Woken from a deep, exhausted sleep – yesterday was a very long day, up at 02:30 to drive to Heathrow, the usual hanging around, two-hour flight to Munich and then a succession of trains, München – Regensburg – Weiden in der Oberpfälz – Bayreuth, with cancellations and missed connections due to running late, and then a torrential downpour at the end. Actually A. could have set her alarm for an hour later, as we’re not meeting our friends M and C for breakfast until nine, and the beds are, as always in Germany, really not well designed for sitting up in bed reading (and of course there is no kettle for a cup of tea) – we should be getting up immediately and off to work! Nevertheless we both read for an hour, smelling fresh coffee and cigarette smoke from outside, listening to the rain. This is certainly the first time in Bayreuth that we have been wondering about turning the heating on, rather than arguing with the air conditioning…
It’s now our fourth time in this hotel – having discovered it, we wouldn’t go anywhere else when we visit here – and it is reassuring that, after four years’ absence, there are still some familiar faces among the staff, but a shame that they no longer have professionally-photographed portraits of the staff on the walls of the breakfast room (too much turnover recently?), which always used to be a nice touch and a sign of the management valuing everyone who works there. But the breakfast is as good as ever, an intimidating range of possibilities with some particularly good Weißwurst, and of course A.’s favourite waffle machine with yeast batter standing ready. As we’d seen at dinner the evening before, the prices are higher than before, but not ridiculously so – which is to say, of course they are ridiculously inflated as it’s Festspielzeit, but not dramatically more over the top than four years ago.
Our German continues to get a thorough work-out. M did at one point start a reply to A in English, and was firmly cut off by C; Wir sind in Deutschland, wir alle sprechen Deutsch. (Whether, when they visited us in England, we consistently spoke only English, I am not going to comment – but since I am already falling into my habit, after a few days in Germany, of weird Denglish constructions and word choices even when speaking English, and even of dreaming in German, I am not going to object, and it is as always good practice; at least it is all nice, clear Hochdeutsch). Again, as yesterday evening, the idiocies of Brexit loom as a conversational theme; as with so many people we meet, including taxi drivers, the question ‘Is your country just really stupid?’ constantly looms (as if they have no unscrupulous populists feeding on resentment and weaponising genuine grievances in Dresden…). I offer the humourous account of my recent smuggling activities, bringing British wool to a conference in Bochum to exchange with a colleague for a box of my favourite coffee beans ordered from Niederbayern as it would cost a fortune to ship either of these directly, and that takes us safely onto topics like the funding of conferences and the persistent expectation that they should then be published.
After breakfast, we stroll, in a light but steady drizzle, the mile or so up to the Festspielhaus to be fitted for the Augmented Reality glasses that will enhance the performance of Parsifal. The process is swift and efficient; the only issue is the necessity of deciding in advance whether to wear glasses or contact lenses. We spend some time looking at the permanent exhibition – in case it’s raining later; A and I have seen it multiple times, but this is a first time at the Festspielhaus for M and C – on the fate of Jewish members of the Bayreuth ensemble under Nazism (and Jewish-associated, so to speak; this time I happened to be most struck by some who were barred, exiled or imprisoned simply for refusing to divorce their partners or sack members of their dance troupe). Of course such an acknowledgement of the darker bits of the past is the least they can do, but it’s still good that they do it; C has told us about an ongoing production of the Ring in Dresden, carefully historically researched, where there is a constant need to ‘manage’ the reactions of local AfD politicians who are less than happy with the idea of “over-emphasising” such things. I attempt a brief explanation of the exploits of Restore Trust in a similar direction.
We walk back down the hill, still in heavy drizzle but never quite heavy enough to abandon the enterprise; A and C walk ahead, M and I return to discussions of university things: what to do (or rather, how to resign oneself) when a doctoral student insists on doing their own thing against all advice, the impact of Chat-GPT on assessment, our shared experience of the conference volume that never appeared and eventually each of us repurposed our papers for another publication, and of course much personal gossip. Back in the town centre, we are equally concerned with showing M some major sights (C has been here with a friend, albeit years ago, but this is new for him, and it really is a pretty and interesting city even in the rain), checking that our favourite haunts are still there (the Conditerei, yes, but the day’s schedule doesn’t accommodate Kaffee und Kuchen; the noodle restaurant, yes, but not open on Sundays; but the Nepalese restaurant has gone), and finding some lunch. We try a new place by the Neues Schloss serving traditional Fränkisches potato cakes and flatbreads with smoked salmon and sour cream or grilled chicken – actually not bad. Back to the hotel to shower and change, then a taxi up to the Festspielhaus ready to be let in early for the Augmented Reality introduction – which is mostly a series of things which one shouldn’t do, like leaving the glasses on the seat or taking the wrong pair; as far as their use is concerned, the instruction is simply to look at the stage and see some holographic doves – which to be honest I initially thought were seagulls – flying around.
Here we go, to Zukunftsgesamtkunstwerk and beyond!
Hmm. Let’s say that I can imagine the potential, if they could make the glasses a bit lighter – by the end of the first act the bridge of my nose was red and painful, and halfway through the second I, like the majority, pretty well gave up on them, especially as some of the projections were actively obscuring what was happening on stage. One obvious problem was that, because only a small part of the audience got to experience the AR, it couldn’t be used for anything essential to the story or the concept, which of course runs the risk that the inessential augmentation becomes trivial distraction. The other was that, having spent all this money on the new toy – and perhaps also to justify all the sore noses – the team had to use it all the time, where a more substle and restrained approach would have been far better. Dead trees – including dead root systems – echoing the single dead tree on stage in Act One: pretty effective. Showing the swan being shot by Parsifal’s arrow: yucky and overdone but memorable. Endless floating skulls and strange glowing figures wandering around? Not so much. Initially I wondered whether the addition of AR meant things on stage had to be more static, so people didn’t get out of sync with the images, but it became clear that there was no hesitation in blocking off the whole stage with giant floating skulls; it was just a static production.
I did make the error – admittedly, invited by the whole set-up – of spending too much time at the beginning thinking about these AR images and their significance, before realising that they could only be a supplement to the director’s core conception on stage. Focusing on the stage, however, didn’t greatly improve things. Parsifal was never my favourite Wagner opera, with its over-bearing motifs of sacrifice, punishment, hatred of the body and redemption; it was only seeing the Tcherniakov production in Berlin that persuaded me that it is actually as rich and ambivalent as his other works. This production is, one might say, not so much rich as indigestible – far too many different things thrown together (or indeed ar one another) in the hope that they might amount to some coherent meaning; and it’s ambivalent only insofar as I have no idea what it was trying to say.
In the course of the evening I developed all sorts of new ideas about what I thought of Parsifal; I still haven’t a clue what the director thinks it’s about. Some bits seemed entirely conventional, even traditional; the climatic scene in Act Two between Parsifal and Kundry, for example, appeared to be nothing more than a basic ‘female temptress tries and fails to seduce noble knight’ episode. Acts One and Three seemed to want to say something about environmental degradation and cobalt mining (and there’s an article in the programme going on about this), while making it rather unclear how that relates to Amfortas’ wound even if the grail is a big chunk of blue mineral – but what Klingsor’s pink Barbie kingdom is supposed to be in this conception passed me by. Two Kundrys, only one of whom sings; okay, lots of possibilities with the divided self and/or the might-have-been self and/or the Doppelgänger – but why is one of them living in a hiking tent?
As noted, in the event that anyone lets me direct Parsifal I have plenty of ideas of my own, that would make considerably more sense… This made me think more highly of productions I’ve disliked in the past, even Kosky’s Meistersinger. But musically it was wonderful, everything you would expect from Bayreuth – and I would, as far as opera is concerned, always choose irritating would-be innovative approaches over boring convention any day. A fabulous experience overall; the refreshments don’t get any less extortionate in price (but the Sekt was pretty good; A insisted on champagne nevertheless), and interestingly a higher proportion of men in simple dinner jackets and bow ties, in the very year when I decided – partly for ease of packing – to go with the dress code of the slightly more arty crowd…
Out into the rain in search of the shuttle back to the hotel, which proves tricker than expected. Not only did the taxi driver who brought us up give us the wrong directions, but the arrangement for paying hin-und-zurück fares and receiving a Quittung for the journey back falls apart; we get A and C into one vehicle without a problem, but the second driver refuses to accept our Quittung as valid in the absence of a special laminated ticket. I’d left the discussion to M as the native speaker, but when he apparently just accepted this situation – implying a mile’s walk back in the rain – I channelled my small piece of inner Germanness into determined litigation of the issue, which, if only because the driver has two free places and wants to get going, finally wins the day.
Back to the hotel for a final drink. My ability to set aside traditional English ineffectual politeness is praised; C notes that, while she doesn’t much like the English and their refusal ever to say what they mean, I might be an exception. A, who thought the Parsifal was wonderful, explains her interpretation of the director’s concept; I remain unpersuaded. We retire to bed just after midnight, and sleep very badly.
The uebermensch of the West Country* strikes a chord…fantastic account for those of us who have never been to the F’haus – and probably now never will.
*Shame, as Jenkyns is a keen Wagnerian himself. You’d probably get on.
There are a couple of older posts where I reviewed and/or rambled about previous productions I’ve seen: ‘Wagner’s Nightmare’ on Kosky’s Meistersinger, about which I was unenthusiastic, and ‘Kunst und Revolution’ on Castorf’s amazing Ring.