerpts from Wagner’s later works. He also reconstructed a performance of Das Liebesmahl der Apostel which Wagner had designed for 1,300 performers in Dresden’s Frauenkirche. When he planned the Bicentenary in Bayreuth he included all Wagner’s early operas. We heard Rienzi where Thielemann’s magic transformed “young” Wagner into “mature” Wagner. The lady next to us remarked: “He has Wagner in his little finger.” Thielemann’s approach to Wagner’s music is holistic with three intertwining strands: • Music that inspired Wagner (eg Beethoven, Weber, Spontini) • All Wagner’s operas (10 Bayreuth canon, 3 Frühwerke) and Symphony in C major • Music inspired by Wagner’s operas (eg Strauss, Bruckner, Debussy) Most important of all, at the age of 21, Thielemann won a Bayreuth Bursary from the Berlin Wagner Society. He sat in the Festspielhaus “burning with enthusiasm”**. The message to our Wagner Society is clear: we must support our young musicians whether they are singers, répétiteurs or conductors because great oaks from little acorns grow.

Photo: Matthias Creutziger *One of the oldest orchestras in the world (see David Woodhead’s article, WN 217) ** My Life with Wagner . It will be reviewed in the next issue of Wagner News . – 40 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 41

WAGNER’S BIRTHPLACE Richard Lemon

I was interested to read David Woodhead’s note on page 13 of Wagner News 218: July 2015. We were in Leipzig last September. Knowing that our hotel was only a few minutes walk from the shrine at No. 3 The Brühl, we set off to find it. Not easy! The site is now part of a supermarket, but there is a plaque on the wall.

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SAFFRON OPERA: BIRTH OF A NEW COMPANY Francis Lambert Saffron Opera Group’s origins owe a lot to the decision of a visionary local benefactor to replace Saffron Walden’s state comprehensive school’s out-dated school hall with a state-of- the art 740 seat concert hall. His Yellow Car Charitable Trust, which also sponsors us, stipulated that the hall should have world class acoustics, promote professional concerts of the highest standard, and be available as a community facility for local music-making. The appointment of Angela Dixon as Chief Executive of Saffron Hall was a stroke of genius and has ensured that the benefactor’s vision is already being fulfilled. The Hall is already attracting top international artists and orchestras and generating capacity audiences from London, Cambridge and much further afield. Mike Thorne, Vice- Chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a passionate Wagnerian conductor, heard the inaugural concert in the Hall (Verdi’s Requiem by the Saffron Walden Choral Society) and was immediately determined to exploit its potential by using it to staging concert performances of Wagner. He approached Paul Garland to assemble a chorus and me to deal with the day-to-day organisation. Wagnerian soprano Elaine McKrill put together a stellar cast for a concert performance of Die Meistersinger and Paul brought in chorus singers from everywhere between London and Cambridge including a few from the ROH and the BBC Singers. We secured the services of Janet Wheeler and Richard Carr, (Music Director and Accompanist respectively of Saffron Walden Choral Society) to rehearse us. Mike Thorne assembled the orchestra which took as its basis the St Albans Symphony Orchestra with 20 additional professional string players so that we could have a full Wagnerian 12, 12, 10, 10, 6 line-up. The logistics of producing an opera of this length with so many key personnel involved are immense ranging from arranging everything with Saffron Hall to sourcing a period cobbler’s last and hammer for Hans Sachs. In all of this we were helped and encouraged considerably by Angela Dixon, CEO of Saffron Hall, her team and Marcus Eustace, the hall’s technical manager. Obtaining surtitles caused some amusement. When we advised Ken Chalmers from the ROH of our plans he replied that anyone who was mad enough to attempt Die Meistersinger could have them for free! He let us borrow their portable surtitle system and put us in touch with Judi Palmer who operated them for us. We owe them many thanks. The performance went without a hitch, mainly due to concert manager Jeff Thomson’s meticulous planning. Musically, it proved itself to be a triumph of casting by Elaine, a tribute to the stamina of the orchestra and to the energetic but sensitive Mike Thorne. Special mention must be made of Andrew Greenan, who imbued Hans Sachs with all the necessary gravitas, Jonathan Finney as an earnest and intense Walther, Adam Tunnicliffe’s appealing and musical David and the revelation that was Inga-Britt Andersson as Eva. We got terrific reviews, not least from Michael Tanner in Opera magazine, Jim Pritchard on Seen and Heard and Paul Dawson-Bowling in Wagner News . So, for Saffron Opera Group, it was a bright beginning. The formula of matching fully professional soloists with an invitation orchestra and chorus clearly works. Saffron Opera Group’s two-year Ring Cycle starts with Das Rheingold on 17 th January 2016 [email protected] – 42 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 43

WAGNER SOCIETY WEBSITE Many of you will have noticed that our website has now been upgraded. This gives us better profiling with Google and enables the site to be accessed on tablets and mobile devices. It also has an entirely new look and feel, and should be easier to navigate as well as more attractive to read. Inevitably however, we have experienced a few teething problems with the new site and we are working hard to fix these. If you experience any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us on [email protected] and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Initially you will have had to change your password to log on and we understand that most of you have now successfully accomplished this. If you have not yet visited the site, please do so at www.wagnersociety.org and get yourself set up. We are pleased to inform you also that you can now renew your membership online. Simply log into your profile and you will see a link on the left hand side named “subscriptions”. This will show you your membership status, along with when you last paid. If you have payments outstanding, we would be delighted if you could update these, using the online payment options. If you would rather renew manually, you can, of course, still send Margaret Murphy a cheque or create a bank transfer, and there is an option to notify us online that this is your chosen payment method. We would really welcome your input, so please feel free to comment on the site and submit items for publication – bearing in mind we have limitless space compared to Wagner News and we would really welcome some content from our members. In particular, we would like to know about Wagner related events in your area, especially if you are outside London. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to Wagner. We are happy to publicise any classical music events you feel would be of interest to members and others visiting the site. Simply e-mail us using the address above.

MINUTES OF WAGNER SOCIETY COMMITTEE MEETINGS The Committee are happy to announce that henceforth, minutes of all Committee meetings from August 2015 onwards will be published on the website for members to access. Please be aware that the minutes of a meeting will not be published until formally approved at the next Committee meeting. For example therefore, the August minutes will be available following the September meeting. As a result, we will cease to put summaries of the meetings in Wagner News. The Secretary

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MIKE MORGAN AWARDED HONORARY SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP The Committee of the Wagner Society is delighted to announce that the former Treasurer, Mike Morgan, has been granted honorary membership of the Society. This is in recognition of the extraordinary work that Mike undertook to sort out the accounts after the unfortunate situation that had occurred with his predecessor. He represented a very safe and reliable pair of hands for the Society’s accounts for a few years after that and we are most grateful to him.

ANDREW PORTER: 1928–2015 Gary Kahn The music critic and opera scholar Andrew Porter died in April this year, aged 86. He will best be remembered by Wagnerians of a certain generation for his masterly Ring libretto translations for the Reginald Goodall-conducted performances at ENO during the 1970s. He was one of the most erudite and respected writers of his generation on opera in the English language. He was the lead music critic of the Financial Times from 1953-1972 and the New Yorker from 1972–1973 and 1974–92 before returning to the UK to write for the Observer and the TLS. He continued to review opera performances, most notably in Opera magazine, up to less than a month before he died. A performance in his memory of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria took place at the Barbican on 29 th September.

CHELSEA OPERA GROUP PRESENTS DAS LIEBESVERBOT Conducted by Anthony Negus

6.30pm on Sunday 25 th October 2015 Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace, London SW1X 9DQ With Helena Dix, Kirstin Sharpin, David Soar, Nicholas Folwell and Paul Curievici Based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , Wagner’s second opera reflects French and Italian operatic styles. One of Wagner's two grand comic operas, (the other being Die Meistersinger ) this is a rare opportunity to reassess what in many ways remains his most significant early work. With hints of Mozart, Beethoven and Weber, Wagner's later music is discernible in embryonic form. Tickets from Cadogan Hall: 020 7730 4500

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THE SEATTLE RING ON CD 14 CDs in a presentation box with many production photographs. (Avie AV 22313) Paul Dawson-Bowling My reason for reviewing things is the satisfaction of praising the things that I love. Normally if something is not for the most part to be praised, it is not worth my while to review it. However, the Seattle Ring has been given a degree of acclaim in the Wagner Journal by the distinguished Paul Breckbill. Of course reviews are notably individual. I once almost fainted on hearing the equally distinguished John Deathridge telling the world that he found Hans Knappertsbusch so boring in Götterdämmerung that he could not bear to hear it to the end – Hans Knappertsbusch! Even so, Paul Breckbill’s acclaim seems so misplaced that to save readers from disappointment and a wasteful financial outlay, it seemed worth indicating why my own response is so different. The Seattle Ring became famous worldwide as an imaginative attempt to do Wagner Wagner’s way, to make visible in the theatre all that is enshrined in his stage directions. The first three full cycles in 2001were sold out a year to the day before the opening of Das Rheingold because the individual segments had won such golden opinions; and my review in the Journal of the Wagner Society of Northern California was given the headline, ‘The Best Ring in the World’. It was repeated every four years for 13 years, three cycles every four years, and I twice asked Speight Jenkins, the charismatic director of Seattle Opera, about giving it immortality by filming it. Each time he said it would cost at least $1 million, or perhaps twice that amount, and he could not manage it. This was a surprising cop-out for the man who could lure money out of conglomerates for culture more easily than charming birds out of the trees. Eventually the Seattle Ring came to be preserved, but only on CD, which does away with its most spectacular feature, Stephen Wadsworth’s wonderful production. It was this which made audiences flock to it from all over the globe, and shorn of its visible dimension, the CD recording must be judged simply as a recording of The Ring – yet another. It represents the Seattle Ring ’s final outing, but the style of its sound would have spoilt any of them. The recording has the voices bellowing at the listener right in the ear, while the orchestra seems to be playing in a different town. It might have mattered less if orchestral sound had been allowed more body, but the all-important strings sound shrivelled, and the only element with real prominence, an excessive prominence, is the contra bass tuba which comes blasting out of the picture disconcertingly. Regrettably too, the sound engineers have followed the current unfounded orthodoxy which holds that voices must have different microphones, with a hard emphasis on the upper partials and sibilants. The result is an oral glare on the voices, and the entire set is an uncomfortable listen. How good it would be if the engineers would occasionally come out of their listening booths into the world and hear what a real sound is actually like. Unfortunately they do not in any case document the musical aspect at its best. There is above all the little matter of the musical direction. Asher Fisch is the third conductor to direct the Seattle Ring , and one of the besetting problems of the Seattle Opera has always been the absence of a mighty musician, a Mahler or Solti or a Gergiev to create a vital musical individuality. Asher Fisch was simply another in the ongoing succession of the guest conductors invited along by Speight Jenkins, and his selection gives him the distinction of being the second conductor to record the complete cycle twice, in two fully commercial versions (The other is Christian Thielemann). Asher Fisch’s first recording was from Adelaide in 2005, and all I can report, sadly, is that when great Wagnerians like Lionel – 45 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 46

Friend and Mark Elder go almost unrecorded, it is bizarre that such a flabby and undistinguished interpretation as this should be perpetuated for a second time on CD. It is all so ordinary. There is no line, no far spanning vision; it is all so choppy. Fisch gets the Rhinemaidens to clip short the word ‘gold’ in their hymn to it; they peck at it; how can someone who is a musician do this? How in the Descent to Nibelheim can he show so little feel for Wagner’s lustrous harmony in the ‘curse on love’ on the horns as to decrescendo it instantly, so that its loveliness goes for nothing? How can he play through the Descent as a whole, with no trickle of adrenaline? To be sure he is not helped by his trumpets cheeping away in the background, thanks to those recording engineers, when Wagner’s music should deliver its terrible picture of beauty and romance hammered down under the brute forces of blood and iron. There is no point in continuing this catalogue of desecration. To be sure, some individual interpretations from the past remain outstanding. Richard Paul Fink remains a tremendous, blistering Alberich. Stephanie Blythe is as ever a specially perceptive, loving, individual, and wounded Fricka, but these qualities were only fully apparent in their visual manifestation. And with haunting memories of the subtle, multifaceted Peter Kazaras as Loge it is sad to hear the featureless Mark Showalter as his replacement. And as for Greer Grimsley who sings Wotan – I admired him as the Valkyrie Wotan at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, in 2011, – his voice and interpretation then had far more light and shade than is documented at Seattle on these CDs. So what about the positives; is there any reason to buy this disappointing set? Well at present, I am glad of it because it has the remarkable Alwyn Mellor as Brünnhilde. When Malcolm Rivers wrote of his disappointment with the Seattle Brünnhilde of five years ago, he probably could not have conceived that one of his own ‘Mastersingers’ graduates would be taking the role in 2013. And unsurprisingly she is infinitely worth hearing, although it was necessary to apply a steep cut-filter so that the engineers’ glare on her voice calms down, and turn down the volume to such an extent that the orchestral contribution is virtually sacrificed. The hope is that this will be not be her last recorded Brünnhilde, and that her riveting contribution will one day be presented again supported by an orchestral sound of proper Wagnerian splendour. Perhaps the set is worth paying the money just for her final high C in Siegfried !

IAN BERESFORD GLEAVES Andrea Bullock A former editor of Wagner News, Ian Beresford Gleaves sadly died aged 78 on 7 th July following a short illness. Ian was an outstanding musician and a wonderful music lecturer. He specialized in the works of Wagner and it was through attending a Wagner Society study day many years ago that my husband Roger and I first experienced Ian's remarkable talent. From that day on we followed him for many years to different venues around Britain where he gave weekend lectures featuring the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner and others. All his lectures were very well attended and hugely appreciated and many who attended them also followed him, as we did, year after year. Ian was also very well read and his lectures were all the more interesting as he would often quote from Shakespeare, TS Eliot and many other poets and writers. Ian also had a great sense of humour and made us laugh! Roger and I have lost a good friend but we feel that all those of us who were fortunate enough to know Ian and his work will always remember him through the music he helped us to understand and love. – 46 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 47

Wagner Symposium GESAMTKUNSTWERK, OR NOT? Where do you stand regarding Wagner's propaganda about Gesamtkunstwerk ? Concert performances provide many of us with some of our best experiences of enjoying his work. This may be appear to challenge the orthodoxy of Wagner's apparent position on Gesamtkunstwerk and even raise doubt as to whether he really believed in the concept. In Wagner News 218 I invited readers to share their thoughts on this question. Ed. David Edwards Gesamt adj. whole, entire, complete, total, general, overall, united, all Kunst n. art, skill; knack, trick Werk n. work, deed, act These are the definitions given by the Collins German Dictionary of the three words that together make up one of those wonderful composite terms in which the German language delights: Gesamtkunstwerk n. synthesis of the arts, total work of art – what today we might call a multi-media artwork. It was a concept that first inspired Wagner during his exile in Zurich in the 1850s. However, like much of the composer's pronouncements and thought, his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk changed and matured over the years. (Incidentally, the original idea wasn't his: the notion existed in the discussions of Romantic artists around the beginning of the 19 th century). For Wagner, writing The Artwork of the Future in 1850, it was imperative to create works that combined Poetry, Music and Dance along the lines of the ancient Greek theatre. Other art forms such as architecture, sculpture and design would also contribute to the "total" picture, each form becoming stronger through competing and comparison with the others, until they all combined into one indivisible whole. Also, and of fundamental importance to his Gesamtkunstwerk philosophy, there was the social element and the inclusion of the audience. Wagner envisaged the Gesamtkunstwerk being part of a political new order, where social demarcation was redrawn along more egalitarian lines and communication between the art work and the public acquired the status of something approaching a religious experience. In Wagner’s opinion, by the mid 19 th Century the arts had become devalued and divorced from the people through the fragmentation of an increasingly industrial society. Wagner’s vision was of a renascent völkisch (national or ethnic) society, with art as its guiding force. Gesamt therefore always referred to the collective, communal participation of the public as well as to the unity and totality of the work presented on stage. “Total” literally meant everybody involved in the artistic process, on both sides of the curtain. Over the years, for various reasons, this ambitious philosophy had to change. Dance, for example, was never a great part of Wagner's world and soon became modified into ideas about gesture rather than choreographic movement per se. The sheer practical difficulties of staging The Ring and the impossibility in 1876 of realising the very specific demands of his own stage directions caused both frustration and a rethink in Wagner's mind. Additionally, it seems he was never very sure of what he wanted to see in a performance of his works. Like so many people, he knew what he didn't care for – quasi-historical reproduction of past eras – but he was surprisingly much more vague about what he really wanted to have represented visually on stage. – 47 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 48

What Wagner never lost sight of was what the Festspielhaus was intended to do: to create a unified experience between audience and performer. It was to be a combination of the Real and the Ideal, the one viewing the other in a distant false perspective uninterrupted by the distractions of a visible orchestra or lights in the auditorium. He originally wanted performances at Bayreuth to be free of charge, and visiting Bayreuth itself was intended to be part of a pilgrimage of devotion by the faithful. It was built as a place in which to dream, not worry about seat-prices. The monument to that vision still stands today, although the financial reality is now inevitably more practical. So does the modern concert/semi-staging format that is currently so popular deliver a good approximation of Wagner’s intentions? In many ways it does. Without the visual “distraction” of scenery and costumes, there is an immediate sense of dramatic and textual communication between performers and audience, in which the orchestra is a primary protagonist. The presence of the musicians on the concert platform is of course the most glaring departure from Wagner's ideal – but I think it does full justice to the music, which is the reason we’re sitting there in the first place. Additionally, concert halls tend to be more “democratic” places than theatres, with much less division between the classes of ticket- buyer and they have a more communal, participatory atmosphere to them than most theatres do. I think Wagner would have approved of this format for performances of his works, though admittedly it's hard to lose oneself in much of a dream-state when watching the bowing arms of string players and the gestures of the conductor. But isn't movement part of the “theatre” of it anyway? I'm not sure if anyone has yet achieved the perfect balance of visual and musical values in a concert staging – but I haven't seen the Opera North Ring and it sounds as if this may come close. The concert-staging format has created a new type of experience. It has some elements of theatre, it pays scrupulous attention to musical standards and it is relatively economical. Perhaps if Simon Rattle gets his new concert hall in London, then the architects can integrate facilities for greater visual enhancement of the music into the structure of their design? Meanwhile, there's no indication that fully designed and staged productions in theatres are about to become defunct. Wagner’s works remain an incredible stimulus to the visual imagination and proof of his lasting impact on theatrical presentation. There must be room for both approaches. Barry Millington I profoundly disagree with the preference, stated in many quarters, for concert performance of Wagner's works. Essentially, it misses the whole aspect of the theatrical dimension that is crucial to them, and which Wagner prized above all. And I don't even agree that it's necessarily preferable from the point of view of focusing on the score, because Wagner actually wanted the drama to take precedence over the music (in as much as they can be differentiated). That's why he built the sunken pit at Bayreuth. If you choose to endorse concert performances, you'll hardly be going out on a limb: critics and audiences alike frequently praise them to the skies. But you know the real reason: it's because they hate these radical productions that “get in the way” of the music. They've always hated interventionist productions, back to Kupfer, Chéreau and Wieland Wagner. Now, of course, the latter have become mainstream… There's a lot of confusion about what Wagner was doing with Gesamtkunstwerk because when he wrote those early essays it was still a matter of theory: he was grappling with new priorities in actually creating the work of art. His ideas about how the works – 48 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 49

should be performed, expressed later in life, are no longer theoretical. They centre on Gesamtkunstwerk principles to some extent, but it's more fundamentally at this point a question of how to engage with the emotional/psychological/ideological issues of the works through the theatrical dimension. That's what the finest modern productions are trying to do and in that sense they are rather more faithful to Wagner than any concert performance could be. John Crowther The word Gesamtkunstwerk has two meanings for me. The simplest meaning is a fusion of all the arts: poetry, story-telling, music, singing, visual images and dance. All of these abound in Wagner’s operas except that “dance” appears in just a few although “dance” is now being included in more and more productions. To honour Wagner’s bicentenary on 23 rd May 2013 Ballet Leipzig devised a programme of Wagner’s music that had rarely been choreographed: the Wesendonck Lieder and the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde with mezzo soprano Katrin Goring singing from the pit. The most visually aesthetic of the seven dances was Traume and it truly deserved the accolade Gesamtkunstwerk .

Photo: Bettina Stroess, Oper Leipzig. A more complex meaning of Gesamtkunstwerk is to add natural philosophy (science) and religion into the mix. Natural philosophy was progressing apace all around Wagner at the time he was writing his operas. Germany was the world leader in chemistry, optics and microbiology. In England Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution which threw the Church into chaos. So just how does this broader definition of Gesamtkunstwerk fit into Wagner’s work? In the first few minutes of the Mariinsky Ring Cycle in Cardiff on 30 th November 2006 when the double basses started playing that famous E ♭, dancers wearing nutbrown body-stockings crept from the darkness making sinuous movements to represent the evolution of life in the mud beneath the Rhine. These gyrations were similar to those seen by microbiologists down the microscope. When Woglinde sang Weia! Waga! the audience sensed that Darwinian evolution was underway: primitive aquatic life had evolved into amphibious Rhinemaidens. Next to evolve would be some odd, entirely terrestrial creature: enter Alberich. These first few minutes of Das Rheingold expanded the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk to embrace both science and religion. Bravo Maestro Gergiev! Despite his genius, Wagner rarely fully achieved Gesamtkunstwerk in his work. But he has inspired others to complete it for him. – 49 – 41934_WagnerNews219_MH_13895 Wagner News 174 18/09/2015 10:54 Page 50

PARSIFAL ACT III: “TIME BECOMES SPACE” St Botolph’s Church Hall, 5 th September 2015 What is Parsifal all about? Christianity? Buddhism? Racial purity? Part Five of The Ring ? David Edwards addressed this question in his enthralling Time becomes Space presentation by Mastersingers artists who will perform Act III of Parsifal with the Rehearsal Orchestra at Henry Wood Hall on 18 th October.

Photography by Richard Carter The title of this event was inspired by Gurnemanz’s philosophically challenging line when escorting Parsifal to the Grail Chapel: “You see, my son, here time becomes space…”. It was followed by a series of masterclasses given by Sir John Tomlinson. Katie Barnes describes witnessing the energy and enthusiasm with which he passed on his peerless knowledge as “truly inspirational to see how deeply he cares about nurturing the voices of the next generation.”

Read all about it at: www.musicclublondon.com

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the Wagner society

President: Dame Gwyneth Jones Vice President: Sir John Tomlinson CONTACTS

Chairman: Richard Miles [email protected] Court Lodge Farm, Blechingley, Surrey RH1 4LP

Secretary and Wagner Andrea Buchanan [email protected] Society Bursary Manager: [email protected]

Treasurer: Neil King [email protected]

Membership Secretary: Margaret Murphy [email protected] 16 Doran Drive, Redhill, Surrey RH1 6AX

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Wagner News Editor: Roger Lee [email protected] 155 Llanrwst Road, Colwyn Bay LL28 5YS

Director of Malcolm Rivers www.mastersingers.info The Mastersingers and [email protected] The Goodall Scholars: 44 Merry Hill Mount, Bushey, Herts. WD 23 1DJ

Wagner Society website: www.wagnersociety.org Registered charity number 266383

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FORTHCOMING WAGNER SOCIETY EVENTS

2.30 - 7.30pm Sunday 18 October THE REHEARSAL ORCHESTRA/MASTERSINGERS – PARSIFAL ACT III Sponsored by The Wagner Society Once again this popular event will take place at Henry Wood Hall, and running times are 2.30 to 7.30pm with the run-through likely to take place at 3pm, and the final performance at 6pm. The cast is Gurnemanz – James Platt (cover Donald Thomson), Amfortas – Stuart Pendred (cover Eddie Wade), Parsifal – Marc Le Brocq (cover Brian Smith Walters). Tickets £20/£10 students. Henry Wood Hall, Trinity Church Square, London SE1 4HU Borough

2pm Sunday 22 November THE WAGNER SOCIETY SINGING COMPETITION 2015 In the presence of Dame Gwyneth Jones, President of the Wagner Society. The judging panel this year includes: Dame Josephine Barstow; Mark Wigglesworth – Music Director, English National Opera; Scott Carlton – Chairman, The Wagner Society of New York Singers Committee; Isabel Murphy – Director of Artistic Administration, Welsh National Opera. In addition to the main competition, The Carole Rees Award for further studies in Wagner roles will once again take place, and the President will award the prize of a Masterclass to her chosen finalist. Finalists will be announced following the auditions taking place on 4 October. Tickets £25/£5 music students. Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, Marylebone Road, London NW1 5HT Baker St.

THE WAGNER SOCIETY CHRISTMAS PARTY Wednesday 2 December, 6-8pm, 15 Gibson Square, London N5 0RD Tickets £20 to include food and drink. This event is held at the home of our Treasurer, who has kindly agreed to host the party. Places are limited, so please apply for tickets early from Mike Morgan in the usual way.

7pm Tuesday 19 January 2016 DINNER RECITAL JOINTLY HOSTED BY THE BERLIOZ SOCIETY, LISZT SOCIETY, ALKAN SOCIETY, RICHARD STRAUSS SOCIETY, MAHLER SOCIETY, AND THE WAGNER SOCIETY This annual event will feature performances of works by all the composers, followed by dinner. Further details regarding performers, and ticket information, to be announced shortly. The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, London NW1 7NL Camden Town

Tickets for the above events, except 19 January, are available from Mike Morgan, 9 West Court, Downley, High Wycombe, Bucks HP13 5TG. Please send cheques payable to The Wagner Society, enclosing an SAE.

More details of forthcoming events are available at www.wagnersociety.org