Stephen Fry on Wagner (2010) - full transcript
ORCHESTRA TUNING UP
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
They call this the Green Hill.
And at the summit
sits a legendary theatre.
Well, for anyone who loves
Wagner as I do, this place is
Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca,
Graceland, all rolled into one.
Bayreuth, the home of the
Bayreuth Festival Theatre.
And I'm here
for the first time in my life.
It's what I've always
dreamed of doing.
Oh, look, ticket office! Eek!
Every summer, they stage a
festival here dedicated to
the music of Richard Wagner.
I've received an invitation
to go behind closed doors
as the new season takes shape.
It's fabulous, you don't
often get a chance to see this.
There's so much to look at.
But only one place to start.
And that's with the music.
Wow, this is amazing. Lucky beggars!
As always, the centrepiece of this
year's festival is The Ring Cycle.
Four monumental music dramas
inspired by ancient myth.
This is a rehearsal
for the second of them.
Look.
Valkyrie, second act,
just the second act.
My God,
there it all is. Every note of it.
Shouldn't really be looking,
he's got his notes here.
It's cheating, whoops!
Put that down.
Quick, I'll be in trouble!
And there are the valkyries, look.
Guten tag.
Hello.
A valkyrie, if you've not had the
pleasure of meeting one before,
is a female goddess.
A daughter of Wotan,
the king of the gods.
Three, four, five of them, we're
three missing, plus Brunhilde.
Of course, you stand waiting
for a valkyrie for hours and
then they all come at once.
MUSIC: "The Ride of The Valkyries"
by Wagner
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
It must be the most
famous Wagner tune of them all.
But music
is only one element of his genius.
He was also an
extraordinary dramatist.
And his revolutionary work
demanded the creation
of a unique theatre to stage it in.
It's just fabulous to see this.
I never imagined in all my life that
I'd see a rehearsal of the beginning
of act three of The Valkyrie.
The score sounds so funny on
the piano, it almost sounds
It took Wagner a lifetime to
create this temple to his art.
It's still driven today by
the ideals which inspired him.
Dedicated to excellence in
performance and production.
Don't know which opera this
is from, some mud made of rubber.
And real grass.
It's just amazing,
the number of personnel that must be
involved just in the stitching of
costumes, let alone the designing
and the finishing and the fitting.
It's an incredible thing.
Oh look, and more here.
That could be
Loge, the god of fire.
I don't know, someone like that.
Excellent.
THEY SPEAK GERMAN
An ocelot, my goodness me!
But it wasn't killed
for the production?
No. Not at all, it's a very old one.
A very old one.
Hi, I'm Stephen.
Hi. You're playing a valkyrie,
you're playing Rossweisse.
Oh, it's quite a costume,
it's fantastic.
Wow!
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
Yeah!
Oh, I wish I were a
valkyrie sometimes.
Fabric a-go-go. These
boxes, even the boxes are Wagnerian.
Parsifal women, Ring 2006 Siegfried.
It's just a...
It's a treasure house, isn't it?
Stoff. Goodbye.
Not sure if I was allowed in.
You might be wondering
why I'm so excited about being here.
I must have been 11 or 12 when
I first heard Wagner's music
on my father's gramophone.
It was the overture to Tannhauser,
one of his earlier operas.
And it did something
most extraordinary to me.
I've always loved music, I've always
been hopeless at performing it.
Couldn't really play an
instrument, certainly can't sing
but it's made me do things inside,
it's released forces within me.
And no music has done it
like Wagner's.
To experience the music I love
in the composer's own theatre is
something I've dreamed of doing
for as long as I can remember.
But it's no secret that
my passion was also shared by him.
And, like me, he felt
the magnetic pull of Bayreuth.
I'm Jewish and lost relatives in the
Holocaust, so before I take my seat
in the Festival House, I need to
feel sure I'm doing the right thing.
To understand why this place exerts
such a powerful hold on all of
us who've loved Wagner's music,
you need to understand what it
meant to the composer himself.
It's a million miles away
from the type of theatre
where his career began.
Good lord!
OPERA MUSIC
This is everything Wagner
detested about opera, a place to
show off, to be seen.
A place to whisper and
talk and stare across at your
rivals and neighbours and social
betters and social inferiors and
all the snobbery and nonsense that
still pertains in so much of opera,
of course. Wagner hated all that.
But it's funny,
you've got to admit it's funny.
Good gracious.
By his early thirties,
Wagner had worked in a string of
places like this.
He'd also written six operas,
including Tannhauser,
the piece which first
ignited my passion for the music.
But his radical ideas
weren't confined to the stage.
In 1848, he was working as musical
director in Dresden's Royal Court.
This was a year of political
revolutions in Europe
and Wagner soon joined the
struggle.
He sided with the
left wing nationalists,
who wanted to replace the princely
German states with a unified nation.
When the uprising failed,
he found himself a wanted man
with a price on his head.
He fled here to Switzerland, where
he lived for the next 12 years,
and plotted the theatrical
revolution which would change the
face of opera forever.
Do you think this particular
landscape
has a connection
with Wagner's music?
Oh yes, it was the first time he'd
seen the mountains at all
in his life
when he came to Switzerland
in 1849 after the revolution, after
he was thrown out and had to escape.
And he writes very
enthusiastically about the scenery.
I mean, he didn't want his music
or his opera to be artificial.
He keeps on saying "naturlich". He
very often described stage directions
which have to do with the mountains.
Mountains, clouds,
cliffs, rocks and so on. Yes.
They're all described and then of
course they have the association
with the Swiss landscape.
So it seems to be
clear that Switzerland
was more than just a little place
to wait while the storm died down?
Oh yes, I think Switzerland
played a great role in his life.
Before he fled Germany, Wagner's
career had started to take off.
Now, aged 36, he was homeless
and virtually destitute.
But he wasn't defeated.
In Switzerland he began to dream
of creating something new
and extraordinary.
He believed the greatest art form
that mankind ever had
was Greek tragedy.
Not because of the nature of Greece
or the nature of tragedy but because
Greek tragedy encompassed
all the arts.
Acting, verse, music,
dance, costume, spectacle, chorus.
But more than that, it involved
the whole community, all people.
It wasn't a snobbish, elitist thing.
It was a ceremony, a celebration,
but more than that, it was
a religious ceremony.
And on top of that too,
its subject matter was myth.
And Wagner believed very
passionately that the
very nature of myth was
universal, because
it was outside time.
It wasn't about the
bourgeois or the aristocracy.
It wasn't stories of love
affairs in history.
It was outside time, almost like
science fiction, but science fiction
set in the past, if you like.
It could speak to
everybody, whatever their condition.
So his revolutionary idea was
to have what he called the
total work of art,
the "Gesamtkunstwerk",
and that, therefore,
the word "opera" was pointless.
He hated grand opera, with its
flounces and its absurd
trills and ornaments.
Obviously at its greatest,
like Mozart, he venerated it,
but he wanted to cleanse the theatre
and cleanse art, of all this
nonsense, and to get back to these
elementals and to make a theatre
for the people which was music and
dance and drama and everything.
And he was going to be the one to
create it and he was going to be
responsible for all aspects of it.
And he put this together in an
essay he wrote here in Switzerland,
which was about the
future work of art.
And it was a future work of art that
he was to make into a present work
of art, the Wagnerian music-drama.
To bring to life his Utopian ideas,
Wagner conceived an opera about the
mythical dragon-slaying
hero, Siegfried.
Over time his ambitions grew.
Instead of one opera, he would write
four, an epic exploration of the
conflict between our appetite
for power
and our hunger for love.
It begins with the struggle for
control of a magical ring, which
grants its owner unimaginable power,
but only if they swear to renounce
love.
HE SINGS IN GERMAN
It would take more than 20 years
for Wagner to realise his vision,
with the first performances
of The Ring Cycle at his
purpose-built theatre in Bayreuth.
In the meantime,
exiled and penniless, he had
more prosaic concerns to deal with.
In Zurich, he was fortunate to
meet a couple whose fabulous wealth
was matched by their enthusiasm
for his talent.
There was Otto, who was
a silk merchant, with a big interest
in America, and his wife, Mathilde.
Yes, and Wesendonck was quite a
patron of the arts and a fan of
Wagner, is that right? That's right.
It was his writings, really, that
caught Mathilde's eye at first.
Oh, more than his music? At first.
She began reading his writings and he
took a shine to Mathilde immediately
and took an even bigger shine to
Otto's money.
Yes. He was writing to friends about
it within just a few weeks. Really?
He'd met this rather nice woman
with this very, very wealthy husband.
Wagner was a married man,
although his relationship with
his wife Minna was tempestuous.
He had enjoyed his share of
affairs over the years,
but his infatuation with Mathilde
Wesendonck had a special intensity.
No-one knows exactly what went
on behind closed doors here,
but it's clear that the relationship
fired Wagner's creativity.
He wrote music inspired
by her poetry, including
a piece which later evolved
into one of his greatest operas.
On the 23rd December,
1857, Wagner performed a song of
Mathilde Wesendonck's that he
dedicated to her, called Traume,
Dreams.
He orchestrated it and we're about
to hear it in exactly
the room it was first performed,
here at the villa Wesendonck.
Maestro.
MUSIC: "Traume"
by Wagner
Wagner's Swiss exile was a
period of intense creativity.
But here,
as elsewhere in the story, a shadow
falls across his sublime music.
In Switzerland, he wrote an article
called Jewishness In Music, which
stains his reputation to this day.
It is ornamented, if you like, or
anti-ornamented, with some genuinely
revolting pieces of anti-Semitism.
He talks constantly about
a kind of...
A physical, visceral level of
repulsion, instinctive repulsion,
that "we" feel towards the Jews.
So there is a real anti-Semitism
in that sense, of, literally,
as people to be in a room with,
they are revolting, is suggested.
And that is, to us, so horrible as
to be, you know, just slappable and
ghastly.
We put out of consideration people
who can talk like that, especially
these days, especially after
the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism back then, of course,
wasn't associated with the Holocaust.
It was
socially acceptable in a way that we
couldn't imagine today, thankfully.
But Wagner was by no means alone.
Anti-Semitism was widespread in
19th-century Germany, even amongst
political liberals like Wagner.
But his outburst had a personal
dimension too, fuelled by his
jealousy of the celebrated Jewish
composers Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.
Yes, Mendelssohn is a
well-known composer to this day.
People love his Violin Concerto
and much of his...octets,
A Midsummer Night's Dream...
He's a very popular composer.
Meyerbeer's less well-known.
In his day he was Stephen Sondheim,
Andrew Lloyd Webber
all rolled into one. Yes.
He was the most successful composer
there was in the 1840s, 1850s.
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, they had
money, they had success, they had
nice lives.
Wagner was small, ugly,
virtually destitute,
and had tried to make a success in
Paris and had failed miserably.
Yes. And he wanted to vent his anger
on someone, and the two most natural
people happened to be the two most
successful people he'd ever known.
There are some people that believe,
and I tend to agree with them, that
Wagner needed to create some kind
of a major disturbance in his life.
He needed some kind of weird kick...
Yeah. ..to get him going.
He needed an enemy, perhaps.
An enemy, something or other,
or an enemy within himself.
He needed to disturb...
He needed to muddy the
waters around him. Yeah.
In order
to write the music that he did.
I have this fantasy. It's typically
pathetic and typically a fantasy,
so very me, in which I go back in
time as an Englishman and
I write letters to Wagner.
I keep writing, saying, I have to
talk to you, and I say to him,
listen, you're on the brink of
becoming the greatest artist of the
19th century
and future generations
will forget that, simply because of
this nasty little essay that you're
writing, and because of the effect
it'll have, unless, you know...
And I think, what would he
say to that? If he had known
that the person who was most hurt
by his anti-Semitism was himself.
It isn't easy to confront Wagner,
is it? No, it's not.
It's often very unpleasant. Yeah.
But just because he may have
been a nasty little man and
a nasty anti-Semite doesn't mean that
his music is not as supreme as it is.
If this sounds familiar, that's
because it grew out of Traume,
the piece we've just heard.
It's the love duet from Act II of
Wagner's opera Tristan Und Isolde.
In 1857 he abandoned work on The
Ring to focus on this new piece,
the story of a forbidden love
affair
between the knight Tristan
and Isolde,
who's betrothed to another man.
It's based on ancient legend but the
music was strikingly avant-garde,
pushing at the boundaries
of conventional harmony.
HE SINGS IN GERMAN
And it all starts with this.
The so-called Tristan chord. It may
not look revolutionary
but it must have astonished
the first audiences who heard it.
Rather than progressing to
a harmonious resolution,
as musical convention expected,
it evolves into another
unresolved discord instead.
I've come to the house where
Wagner once lived, to explore
that cluster of notes which
opened the door to modern music.
PIANO PLAYS
Stefan, have you got
a spare right hand?
Hi.
You're playing on Wagner's piano.
This
was given to him, I can see, as a...
This is a pretty good piano,
a gift from the Steinway factory
to Richard Wagner in 1876.
Ah, to celebrate the beginning...
The beginning of the festival.
Yeah. Will you let me just try and
play the... Of course.
The famous chord.
I'm not going to do any more
than that, but this chord, here,
I want you to explain why it's...
It's the first chord
of Tristan in the Prelude.
Yes.
I'm playing the Tristan
chord on Wagner's own piano.
I have to pinch myself to see
that I'm not dreaming!
Yes, very important. There it is.
The famous Tristan chord. Yeah.
Will I come up with the
other two notes so that...?
Then you get this. That is it.
The E and the A-flat. That's it.
Yes.
This chord, if someone was to look
it up on Wikipedia,
they'd find
a huge entry, just on this chord.
What is it about this chord?
It's a chord of tension, of longing.
Yeah. The first voice goes up, like
you played, right? Longing, yeah.
And the other voices go down.
So this is a depression.
And this at the same time.
'This is where Wagner's genius as
'a composer merges with his
brilliance as a dramatist.
'His music keeps you on the
edge of your seat, longing for
'the unbearable tension of those
opening chords to be resolved.
'It almost happens in Act Two,
when the lovers meet in secret
to consummate their passion.'
It sounds vulgar but it really is
a coitus interruptus,
in the Liebesnacht,
the great duet where...
You think it is going to
arrive then, don't you?
Yes. And then in comes...
It's very erotic.
In comes... Yeah.
"Rette dich, Tristan!" happens
and it's...
STEPHEN SNAPS FINGERS
It's as if people are literally
in bed with each other
and they are
actually making love
and just as the climax
is about to arrive...
bang, someone comes in and...
HE BEGINS TO PLAY
MUSIC CONTINUES
And then...
"Rette dich, Tristan!"
Exactly, yeah.
It's fantastic. Interrupted.
Such a moment, isn't it?
Now I show you...
the non-interruption,
the transformation.
'Finally, after four hours of the
most glorious, gut-wrenching music,
'the psychological drama launched
by that famous opening chord
'reaches its tragic climax.'
The word is "lust", isn't it?
Now, for the last time,
the longing motif comes back.
Chromatic scale, going upwards.
Leading.
That E is going to come...
Transitional. To transcendence.
Just a moment, now.
Oh, I played the wrong note!
It's not so easy!
It's not. The piano-playing.
I get terribly excited. Yes.
But, my goodness, to have
been even a small part of it.
You've made me the happiest man
in Germany today.
There's nothing to say.
No, there is nothing to say.
That's exactly the point.
Extremely good music.
In 1860, Wagner's Swiss exile
finally ended.
He was 47 and his music had
made him internationally famous.
But he still had enormous debts,
thanks to his itinerant lifestyle
and legendary extravagance.
To raise cash, he toured Europe
as a conductor.
Ooh.
Ooh, look.
I'm pretty sure - I don't
have any Russian -
but that must be the Russian for
Ring, there, beginning with "Ko."
So there it is, Richard Wagner's
Tetralogy of the
Ring of the Nibelung.
And then the top right,
Mariinsky Theatre. Looks gorgeous.
Let's go in and see what it's like.
The Mariinsky Theatre
has always been a landmark building
in Russian cultural life,
famous for its opera and ballet.
You might be more familiar
with the name given to it
during the Soviet period,
when it was known as the Kirov.
They're preparing a new staging of
The Ring, masterminded by this man,
conductor Valery Gergiev,
the Mariinsky's artistic director.
There are no horned helmets
or Aryan ice-maidens on show here.
This production is inspired
by the myths and legends of
Gergiev's homeland, North Ossetia,
a reminder that Wagner's work
is open to endless
re-interpretation.
Wagner actually came to Russia
and conducted some orchestral
passages from his works
which were in progress and
had been produced elsewhere,
but some of them,
for the first time, here.
The Ride Of The Valkyries, for
example, was first heard in Russia.
He was paid a princely sum
to come and conduct in Russia,
and whatever people thought
of the music - and many people
were affronted and astounded
and simply uncomprehending.
It was very revolutionary. No one
had ever heard anything like it -
But whatever people thought of that,
they were really impressed
by his conducting.
He faced, with his back
to the audience, the orchestra.
That may seem normal to us
but in its day that
was considered very revolutionary.
I think it will be totally
impossible to imagine
the history of conducting without
a figure like Richard Wagner.
Not only because he was the one
who decided to turn
his back to the audience,
which was a revolution, but also
to control the orchestra this way,
and to get so much result from direct
eye-contact with the musicians.
Which is a thing you do,
as well. Isn't it?
'Yes.'
'It is very difficult to describe
into words what is conducting,
'or what is conducting Wagner operas,
but the tempo is very important.'
There is a moment when
you have to release
all the power of orchestra.
Then there is a moment when you have
to support, totally, the voice. Yes.
Or some of the voices on stage, and
then there is a moment when you have
to create a mysterious atmosphere.
Without this mystery
Wagner is not Wagner.
'I wondered if it was
important for you...'
to take the German out of Wagner,
because, to me,
he's an international composer
and he doesn't belong
to a country any more than
Shakespeare or Beethoven do,
and I wondered
if that's important to you.
I think it is a very
interesting question,
especially if we talk about The Ring.
There is not once...
a mentioning of Germany
or Deutschland,
so I think it's
a story of the world,
and I think Wagner himself,
being quite a smart man,
and because he also was
not only composing music
but famously he was also writing,
preparing libretto,
and he understood that The Ring
is about greed, hatred, love...
It's about nature, it's about power,
it's about domination.
Yes, betrayal, treachery...
Betrayal... And then nature being
kept in peace and harmony.
It's not German, German, German.
I think it's a world and it shouldn't
be associated with the Nazis...
No, that's really important...
..Really, because if we are able
to do it after the Second World War,
where this city was so, so destroyed,
you know. Incredible, yes.
That means any country can do it.
APPLAUSE
Wagner's Russian adventure
was a triumph.
He was even sounded out
about taking over as artistic
director of the Mariinsky.
Had he accepted, there might never
have been a Bayreuth Festival House.
He might never have
completed The Ring Cycle.
His story would have had
a very different, and probably
less controversial, ending.
But despite the adulation,
the pull of home was too strong
for Wagner to resist.
He returned to Germany instead,
where the money he'd made on tour
was soon swallowed up
by his huge debts.
By 1864, Wagner's life
had reached its lowest ebb.
He was no longer a young firebrand,
in danger of being imprisoned
for his revolutionary politics.
He was a 50-year-old in danger
of being imprisoned for his
simply astonishing debt.
He'd written Tristan but that
had been declared unproduceable
by most people who had seen it
or tried to rehearse it.
His relationship with
Mathilde Wesendonck was over.
His marriage was over.
It seemed his career was over.
All that bright promise.
And how could he possibly give
the world these preposterously
ambitious music-dramas?
If he were to write a wish-list, I
suppose he'd come up with one thing.
He would need someone so powerful,
so extraordinarily rich,
that they could write off his debts,
they could build him
the theatre he wanted,
they could guarantee him
the posterity that he knew
his genius merited.
But that would be asking
for a miracle.
On March 10th, 1864,
a miracle happened.
Quite unexpectedly, Maximilian II,
King of Bavaria, died.
He left his opulent kingdom
to his son Ludwig,
a handsome, eccentric 18-year-old,
and one of Ludwig's first actions
on acceding to the throne
was to send for his hero,
the artist he most adored in
all the world, Richard Wagner.
Wagner was so used
to fleeing the debt collector
that it took Ludwig's
messenger some time
to track him down
with the good news.
The king was offering
to pay off all his debts
and bankroll his future work.
And if that wasn't proof enough of
his passion, Ludwig went on to build
what must surely be the world's
most extravagant fan letter.
Schloss Neuschwanstein
wasn't completed until 1886,
three years after Wagner's death.
So he never had a chance to wander
through these extraordinary spaces,
all inspired by his work.
But he had something better,
the King's blank cheque.
After years of struggle
and disappointment,
Wagner's dreams of artistic freedom
must finally have seemed attainable.
What a patron to have.
No-one ever built something like
this for Mozart or Beethoven.
So what is it about Wagner's music
which inspires some men to
seize on his stories and ideas,
things which belong in the theatre
and seek to give them substance
in the real world instead?
In the middle ages,
Nuremberg was capital of
the German cultural renaissance,
a backdrop to Wagner's opera,
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
Later of course,
Hitler chose it as the stage for
his infamous propaganda rallies.
Well, the thing is,
Joachim, I'm familiar with the idea
that whenever there's a, you know,
footage of the Nuremberg rallies
with Hitler standing
on that podium over there,
usually someone has decided
to play Wagner in the background.
But you have theories that actually
Wagner is more deeply embedded
in the modern Nazi Nuremberg.
Yes, I think so. First of all, when
you take all these party rallies that
we had here, in the evening then,
there was a celebration of
the Meistersingers of Nuremberg...
Right, one of Wagner's
truly great operas. Yes, yes.
And they played that
and then came here, didn't they?
To this enormous, what was then,
how many soldiers would be here?
I'm sure more than 100,000.
More than 100,000.
From all over Germany,
they gathered here.
And the party faithful
would've listened to
The Meistersingers first.
In the evening, they listened
to The Meistersingers....
And then they come here...
Yes. And they played it themselves.
Hitler loved The Meistersingers.
He loved to whistle
the tunes to his guests.
He could whistle all the tunes
of The Meistersingers.
God. Yes, he liked that.
There's a certain scene
that's triggered in him,
I think, that whole rally idea.
Yes. It was the third act. There
you have all the guilds of Nuremburg
marching onto the stage and you have
the costume masses carrying flags
and their guild signs and symbols
they're singing together and this
is on the small stage of the opera
and then transferred or even
translated into reality in this
huge field here in Nuremberg.
So they perverted the style
of Wagner, if you like.
The emotional impact of the music
and the grandeur and the spectacle,
which does have an enormous effect
on audiences who love Wagner.
You do get turned into a jelly
by the end of the evening,
it's so extreme.
Yes, that was the first step.
The second was that he thought
one could teach the Germans
to see the world in a way
which you find in Wagner operas,
in a dialectic way.
That you have a protagonist and
an antagonist. A good and an evil.
That you have an Iago and
a Desdemona or in the Wagner case,
it is Siegfried and the Dragon.
Now, if you have this in the opera,
it is perfectly all right
because the opera needs the tension
of drama, between the good and evil.
But as soon as you turn it into
reality, it becomes a devastating
political fantasy and ideology.
Of course, a defender of Wagner
like me, although I'm not a complete
defender of Wagner,
would say Hitler saw
one side of Wagner and we tend
to see Hitler's side of Wagner
because Hitler was such
a huge figure in the 20th century
and because his taste for Wagner
was so enormous, we tend to say,
"What did Hitler see in Wagner?"
And we look through Hitler's
viewfinder of this enormous man
and see one little area like that,
instead of seeing the whole,
the whole thing.
If Joachim's right, that makes
Nuremberg the sinister descendant
of Ludwig's castle, Neuschwanstein.
A monstrous example of the way
Wagner's music inspires some men
to tear down the boundary which
ought to separate fantasy from fact.
The railing there surrounds on
three sides the area known
as the Fuhrer's Kanzel.
The Fuhrer's podium and
that's where Hitler stood.
That's where tourists
to this day stand.
Others, like me, can't actually
bring themselves to go there.
I'm not being over-sensitive,
I don't think.
I just don't like,
in the same way I'm not very
good at picking up guns.
I can do it occasionally,
but I don't think I want
to put myself in that position.
I don't want to...
I don't want to hedge around here.
I am deeply uncomfortable
in Nuremberg talking about Wagner.
I realise how close to the Nazi
fantasy world Wagner was
and how deeply stitched into
Hitler's vision of the world.
It's very difficult.
I have to keep reminding myself,
and I do it best by simply
listening to the music,
how unbelievably complicated,
ambiguous, emotionally honest,
raw, revolutionary,
anti-fascist Wagner truly is.
I, I suppose
I think of it like this.
Imagine a great, beautiful
silk tapestry of infinite
colour and complexity,
that has been stained indelibly.
It's still a beautiful tapestry
of miraculous workmanship
and gorgeous colour
and silk and texture.
But that stain is real
and I'm afraid Hitler
and Nazism have stained Wagner.
For some people,
that stain ruins the whole work.
For others, it is just
something that you have to,
have to face up to.
And here's a place,
as storm clouds gather in Nuremberg,
here's a place to think
about such things, I suppose.
By the time he finished work
on The Mastersingers, there was
a new woman in Wagner's life...
..Cosima, the daughter
of his friend, Franz Liszt.
They married in 1870,
after a scandalous affair which
almost cost him Ludwig's patronage.
This was the bait
that brought Wagner to Bayreuth.
Do you remember it?
The Baroque rococo extravagance,
which is the Margravial Opera House?
Wagner had resumed work on
The Ring Cycle and was searching for
a suitable theatre to stage it in.
A helpful friend suggested
this place might fit the bill.
Some friend!
But Wagner liked Bayreuth,
conveniently situated
at the heart of his royal patron's
Bavarian kingdom.
So, if the perfect theatre
didn't already exist here,
why not build one instead?
These are the original plans
for the Festspeilhaus,
constructed by Otto Bruckwald.
And someone's written here...
That's very nice.
"Die ornamente fort"? Yes.
That's Wagner's hand? Yes,
this is original Wagner's hand.
He got the plans from the architect
and you can see he had the idea
to make some ornaments.
Typical late 19th century
kind of thing.
Yes. And Wagner wrote
"die ornamente fort".
Yes. "Away with the ornaments", yes.
Some of the cash came from Ludwig,
the rest from private donations.
And the city of Bayreuth gifted
him the Green Hill to build on.
But there was another grand design
for Wagner to complete before
the festival could happen.
The final instalment
of his four-opera Ring Cycle.
Just, we'll open it.
It's been rebound.
It is rebound, yes.
But it's not a facsimile, actually.
That is the real thing.
"Gotterdammerung".
There it is, he just takes it and
writes it across, quite simple...
To remind what he's writing. Yes.
This is the very famous
beginning of the prelude. Yes.
Of the Norns.
And he writes in all the parts,
one, two, three, four.
All of these horns, the first
violins, the second violins...
It's written very clearly.
It's beautiful. Very beautiful.
It's so clear. You can't make
a single mistake here, can you?
Wow...
It's like you could conduct
from this score.
Yes, I couldn't but someone
with musical talent could!
Me too!
I'm sure some people will think
it's preposterous to get so excited
about bits of paper
and black notes on lines,
but I see and hear worlds
come out of these pages.
Dum, dum! Dur-dur-dur-dur.
Dum, dum!
Whole worlds, great worlds that
have influenced me and moved me
and done things to me
that no other art has.
And here, under the last notes,
he writes...
"Achieved..." Finished. Finished,
achieved. "..in Wahnfried on 21st
of November, I'll say no more."
That's fantastic,
with a little exclamation mark.
It was more than 20 years since
Wagner, penniless and in exile, had
first conceived of his masterwork.
Now, at last, the mountain was
scaled and The Ring Cycle completed.
And, finally, he had the theatre
of his dreams in which to stage it.
Well, here we are. "Memorialising
the first ever performance of
"The Ring Cycle, in
the year 1876."
I wish I'd been there.
Wow.
Here it is.
My hand is on the door.
I know you'll think
I'm very over-excited
but if this is the temple,
this is the sancto sanctorum,
the holy of holies.
This is the theatre itself and I've
waited all my life really, to enter.
I'm going to do it now.
Ah.
They're at work here,
I think they're doing a technical
rehearsal of The Mastersingers.
My goodness.
Whatever you think of
Wagner's music,
no-one can deny
this is one of the most
revolutionary theatres ever built.
For, I would suggest, the most
revolutionary music ever written.
It's fabulous, isn't it?
Much more classical than I expected
because it's quite outside, it is
quite staid, it's sort of like
a, like an Italian
basilica in some ways, isn't it?
And inside, like an Italian
basilica, it's quite gold, I mean
not mad by opera house standards,
but there's Corinthian
composite columns and the gold leaf
and everything, it's wonderful.
I'm so excited.
These are quite famous because
they're not known for their comfort.
The Ring Cycle is about 18 hours,
well it depends, 17 or 18 hours of
solid seating.
Most people bring a
cushion, I believe.
I must remember to do
that when it's my turn.
Everything about this theatre
exists to serve the onstage drama.
Every seat has an
uninterrupted view.
And the acoustic is legendary.
That's partly by design, partly by
happy accident.
The simple wooden
floors are original.
Wagner couldn't afford to
put in anything more fancy.
But they make a wonderfully
resonant sounding board,
so they've never been replaced.
But there's another aspect
of the design, which makes
this auditorium truly unique.
And if you don't
immediately spot it,
that's exactly the point.
This is where the orchestra is.
The audience can't see a single
one of them. They're all hidden.
It's a unique system, the whole
idea is that there's this balance,
because the music is just one
element of the whole drama.
To Wagner, the drama was a
compendium of all the arts together.
The music shouldn't drown
the action. Incredible.
Nowhere else like it in the world.
I never imagined I'd stand
centre stage at Bayreuth.
But it's about to get even better.
Look.
The Holy Chair.
It's hard not to talk in terms of
relics and religiosity when you're
in Bayreuth, but this chair has
hosted the bottoms
of, well the greatest conductors
in the history of music.
Just imagine this.
Oh! This is terrible!
I just feel like such a child,
in a sweetshop.
I'm trying to think of an
equivalent,
I suppose Lord's Cricket Ground
on a Thursday of an Ashes Test.
Maybe the Cavern in Liverpool
if you're a Beatles Fan.
But this does it for me.
The 1876 festival was the artistic
event of the century.
Wagner's boundless
appetite for innovation set
a new standard in opera production,
which still inspires Bayreuth today.
This is a technical rehearsal for
The Mastersingers, directed by his
great grand-daughter, Katharina.
That is a unique
piece of stage machinery.
It's firmly embedded into the
concrete because it's capable of
shifting 23 tonnes in a very
particular direction.
As we saw, it was built and
installed precisely for that
one moment in this one opera.
Isn't it amazing? Doesn't it show
the willpower behind Bayreuth?
It still exists as it
did in Wagner's day.
Wagner, ever the perfectionist,
wasn't entirely happy with
the performances or the staging
of the first productions.
Hardly surprising when you
remember he had to make do
with the rudimentary technology
of a 19th century theatre to bring
to life his mythical world of vast
underground caverns, mighty rivers
and castles in the sky.
We're very high up here.
It's about 75 to 80 feet up
and this is the stage below me.
It's making me a bit weird.
There's something
slightly surreal about
walking around a place so full
of such incredible high-tech
hydraulic machinery.
It's all beautifully kept and so
modern and hearing over it some
of the most profoundly beautiful
operatic chorus ever. It's a
marvellous mixture and it sums up
Wagner as much as anything can.
The demands of the stage and the
demands of art coming together.
This is a rehearsal for Siegfried,
the third opera of the Ring.
It's an opportunity for the soloists
to go through their paces, backed by
a full scale Wagnerian orchestra of
more than 120 musicians.
ORCHESTRA PRACTICES
It's wonderful, I don't think
I've ever been so close.
It's like being inside a painting.
You're actually inside the
texture of the music in a
way you could never imagine.
I wish you could believe how
happy I was. You wouldn't.
You'd think I was insane.
You probably do anyway.
Mmm.
Here's the boss.
One of them, anyway. Eva Wagner,
the composer's great-granddaughter.
She's recently taken
charge of the Festival
alongside her sister, Katharina.
This is your first month here,
almost, isn't it? You're a new girl.
It's... well.
I lived here before, but now
I'm a new person here, yes.
In a new position.
It must be a very strange feeling.
I'm back home.
Do
you think of Bayreuth as your home?
I don't know. I can't answer that. I
was a long time away, but I like it.
You ever get a chance
to relax and think yet?
Not really yet.
I think that will be probably after
the festival, when I'm on my holiday.
This is June, when the
whole thing starts building
to an enormous climax.
Exactly. I suppose a very
pathetic and vulgar question,
but do you think he would be
surprised that the Bayreuth is still
going strong?
It's seven years, the waiting list
for a ticket. He would be surprised.
Would he expect that? He knew he was
going to live forever. Of course.
He did, didn't he?
I am sure, otherwise
why should he have built it here?
It's true.
It's still astonishing, isn't it?
That is the very special thing about
here, about him, about the music.
The person.
You know also, that means,
it's a bit like being an aristocrat.
You know that you are borrowing,
as it were, your time from your
children, do you know what I mean?
I don't mean literally your
children, but the next generation,
and the generation after that, will
do new things.
I think you create something
in your mind, which is perhaps not...
No, you don't feel that?
No, I don't feel!
You don't feel the idea of
posterity, as we would say
in England? The future?
Not at the moment.
That's probably good,
get on with the present.
I live now,
I do my things now, and I hope
to do it like people want it
and expect it.
With Katharina, with my sister.
I think we are...
hopefully, we are a good team.
I'm sure. OK, is that OK?
Really nice talking to you.
I appreciate it, you are very busy.
Thank you, bye-bye.
Thank you so much.
Greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
You stay still, or not? Yeah, we'll
be here for the next three days.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
(Wagner.)
Flesh on flesh, I touched a Wagner.
It's pathetic of me,
but it's rather wonderful.
Running Bayreuth has
always been a family affair.
But I'm not sure I
envy the Wagner sisters.
They're under intense scrutiny,
as they try to strike the balance
between tradition and innovation.
A challenge faced by the family ever
since 1883, the year Wagner died.
He's buried here in the garden of
his former home, Villa Wahnfried.
You don't get much
simpler than that do you?
Just polished granite in grey.
There he lies.
I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in
Bayreuth.
SINGERS PRACTISE
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
All I want to do now is give
myself over to the music and count
down the days to opening night.
SINGING STOPS
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
SINGERS PRACTISE
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
SINGING PRACTISE
But there's another character who
refuses to leave the story.
This is Hitler in September 1923
on his very first visit to Bayreuth.
He'd come to pay his
respects at the master's tomb,
and to meet the British-born writer,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was a racist,
who championed Aryan supremacy
and vilified the Jews.
He was also an influential member
of the Wagner household, through
marriage to the composer's daughter.
Long before he became Chancellor,
Hitler was embraced by some
in Bayreuth with open arms.
It wasn't a question of
the Wagner family and Bayreuth
welcoming Hitler because,
in a cowardy-custard fashion,
he was the great leader of Germany
and they didn't dare offend him.
Quite the opposite. They actually
pushed him forward, they supported
him from a very early age.
1923 was just a few years after
the First World War, when
Hitler was a nobody.
He was a corporal who had
left the front and came to join
the turmoil of post-war Germany.
But in fact, they saw in him -
Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
Wagner's son-in-law - they saw in
Hitler a kind of Parsifal who had
become the shining knight to
liberate Germany and lead it forward
into a grand new age, as many
people, much later, also saw Hitler.
After Hitler became
chancellor in 1933,
he became a patron of the festival.
Performances continued here
even during the Second World War.
It's impossible to come to Bayreuth
without having to confront the
issue of that window, really.
Because out of that window appeared
one Adolf Hitler, some years ago.
He came to Bayreuth to enjoy
the performances of his favourite
dramatist composer - my favourite
dramatist composer - Richard Wagner.
Wagner's music and reputation
has suffered, partly because
the Nazis loved and perverted
that music - certainly in my
opinion, they perverted it to their
hideous ideology.
But also, Wagner has suffered
because his descendants, his family,
seemed to welcome Hitler.
In the case of his daughter-in-law,
Winifred, who was British,
actually to revere Hitler.
This is one of the reasons that
Wagner's music
and Bayreuth itself are tainted,
stained in some people's opinion.
There are many who shun the Green
Hill because of what happened
here in the 1930s and '40s.
But now, after years of fudging the
issue, it looks as if Bayreuth is
starting to square up to its past.
SINGERS PRACTISE
The Wagner sisters want an
independent investigation into
their family's links with Hitler.
And the Nazi period
is even being addressed on
the Bayreuth stage itself.
OPERATIC SINGING
Parsifal is Wagner's final opera,
based on the Arthurian
legend of the Holy Grail.
Norwegian director Stefan Herheim
has updated the action, which now
plays out against the backdrop
of recent events in German history.
For the first time in a generation,
there will be Swastikas
on show at Bayreuth.
OPERATIC SINGING
Hi, what a pleasure. And you too.
Nice to meet you. Thank you.
It's wonderful to be here.
It's very exciting.
This is where we have the
Swastikas and the Nazis.
It's pretty brave, isn't it?
It's fantastic.
These refugees
are an addition to last year. Right.
That's why we're spending time on it.
Ah, right. It's all new.
We somehow got
permission to add this idea.
It's brilliant.
I know Katharina is wanting to
confront the history more full on,
which I think is a really good idea.
There might be an exhibition in
Wahnfried, I believe. Yeah. Imagine.
OPERATIC SINGING
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
OPERATIC SINGING
It will take more than
one daring production
to make amends for the past.
But what better way of healing the
wound than through the music itself?
My head tells me I'm ready to
take my seat for the opening
night of the Festival,
but my heart
still has some catching up to do.
And there's one more
person I need to hear from.
In London, I'm meeting
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch.
When she was 18 years old,
she became a prisoner at Auschwitz,
where some of my own relatives
were also held and killed.
She's a cellist, whose talent
for music probably saved her life,
when she was recruited into the
inmates' orchestra at the camp.
There was nobody there
who played the cello.
There had been somebody
there, who had died.
I don't know what would have
happened. If they still had
had a cello,
then I wouldn't have
been so important.
And, you know,
I had typhus, like everybody.
I was half dead in the revier, as it
was called, a sort of sick bay.
I remember two
Germans standing in front of my bed.
We had to all get up, and march naked
in front of the people who would say
yes or no in the revier.
Meaning that you're too sick to
live? Too sick to live, so you go,
or you survive.
And that is something that is
engraved in my memory.
"This is the cellist."
And they walked on.
There was one particular
piece you played under
extraordinary circumstances.
Well, I mean, that this is sort of
worth mentioning, that actually
Doctor Mengele, the famous
doctor who was interested
in experiments on twins,
after he's probably done a selection,
or God knows what he's done, came
into the block and he wanted to
hear the Schumann-Traumerei.
And that was on my repertoire so
Anita, go on, play the Traumerei,
which I did.
One big thing was always,
never get eye contact with the
Germans. Oh, really. If possible.
Because the moment you get eye
contact, you feel you're being seen.
Have you played it since then?
This grandson plays it with pleasure.
Really? Yes. And you don't mind?
No, I don't mind.
I find, music is not sullied
for me, by anything. Absolutely.
I mean, how much do we
grant the Germans in their
quest of destroying everything?
I mean, music is holy for me.
Yes. That's above everything.
Yes, they didn't destroy the music,
did they? No. No.
People have this idea
that in the death camps,
that Wagner was playing in the
background all the time, as it were.
I'm here talking to you as a
survivor of one of one of
the death camps,
the most famous of them all,
the dreaded and horrific Auschwitz.
Well, we certainly
didn't play Wagner.
You did not? No, we didn't.
First of all, you must realise
what this band, or capella as
we used to call it, consisted of.
You couldn't have played
Wagner if you'd tried.
Right, Wagner does
demand a big orchestra.
Yeah, and you know, blowing
instruments, I can't speak for
the other camps
but I don't think Wagner
was particularly played.
When I was a boy, and if I
played Wagner at the top of
the house loudly,
for a Jewish family, Wagner...
Must I play that?
If your children played Wagner in
the attic here and loudly, would
you think they were somehow...
Am I betraying my Jewishness by
playing Wagner and then liking him?
I think everybody has to come to
terms by themselves.
I would never
forbid anybody to listen to Wagner.
If it was the music
without the drama,
one wouldn't probably argue with
it but apart from the fact,
I would never have the patience
to sit through five hours
and listen to so much noise.
You know, I know you love it but...
I do. What happens to you when
you sit there for five hours?
HE LAUGHS
I'm taken into a world of heightened
emotion and psychological depth.
It's...
It's really extraordinary,
I find that every time
I see a Wagner piece,
a music drama as he'd call
it, an opera is the easiest way
to call it,
it's as if it's absolutely
new so although they're very long,
and I understand, why five hours?
It seems like a long time with
people singing and standing
in one place. Screaming!
Or screaming sometimes.
And yet, because of what the music
does underneath with the drama, it's
as if it's an enormous conversation.
Your mind goes on a journey of
connecting all kinds of
emotional states and all kinds of
philosophical thoughts.
I mean, I know it sounds so
pretentious, I'm fully aware of
how embarrassing it can be to
try and explain.
Why do you have to listen to
Wagner in Bayreuth, which is so
somehow symbolic for everything
terrible that has happened? Yes.
Why can't you just sit at
home and listen to a record?
It's a very good question.
I think I've spent my life listening
to the records and loving it, I've
never been to Bayreuth, Wagner built
the theatre specifically for it
and I suppose it's a way of
completing
a part of my life with Wagner as
it's been.
Maybe I'll be disappointed.
Well, you tell me when you
come back, what you felt like
in there on the shrine.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's...
Gosh, you've got me worried now!
I'm sorry.
No, no, it's right that you should.
I embarked on this whole project,
I was kidding myself, with an open
mind but I kind of thought, really,
I'll just cruise through this
and I know people will put contrary
points of view to me and say well,
yes, but think I've already got the
answers and I know why Wagner is the
greatest genius who ever lived and
I don't need anyone to tell me,
to give any more
pause to that than I already have.
But there is much in what you say.
So do you think I
shouldn't go to Bayreuth?
I'm sorry, I'm not going to
give you any advice, Stephen.
You have to do that.
You're quite right.
And I can't... No, why not?
Maybe you'll decide never again,
but you'll have experienced it.
This remarkable plot of ground will
never be a neutral place, of course.
For some, it's a shrine to one
of the world's great geniuses.
For others, it's a tainted reminder
of dark days in Germany's past.
Even this memorial bust was created
by Hitler's favourite sculptor.
But Wagner's music is
bigger, and better,
than Hitler ever imagined it to be.
And Bayreuth, the theatre Wagner
dreamed of creating for so long,
is also redeemed by that fact.
Which is why I'm not prepared to
surrender either of them
to him.
Well, here it is. In my hand,
one of the most valuable pieces
of paper in the world of culture.
One thing I'd leave
with is this thought.
If you've never heard the music
of Richard Wagner, if you've never
encountered his dramas,
I would urge you, because we're
only on this
planet once, to give it a try.
I still believe,
as firmly as I believe anything,
that his work is important
and is on the side of the angels.
It is, fundamentally, good.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
They call this the Green Hill.
And at the summit
sits a legendary theatre.
Well, for anyone who loves
Wagner as I do, this place is
Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca,
Graceland, all rolled into one.
Bayreuth, the home of the
Bayreuth Festival Theatre.
And I'm here
for the first time in my life.
It's what I've always
dreamed of doing.
Oh, look, ticket office! Eek!
Every summer, they stage a
festival here dedicated to
the music of Richard Wagner.
I've received an invitation
to go behind closed doors
as the new season takes shape.
It's fabulous, you don't
often get a chance to see this.
There's so much to look at.
But only one place to start.
And that's with the music.
Wow, this is amazing. Lucky beggars!
As always, the centrepiece of this
year's festival is The Ring Cycle.
Four monumental music dramas
inspired by ancient myth.
This is a rehearsal
for the second of them.
Look.
Valkyrie, second act,
just the second act.
My God,
there it all is. Every note of it.
Shouldn't really be looking,
he's got his notes here.
It's cheating, whoops!
Put that down.
Quick, I'll be in trouble!
And there are the valkyries, look.
Guten tag.
Hello.
A valkyrie, if you've not had the
pleasure of meeting one before,
is a female goddess.
A daughter of Wotan,
the king of the gods.
Three, four, five of them, we're
three missing, plus Brunhilde.
Of course, you stand waiting
for a valkyrie for hours and
then they all come at once.
MUSIC: "The Ride of The Valkyries"
by Wagner
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
It must be the most
famous Wagner tune of them all.
But music
is only one element of his genius.
He was also an
extraordinary dramatist.
And his revolutionary work
demanded the creation
of a unique theatre to stage it in.
It's just fabulous to see this.
I never imagined in all my life that
I'd see a rehearsal of the beginning
of act three of The Valkyrie.
The score sounds so funny on
the piano, it almost sounds
It took Wagner a lifetime to
create this temple to his art.
It's still driven today by
the ideals which inspired him.
Dedicated to excellence in
performance and production.
Don't know which opera this
is from, some mud made of rubber.
And real grass.
It's just amazing,
the number of personnel that must be
involved just in the stitching of
costumes, let alone the designing
and the finishing and the fitting.
It's an incredible thing.
Oh look, and more here.
That could be
Loge, the god of fire.
I don't know, someone like that.
Excellent.
THEY SPEAK GERMAN
An ocelot, my goodness me!
But it wasn't killed
for the production?
No. Not at all, it's a very old one.
A very old one.
Hi, I'm Stephen.
Hi. You're playing a valkyrie,
you're playing Rossweisse.
Oh, it's quite a costume,
it's fantastic.
Wow!
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
Yeah!
Oh, I wish I were a
valkyrie sometimes.
Fabric a-go-go. These
boxes, even the boxes are Wagnerian.
Parsifal women, Ring 2006 Siegfried.
It's just a...
It's a treasure house, isn't it?
Stoff. Goodbye.
Not sure if I was allowed in.
You might be wondering
why I'm so excited about being here.
I must have been 11 or 12 when
I first heard Wagner's music
on my father's gramophone.
It was the overture to Tannhauser,
one of his earlier operas.
And it did something
most extraordinary to me.
I've always loved music, I've always
been hopeless at performing it.
Couldn't really play an
instrument, certainly can't sing
but it's made me do things inside,
it's released forces within me.
And no music has done it
like Wagner's.
To experience the music I love
in the composer's own theatre is
something I've dreamed of doing
for as long as I can remember.
But it's no secret that
my passion was also shared by him.
And, like me, he felt
the magnetic pull of Bayreuth.
I'm Jewish and lost relatives in the
Holocaust, so before I take my seat
in the Festival House, I need to
feel sure I'm doing the right thing.
To understand why this place exerts
such a powerful hold on all of
us who've loved Wagner's music,
you need to understand what it
meant to the composer himself.
It's a million miles away
from the type of theatre
where his career began.
Good lord!
OPERA MUSIC
This is everything Wagner
detested about opera, a place to
show off, to be seen.
A place to whisper and
talk and stare across at your
rivals and neighbours and social
betters and social inferiors and
all the snobbery and nonsense that
still pertains in so much of opera,
of course. Wagner hated all that.
But it's funny,
you've got to admit it's funny.
Good gracious.
By his early thirties,
Wagner had worked in a string of
places like this.
He'd also written six operas,
including Tannhauser,
the piece which first
ignited my passion for the music.
But his radical ideas
weren't confined to the stage.
In 1848, he was working as musical
director in Dresden's Royal Court.
This was a year of political
revolutions in Europe
and Wagner soon joined the
struggle.
He sided with the
left wing nationalists,
who wanted to replace the princely
German states with a unified nation.
When the uprising failed,
he found himself a wanted man
with a price on his head.
He fled here to Switzerland, where
he lived for the next 12 years,
and plotted the theatrical
revolution which would change the
face of opera forever.
Do you think this particular
landscape
has a connection
with Wagner's music?
Oh yes, it was the first time he'd
seen the mountains at all
in his life
when he came to Switzerland
in 1849 after the revolution, after
he was thrown out and had to escape.
And he writes very
enthusiastically about the scenery.
I mean, he didn't want his music
or his opera to be artificial.
He keeps on saying "naturlich". He
very often described stage directions
which have to do with the mountains.
Mountains, clouds,
cliffs, rocks and so on. Yes.
They're all described and then of
course they have the association
with the Swiss landscape.
So it seems to be
clear that Switzerland
was more than just a little place
to wait while the storm died down?
Oh yes, I think Switzerland
played a great role in his life.
Before he fled Germany, Wagner's
career had started to take off.
Now, aged 36, he was homeless
and virtually destitute.
But he wasn't defeated.
In Switzerland he began to dream
of creating something new
and extraordinary.
He believed the greatest art form
that mankind ever had
was Greek tragedy.
Not because of the nature of Greece
or the nature of tragedy but because
Greek tragedy encompassed
all the arts.
Acting, verse, music,
dance, costume, spectacle, chorus.
But more than that, it involved
the whole community, all people.
It wasn't a snobbish, elitist thing.
It was a ceremony, a celebration,
but more than that, it was
a religious ceremony.
And on top of that too,
its subject matter was myth.
And Wagner believed very
passionately that the
very nature of myth was
universal, because
it was outside time.
It wasn't about the
bourgeois or the aristocracy.
It wasn't stories of love
affairs in history.
It was outside time, almost like
science fiction, but science fiction
set in the past, if you like.
It could speak to
everybody, whatever their condition.
So his revolutionary idea was
to have what he called the
total work of art,
the "Gesamtkunstwerk",
and that, therefore,
the word "opera" was pointless.
He hated grand opera, with its
flounces and its absurd
trills and ornaments.
Obviously at its greatest,
like Mozart, he venerated it,
but he wanted to cleanse the theatre
and cleanse art, of all this
nonsense, and to get back to these
elementals and to make a theatre
for the people which was music and
dance and drama and everything.
And he was going to be the one to
create it and he was going to be
responsible for all aspects of it.
And he put this together in an
essay he wrote here in Switzerland,
which was about the
future work of art.
And it was a future work of art that
he was to make into a present work
of art, the Wagnerian music-drama.
To bring to life his Utopian ideas,
Wagner conceived an opera about the
mythical dragon-slaying
hero, Siegfried.
Over time his ambitions grew.
Instead of one opera, he would write
four, an epic exploration of the
conflict between our appetite
for power
and our hunger for love.
It begins with the struggle for
control of a magical ring, which
grants its owner unimaginable power,
but only if they swear to renounce
love.
HE SINGS IN GERMAN
It would take more than 20 years
for Wagner to realise his vision,
with the first performances
of The Ring Cycle at his
purpose-built theatre in Bayreuth.
In the meantime,
exiled and penniless, he had
more prosaic concerns to deal with.
In Zurich, he was fortunate to
meet a couple whose fabulous wealth
was matched by their enthusiasm
for his talent.
There was Otto, who was
a silk merchant, with a big interest
in America, and his wife, Mathilde.
Yes, and Wesendonck was quite a
patron of the arts and a fan of
Wagner, is that right? That's right.
It was his writings, really, that
caught Mathilde's eye at first.
Oh, more than his music? At first.
She began reading his writings and he
took a shine to Mathilde immediately
and took an even bigger shine to
Otto's money.
Yes. He was writing to friends about
it within just a few weeks. Really?
He'd met this rather nice woman
with this very, very wealthy husband.
Wagner was a married man,
although his relationship with
his wife Minna was tempestuous.
He had enjoyed his share of
affairs over the years,
but his infatuation with Mathilde
Wesendonck had a special intensity.
No-one knows exactly what went
on behind closed doors here,
but it's clear that the relationship
fired Wagner's creativity.
He wrote music inspired
by her poetry, including
a piece which later evolved
into one of his greatest operas.
On the 23rd December,
1857, Wagner performed a song of
Mathilde Wesendonck's that he
dedicated to her, called Traume,
Dreams.
He orchestrated it and we're about
to hear it in exactly
the room it was first performed,
here at the villa Wesendonck.
Maestro.
MUSIC: "Traume"
by Wagner
Wagner's Swiss exile was a
period of intense creativity.
But here,
as elsewhere in the story, a shadow
falls across his sublime music.
In Switzerland, he wrote an article
called Jewishness In Music, which
stains his reputation to this day.
It is ornamented, if you like, or
anti-ornamented, with some genuinely
revolting pieces of anti-Semitism.
He talks constantly about
a kind of...
A physical, visceral level of
repulsion, instinctive repulsion,
that "we" feel towards the Jews.
So there is a real anti-Semitism
in that sense, of, literally,
as people to be in a room with,
they are revolting, is suggested.
And that is, to us, so horrible as
to be, you know, just slappable and
ghastly.
We put out of consideration people
who can talk like that, especially
these days, especially after
the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism back then, of course,
wasn't associated with the Holocaust.
It was
socially acceptable in a way that we
couldn't imagine today, thankfully.
But Wagner was by no means alone.
Anti-Semitism was widespread in
19th-century Germany, even amongst
political liberals like Wagner.
But his outburst had a personal
dimension too, fuelled by his
jealousy of the celebrated Jewish
composers Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.
Yes, Mendelssohn is a
well-known composer to this day.
People love his Violin Concerto
and much of his...octets,
A Midsummer Night's Dream...
He's a very popular composer.
Meyerbeer's less well-known.
In his day he was Stephen Sondheim,
Andrew Lloyd Webber
all rolled into one. Yes.
He was the most successful composer
there was in the 1840s, 1850s.
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, they had
money, they had success, they had
nice lives.
Wagner was small, ugly,
virtually destitute,
and had tried to make a success in
Paris and had failed miserably.
Yes. And he wanted to vent his anger
on someone, and the two most natural
people happened to be the two most
successful people he'd ever known.
There are some people that believe,
and I tend to agree with them, that
Wagner needed to create some kind
of a major disturbance in his life.
He needed some kind of weird kick...
Yeah. ..to get him going.
He needed an enemy, perhaps.
An enemy, something or other,
or an enemy within himself.
He needed to disturb...
He needed to muddy the
waters around him. Yeah.
In order
to write the music that he did.
I have this fantasy. It's typically
pathetic and typically a fantasy,
so very me, in which I go back in
time as an Englishman and
I write letters to Wagner.
I keep writing, saying, I have to
talk to you, and I say to him,
listen, you're on the brink of
becoming the greatest artist of the
19th century
and future generations
will forget that, simply because of
this nasty little essay that you're
writing, and because of the effect
it'll have, unless, you know...
And I think, what would he
say to that? If he had known
that the person who was most hurt
by his anti-Semitism was himself.
It isn't easy to confront Wagner,
is it? No, it's not.
It's often very unpleasant. Yeah.
But just because he may have
been a nasty little man and
a nasty anti-Semite doesn't mean that
his music is not as supreme as it is.
If this sounds familiar, that's
because it grew out of Traume,
the piece we've just heard.
It's the love duet from Act II of
Wagner's opera Tristan Und Isolde.
In 1857 he abandoned work on The
Ring to focus on this new piece,
the story of a forbidden love
affair
between the knight Tristan
and Isolde,
who's betrothed to another man.
It's based on ancient legend but the
music was strikingly avant-garde,
pushing at the boundaries
of conventional harmony.
HE SINGS IN GERMAN
And it all starts with this.
The so-called Tristan chord. It may
not look revolutionary
but it must have astonished
the first audiences who heard it.
Rather than progressing to
a harmonious resolution,
as musical convention expected,
it evolves into another
unresolved discord instead.
I've come to the house where
Wagner once lived, to explore
that cluster of notes which
opened the door to modern music.
PIANO PLAYS
Stefan, have you got
a spare right hand?
Hi.
You're playing on Wagner's piano.
This
was given to him, I can see, as a...
This is a pretty good piano,
a gift from the Steinway factory
to Richard Wagner in 1876.
Ah, to celebrate the beginning...
The beginning of the festival.
Yeah. Will you let me just try and
play the... Of course.
The famous chord.
I'm not going to do any more
than that, but this chord, here,
I want you to explain why it's...
It's the first chord
of Tristan in the Prelude.
Yes.
I'm playing the Tristan
chord on Wagner's own piano.
I have to pinch myself to see
that I'm not dreaming!
Yes, very important. There it is.
The famous Tristan chord. Yeah.
Will I come up with the
other two notes so that...?
Then you get this. That is it.
The E and the A-flat. That's it.
Yes.
This chord, if someone was to look
it up on Wikipedia,
they'd find
a huge entry, just on this chord.
What is it about this chord?
It's a chord of tension, of longing.
Yeah. The first voice goes up, like
you played, right? Longing, yeah.
And the other voices go down.
So this is a depression.
And this at the same time.
'This is where Wagner's genius as
'a composer merges with his
brilliance as a dramatist.
'His music keeps you on the
edge of your seat, longing for
'the unbearable tension of those
opening chords to be resolved.
'It almost happens in Act Two,
when the lovers meet in secret
to consummate their passion.'
It sounds vulgar but it really is
a coitus interruptus,
in the Liebesnacht,
the great duet where...
You think it is going to
arrive then, don't you?
Yes. And then in comes...
It's very erotic.
In comes... Yeah.
"Rette dich, Tristan!" happens
and it's...
STEPHEN SNAPS FINGERS
It's as if people are literally
in bed with each other
and they are
actually making love
and just as the climax
is about to arrive...
bang, someone comes in and...
HE BEGINS TO PLAY
MUSIC CONTINUES
And then...
"Rette dich, Tristan!"
Exactly, yeah.
It's fantastic. Interrupted.
Such a moment, isn't it?
Now I show you...
the non-interruption,
the transformation.
'Finally, after four hours of the
most glorious, gut-wrenching music,
'the psychological drama launched
by that famous opening chord
'reaches its tragic climax.'
The word is "lust", isn't it?
Now, for the last time,
the longing motif comes back.
Chromatic scale, going upwards.
Leading.
That E is going to come...
Transitional. To transcendence.
Just a moment, now.
Oh, I played the wrong note!
It's not so easy!
It's not. The piano-playing.
I get terribly excited. Yes.
But, my goodness, to have
been even a small part of it.
You've made me the happiest man
in Germany today.
There's nothing to say.
No, there is nothing to say.
That's exactly the point.
Extremely good music.
In 1860, Wagner's Swiss exile
finally ended.
He was 47 and his music had
made him internationally famous.
But he still had enormous debts,
thanks to his itinerant lifestyle
and legendary extravagance.
To raise cash, he toured Europe
as a conductor.
Ooh.
Ooh, look.
I'm pretty sure - I don't
have any Russian -
but that must be the Russian for
Ring, there, beginning with "Ko."
So there it is, Richard Wagner's
Tetralogy of the
Ring of the Nibelung.
And then the top right,
Mariinsky Theatre. Looks gorgeous.
Let's go in and see what it's like.
The Mariinsky Theatre
has always been a landmark building
in Russian cultural life,
famous for its opera and ballet.
You might be more familiar
with the name given to it
during the Soviet period,
when it was known as the Kirov.
They're preparing a new staging of
The Ring, masterminded by this man,
conductor Valery Gergiev,
the Mariinsky's artistic director.
There are no horned helmets
or Aryan ice-maidens on show here.
This production is inspired
by the myths and legends of
Gergiev's homeland, North Ossetia,
a reminder that Wagner's work
is open to endless
re-interpretation.
Wagner actually came to Russia
and conducted some orchestral
passages from his works
which were in progress and
had been produced elsewhere,
but some of them,
for the first time, here.
The Ride Of The Valkyries, for
example, was first heard in Russia.
He was paid a princely sum
to come and conduct in Russia,
and whatever people thought
of the music - and many people
were affronted and astounded
and simply uncomprehending.
It was very revolutionary. No one
had ever heard anything like it -
But whatever people thought of that,
they were really impressed
by his conducting.
He faced, with his back
to the audience, the orchestra.
That may seem normal to us
but in its day that
was considered very revolutionary.
I think it will be totally
impossible to imagine
the history of conducting without
a figure like Richard Wagner.
Not only because he was the one
who decided to turn
his back to the audience,
which was a revolution, but also
to control the orchestra this way,
and to get so much result from direct
eye-contact with the musicians.
Which is a thing you do,
as well. Isn't it?
'Yes.'
'It is very difficult to describe
into words what is conducting,
'or what is conducting Wagner operas,
but the tempo is very important.'
There is a moment when
you have to release
all the power of orchestra.
Then there is a moment when you have
to support, totally, the voice. Yes.
Or some of the voices on stage, and
then there is a moment when you have
to create a mysterious atmosphere.
Without this mystery
Wagner is not Wagner.
'I wondered if it was
important for you...'
to take the German out of Wagner,
because, to me,
he's an international composer
and he doesn't belong
to a country any more than
Shakespeare or Beethoven do,
and I wondered
if that's important to you.
I think it is a very
interesting question,
especially if we talk about The Ring.
There is not once...
a mentioning of Germany
or Deutschland,
so I think it's
a story of the world,
and I think Wagner himself,
being quite a smart man,
and because he also was
not only composing music
but famously he was also writing,
preparing libretto,
and he understood that The Ring
is about greed, hatred, love...
It's about nature, it's about power,
it's about domination.
Yes, betrayal, treachery...
Betrayal... And then nature being
kept in peace and harmony.
It's not German, German, German.
I think it's a world and it shouldn't
be associated with the Nazis...
No, that's really important...
..Really, because if we are able
to do it after the Second World War,
where this city was so, so destroyed,
you know. Incredible, yes.
That means any country can do it.
APPLAUSE
Wagner's Russian adventure
was a triumph.
He was even sounded out
about taking over as artistic
director of the Mariinsky.
Had he accepted, there might never
have been a Bayreuth Festival House.
He might never have
completed The Ring Cycle.
His story would have had
a very different, and probably
less controversial, ending.
But despite the adulation,
the pull of home was too strong
for Wagner to resist.
He returned to Germany instead,
where the money he'd made on tour
was soon swallowed up
by his huge debts.
By 1864, Wagner's life
had reached its lowest ebb.
He was no longer a young firebrand,
in danger of being imprisoned
for his revolutionary politics.
He was a 50-year-old in danger
of being imprisoned for his
simply astonishing debt.
He'd written Tristan but that
had been declared unproduceable
by most people who had seen it
or tried to rehearse it.
His relationship with
Mathilde Wesendonck was over.
His marriage was over.
It seemed his career was over.
All that bright promise.
And how could he possibly give
the world these preposterously
ambitious music-dramas?
If he were to write a wish-list, I
suppose he'd come up with one thing.
He would need someone so powerful,
so extraordinarily rich,
that they could write off his debts,
they could build him
the theatre he wanted,
they could guarantee him
the posterity that he knew
his genius merited.
But that would be asking
for a miracle.
On March 10th, 1864,
a miracle happened.
Quite unexpectedly, Maximilian II,
King of Bavaria, died.
He left his opulent kingdom
to his son Ludwig,
a handsome, eccentric 18-year-old,
and one of Ludwig's first actions
on acceding to the throne
was to send for his hero,
the artist he most adored in
all the world, Richard Wagner.
Wagner was so used
to fleeing the debt collector
that it took Ludwig's
messenger some time
to track him down
with the good news.
The king was offering
to pay off all his debts
and bankroll his future work.
And if that wasn't proof enough of
his passion, Ludwig went on to build
what must surely be the world's
most extravagant fan letter.
Schloss Neuschwanstein
wasn't completed until 1886,
three years after Wagner's death.
So he never had a chance to wander
through these extraordinary spaces,
all inspired by his work.
But he had something better,
the King's blank cheque.
After years of struggle
and disappointment,
Wagner's dreams of artistic freedom
must finally have seemed attainable.
What a patron to have.
No-one ever built something like
this for Mozart or Beethoven.
So what is it about Wagner's music
which inspires some men to
seize on his stories and ideas,
things which belong in the theatre
and seek to give them substance
in the real world instead?
In the middle ages,
Nuremberg was capital of
the German cultural renaissance,
a backdrop to Wagner's opera,
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
Later of course,
Hitler chose it as the stage for
his infamous propaganda rallies.
Well, the thing is,
Joachim, I'm familiar with the idea
that whenever there's a, you know,
footage of the Nuremberg rallies
with Hitler standing
on that podium over there,
usually someone has decided
to play Wagner in the background.
But you have theories that actually
Wagner is more deeply embedded
in the modern Nazi Nuremberg.
Yes, I think so. First of all, when
you take all these party rallies that
we had here, in the evening then,
there was a celebration of
the Meistersingers of Nuremberg...
Right, one of Wagner's
truly great operas. Yes, yes.
And they played that
and then came here, didn't they?
To this enormous, what was then,
how many soldiers would be here?
I'm sure more than 100,000.
More than 100,000.
From all over Germany,
they gathered here.
And the party faithful
would've listened to
The Meistersingers first.
In the evening, they listened
to The Meistersingers....
And then they come here...
Yes. And they played it themselves.
Hitler loved The Meistersingers.
He loved to whistle
the tunes to his guests.
He could whistle all the tunes
of The Meistersingers.
God. Yes, he liked that.
There's a certain scene
that's triggered in him,
I think, that whole rally idea.
Yes. It was the third act. There
you have all the guilds of Nuremburg
marching onto the stage and you have
the costume masses carrying flags
and their guild signs and symbols
they're singing together and this
is on the small stage of the opera
and then transferred or even
translated into reality in this
huge field here in Nuremberg.
So they perverted the style
of Wagner, if you like.
The emotional impact of the music
and the grandeur and the spectacle,
which does have an enormous effect
on audiences who love Wagner.
You do get turned into a jelly
by the end of the evening,
it's so extreme.
Yes, that was the first step.
The second was that he thought
one could teach the Germans
to see the world in a way
which you find in Wagner operas,
in a dialectic way.
That you have a protagonist and
an antagonist. A good and an evil.
That you have an Iago and
a Desdemona or in the Wagner case,
it is Siegfried and the Dragon.
Now, if you have this in the opera,
it is perfectly all right
because the opera needs the tension
of drama, between the good and evil.
But as soon as you turn it into
reality, it becomes a devastating
political fantasy and ideology.
Of course, a defender of Wagner
like me, although I'm not a complete
defender of Wagner,
would say Hitler saw
one side of Wagner and we tend
to see Hitler's side of Wagner
because Hitler was such
a huge figure in the 20th century
and because his taste for Wagner
was so enormous, we tend to say,
"What did Hitler see in Wagner?"
And we look through Hitler's
viewfinder of this enormous man
and see one little area like that,
instead of seeing the whole,
the whole thing.
If Joachim's right, that makes
Nuremberg the sinister descendant
of Ludwig's castle, Neuschwanstein.
A monstrous example of the way
Wagner's music inspires some men
to tear down the boundary which
ought to separate fantasy from fact.
The railing there surrounds on
three sides the area known
as the Fuhrer's Kanzel.
The Fuhrer's podium and
that's where Hitler stood.
That's where tourists
to this day stand.
Others, like me, can't actually
bring themselves to go there.
I'm not being over-sensitive,
I don't think.
I just don't like,
in the same way I'm not very
good at picking up guns.
I can do it occasionally,
but I don't think I want
to put myself in that position.
I don't want to...
I don't want to hedge around here.
I am deeply uncomfortable
in Nuremberg talking about Wagner.
I realise how close to the Nazi
fantasy world Wagner was
and how deeply stitched into
Hitler's vision of the world.
It's very difficult.
I have to keep reminding myself,
and I do it best by simply
listening to the music,
how unbelievably complicated,
ambiguous, emotionally honest,
raw, revolutionary,
anti-fascist Wagner truly is.
I, I suppose
I think of it like this.
Imagine a great, beautiful
silk tapestry of infinite
colour and complexity,
that has been stained indelibly.
It's still a beautiful tapestry
of miraculous workmanship
and gorgeous colour
and silk and texture.
But that stain is real
and I'm afraid Hitler
and Nazism have stained Wagner.
For some people,
that stain ruins the whole work.
For others, it is just
something that you have to,
have to face up to.
And here's a place,
as storm clouds gather in Nuremberg,
here's a place to think
about such things, I suppose.
By the time he finished work
on The Mastersingers, there was
a new woman in Wagner's life...
..Cosima, the daughter
of his friend, Franz Liszt.
They married in 1870,
after a scandalous affair which
almost cost him Ludwig's patronage.
This was the bait
that brought Wagner to Bayreuth.
Do you remember it?
The Baroque rococo extravagance,
which is the Margravial Opera House?
Wagner had resumed work on
The Ring Cycle and was searching for
a suitable theatre to stage it in.
A helpful friend suggested
this place might fit the bill.
Some friend!
But Wagner liked Bayreuth,
conveniently situated
at the heart of his royal patron's
Bavarian kingdom.
So, if the perfect theatre
didn't already exist here,
why not build one instead?
These are the original plans
for the Festspeilhaus,
constructed by Otto Bruckwald.
And someone's written here...
That's very nice.
"Die ornamente fort"? Yes.
That's Wagner's hand? Yes,
this is original Wagner's hand.
He got the plans from the architect
and you can see he had the idea
to make some ornaments.
Typical late 19th century
kind of thing.
Yes. And Wagner wrote
"die ornamente fort".
Yes. "Away with the ornaments", yes.
Some of the cash came from Ludwig,
the rest from private donations.
And the city of Bayreuth gifted
him the Green Hill to build on.
But there was another grand design
for Wagner to complete before
the festival could happen.
The final instalment
of his four-opera Ring Cycle.
Just, we'll open it.
It's been rebound.
It is rebound, yes.
But it's not a facsimile, actually.
That is the real thing.
"Gotterdammerung".
There it is, he just takes it and
writes it across, quite simple...
To remind what he's writing. Yes.
This is the very famous
beginning of the prelude. Yes.
Of the Norns.
And he writes in all the parts,
one, two, three, four.
All of these horns, the first
violins, the second violins...
It's written very clearly.
It's beautiful. Very beautiful.
It's so clear. You can't make
a single mistake here, can you?
Wow...
It's like you could conduct
from this score.
Yes, I couldn't but someone
with musical talent could!
Me too!
I'm sure some people will think
it's preposterous to get so excited
about bits of paper
and black notes on lines,
but I see and hear worlds
come out of these pages.
Dum, dum! Dur-dur-dur-dur.
Dum, dum!
Whole worlds, great worlds that
have influenced me and moved me
and done things to me
that no other art has.
And here, under the last notes,
he writes...
"Achieved..." Finished. Finished,
achieved. "..in Wahnfried on 21st
of November, I'll say no more."
That's fantastic,
with a little exclamation mark.
It was more than 20 years since
Wagner, penniless and in exile, had
first conceived of his masterwork.
Now, at last, the mountain was
scaled and The Ring Cycle completed.
And, finally, he had the theatre
of his dreams in which to stage it.
Well, here we are. "Memorialising
the first ever performance of
"The Ring Cycle, in
the year 1876."
I wish I'd been there.
Wow.
Here it is.
My hand is on the door.
I know you'll think
I'm very over-excited
but if this is the temple,
this is the sancto sanctorum,
the holy of holies.
This is the theatre itself and I've
waited all my life really, to enter.
I'm going to do it now.
Ah.
They're at work here,
I think they're doing a technical
rehearsal of The Mastersingers.
My goodness.
Whatever you think of
Wagner's music,
no-one can deny
this is one of the most
revolutionary theatres ever built.
For, I would suggest, the most
revolutionary music ever written.
It's fabulous, isn't it?
Much more classical than I expected
because it's quite outside, it is
quite staid, it's sort of like
a, like an Italian
basilica in some ways, isn't it?
And inside, like an Italian
basilica, it's quite gold, I mean
not mad by opera house standards,
but there's Corinthian
composite columns and the gold leaf
and everything, it's wonderful.
I'm so excited.
These are quite famous because
they're not known for their comfort.
The Ring Cycle is about 18 hours,
well it depends, 17 or 18 hours of
solid seating.
Most people bring a
cushion, I believe.
I must remember to do
that when it's my turn.
Everything about this theatre
exists to serve the onstage drama.
Every seat has an
uninterrupted view.
And the acoustic is legendary.
That's partly by design, partly by
happy accident.
The simple wooden
floors are original.
Wagner couldn't afford to
put in anything more fancy.
But they make a wonderfully
resonant sounding board,
so they've never been replaced.
But there's another aspect
of the design, which makes
this auditorium truly unique.
And if you don't
immediately spot it,
that's exactly the point.
This is where the orchestra is.
The audience can't see a single
one of them. They're all hidden.
It's a unique system, the whole
idea is that there's this balance,
because the music is just one
element of the whole drama.
To Wagner, the drama was a
compendium of all the arts together.
The music shouldn't drown
the action. Incredible.
Nowhere else like it in the world.
I never imagined I'd stand
centre stage at Bayreuth.
But it's about to get even better.
Look.
The Holy Chair.
It's hard not to talk in terms of
relics and religiosity when you're
in Bayreuth, but this chair has
hosted the bottoms
of, well the greatest conductors
in the history of music.
Just imagine this.
Oh! This is terrible!
I just feel like such a child,
in a sweetshop.
I'm trying to think of an
equivalent,
I suppose Lord's Cricket Ground
on a Thursday of an Ashes Test.
Maybe the Cavern in Liverpool
if you're a Beatles Fan.
But this does it for me.
The 1876 festival was the artistic
event of the century.
Wagner's boundless
appetite for innovation set
a new standard in opera production,
which still inspires Bayreuth today.
This is a technical rehearsal for
The Mastersingers, directed by his
great grand-daughter, Katharina.
That is a unique
piece of stage machinery.
It's firmly embedded into the
concrete because it's capable of
shifting 23 tonnes in a very
particular direction.
As we saw, it was built and
installed precisely for that
one moment in this one opera.
Isn't it amazing? Doesn't it show
the willpower behind Bayreuth?
It still exists as it
did in Wagner's day.
Wagner, ever the perfectionist,
wasn't entirely happy with
the performances or the staging
of the first productions.
Hardly surprising when you
remember he had to make do
with the rudimentary technology
of a 19th century theatre to bring
to life his mythical world of vast
underground caverns, mighty rivers
and castles in the sky.
We're very high up here.
It's about 75 to 80 feet up
and this is the stage below me.
It's making me a bit weird.
There's something
slightly surreal about
walking around a place so full
of such incredible high-tech
hydraulic machinery.
It's all beautifully kept and so
modern and hearing over it some
of the most profoundly beautiful
operatic chorus ever. It's a
marvellous mixture and it sums up
Wagner as much as anything can.
The demands of the stage and the
demands of art coming together.
This is a rehearsal for Siegfried,
the third opera of the Ring.
It's an opportunity for the soloists
to go through their paces, backed by
a full scale Wagnerian orchestra of
more than 120 musicians.
ORCHESTRA PRACTICES
It's wonderful, I don't think
I've ever been so close.
It's like being inside a painting.
You're actually inside the
texture of the music in a
way you could never imagine.
I wish you could believe how
happy I was. You wouldn't.
You'd think I was insane.
You probably do anyway.
Mmm.
Here's the boss.
One of them, anyway. Eva Wagner,
the composer's great-granddaughter.
She's recently taken
charge of the Festival
alongside her sister, Katharina.
This is your first month here,
almost, isn't it? You're a new girl.
It's... well.
I lived here before, but now
I'm a new person here, yes.
In a new position.
It must be a very strange feeling.
I'm back home.
Do
you think of Bayreuth as your home?
I don't know. I can't answer that. I
was a long time away, but I like it.
You ever get a chance
to relax and think yet?
Not really yet.
I think that will be probably after
the festival, when I'm on my holiday.
This is June, when the
whole thing starts building
to an enormous climax.
Exactly. I suppose a very
pathetic and vulgar question,
but do you think he would be
surprised that the Bayreuth is still
going strong?
It's seven years, the waiting list
for a ticket. He would be surprised.
Would he expect that? He knew he was
going to live forever. Of course.
He did, didn't he?
I am sure, otherwise
why should he have built it here?
It's true.
It's still astonishing, isn't it?
That is the very special thing about
here, about him, about the music.
The person.
You know also, that means,
it's a bit like being an aristocrat.
You know that you are borrowing,
as it were, your time from your
children, do you know what I mean?
I don't mean literally your
children, but the next generation,
and the generation after that, will
do new things.
I think you create something
in your mind, which is perhaps not...
No, you don't feel that?
No, I don't feel!
You don't feel the idea of
posterity, as we would say
in England? The future?
Not at the moment.
That's probably good,
get on with the present.
I live now,
I do my things now, and I hope
to do it like people want it
and expect it.
With Katharina, with my sister.
I think we are...
hopefully, we are a good team.
I'm sure. OK, is that OK?
Really nice talking to you.
I appreciate it, you are very busy.
Thank you, bye-bye.
Thank you so much.
Greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
You stay still, or not? Yeah, we'll
be here for the next three days.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
(Wagner.)
Flesh on flesh, I touched a Wagner.
It's pathetic of me,
but it's rather wonderful.
Running Bayreuth has
always been a family affair.
But I'm not sure I
envy the Wagner sisters.
They're under intense scrutiny,
as they try to strike the balance
between tradition and innovation.
A challenge faced by the family ever
since 1883, the year Wagner died.
He's buried here in the garden of
his former home, Villa Wahnfried.
You don't get much
simpler than that do you?
Just polished granite in grey.
There he lies.
I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in
Bayreuth.
SINGERS PRACTISE
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
All I want to do now is give
myself over to the music and count
down the days to opening night.
SINGING STOPS
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
SINGERS PRACTISE
CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN
SINGING PRACTISE
But there's another character who
refuses to leave the story.
This is Hitler in September 1923
on his very first visit to Bayreuth.
He'd come to pay his
respects at the master's tomb,
and to meet the British-born writer,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was a racist,
who championed Aryan supremacy
and vilified the Jews.
He was also an influential member
of the Wagner household, through
marriage to the composer's daughter.
Long before he became Chancellor,
Hitler was embraced by some
in Bayreuth with open arms.
It wasn't a question of
the Wagner family and Bayreuth
welcoming Hitler because,
in a cowardy-custard fashion,
he was the great leader of Germany
and they didn't dare offend him.
Quite the opposite. They actually
pushed him forward, they supported
him from a very early age.
1923 was just a few years after
the First World War, when
Hitler was a nobody.
He was a corporal who had
left the front and came to join
the turmoil of post-war Germany.
But in fact, they saw in him -
Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
Wagner's son-in-law - they saw in
Hitler a kind of Parsifal who had
become the shining knight to
liberate Germany and lead it forward
into a grand new age, as many
people, much later, also saw Hitler.
After Hitler became
chancellor in 1933,
he became a patron of the festival.
Performances continued here
even during the Second World War.
It's impossible to come to Bayreuth
without having to confront the
issue of that window, really.
Because out of that window appeared
one Adolf Hitler, some years ago.
He came to Bayreuth to enjoy
the performances of his favourite
dramatist composer - my favourite
dramatist composer - Richard Wagner.
Wagner's music and reputation
has suffered, partly because
the Nazis loved and perverted
that music - certainly in my
opinion, they perverted it to their
hideous ideology.
But also, Wagner has suffered
because his descendants, his family,
seemed to welcome Hitler.
In the case of his daughter-in-law,
Winifred, who was British,
actually to revere Hitler.
This is one of the reasons that
Wagner's music
and Bayreuth itself are tainted,
stained in some people's opinion.
There are many who shun the Green
Hill because of what happened
here in the 1930s and '40s.
But now, after years of fudging the
issue, it looks as if Bayreuth is
starting to square up to its past.
SINGERS PRACTISE
The Wagner sisters want an
independent investigation into
their family's links with Hitler.
And the Nazi period
is even being addressed on
the Bayreuth stage itself.
OPERATIC SINGING
Parsifal is Wagner's final opera,
based on the Arthurian
legend of the Holy Grail.
Norwegian director Stefan Herheim
has updated the action, which now
plays out against the backdrop
of recent events in German history.
For the first time in a generation,
there will be Swastikas
on show at Bayreuth.
OPERATIC SINGING
Hi, what a pleasure. And you too.
Nice to meet you. Thank you.
It's wonderful to be here.
It's very exciting.
This is where we have the
Swastikas and the Nazis.
It's pretty brave, isn't it?
It's fantastic.
These refugees
are an addition to last year. Right.
That's why we're spending time on it.
Ah, right. It's all new.
We somehow got
permission to add this idea.
It's brilliant.
I know Katharina is wanting to
confront the history more full on,
which I think is a really good idea.
There might be an exhibition in
Wahnfried, I believe. Yeah. Imagine.
OPERATIC SINGING
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
OPERATIC SINGING
It will take more than
one daring production
to make amends for the past.
But what better way of healing the
wound than through the music itself?
My head tells me I'm ready to
take my seat for the opening
night of the Festival,
but my heart
still has some catching up to do.
And there's one more
person I need to hear from.
In London, I'm meeting
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch.
When she was 18 years old,
she became a prisoner at Auschwitz,
where some of my own relatives
were also held and killed.
She's a cellist, whose talent
for music probably saved her life,
when she was recruited into the
inmates' orchestra at the camp.
There was nobody there
who played the cello.
There had been somebody
there, who had died.
I don't know what would have
happened. If they still had
had a cello,
then I wouldn't have
been so important.
And, you know,
I had typhus, like everybody.
I was half dead in the revier, as it
was called, a sort of sick bay.
I remember two
Germans standing in front of my bed.
We had to all get up, and march naked
in front of the people who would say
yes or no in the revier.
Meaning that you're too sick to
live? Too sick to live, so you go,
or you survive.
And that is something that is
engraved in my memory.
"This is the cellist."
And they walked on.
There was one particular
piece you played under
extraordinary circumstances.
Well, I mean, that this is sort of
worth mentioning, that actually
Doctor Mengele, the famous
doctor who was interested
in experiments on twins,
after he's probably done a selection,
or God knows what he's done, came
into the block and he wanted to
hear the Schumann-Traumerei.
And that was on my repertoire so
Anita, go on, play the Traumerei,
which I did.
One big thing was always,
never get eye contact with the
Germans. Oh, really. If possible.
Because the moment you get eye
contact, you feel you're being seen.
Have you played it since then?
This grandson plays it with pleasure.
Really? Yes. And you don't mind?
No, I don't mind.
I find, music is not sullied
for me, by anything. Absolutely.
I mean, how much do we
grant the Germans in their
quest of destroying everything?
I mean, music is holy for me.
Yes. That's above everything.
Yes, they didn't destroy the music,
did they? No. No.
People have this idea
that in the death camps,
that Wagner was playing in the
background all the time, as it were.
I'm here talking to you as a
survivor of one of one of
the death camps,
the most famous of them all,
the dreaded and horrific Auschwitz.
Well, we certainly
didn't play Wagner.
You did not? No, we didn't.
First of all, you must realise
what this band, or capella as
we used to call it, consisted of.
You couldn't have played
Wagner if you'd tried.
Right, Wagner does
demand a big orchestra.
Yeah, and you know, blowing
instruments, I can't speak for
the other camps
but I don't think Wagner
was particularly played.
When I was a boy, and if I
played Wagner at the top of
the house loudly,
for a Jewish family, Wagner...
Must I play that?
If your children played Wagner in
the attic here and loudly, would
you think they were somehow...
Am I betraying my Jewishness by
playing Wagner and then liking him?
I think everybody has to come to
terms by themselves.
I would never
forbid anybody to listen to Wagner.
If it was the music
without the drama,
one wouldn't probably argue with
it but apart from the fact,
I would never have the patience
to sit through five hours
and listen to so much noise.
You know, I know you love it but...
I do. What happens to you when
you sit there for five hours?
HE LAUGHS
I'm taken into a world of heightened
emotion and psychological depth.
It's...
It's really extraordinary,
I find that every time
I see a Wagner piece,
a music drama as he'd call
it, an opera is the easiest way
to call it,
it's as if it's absolutely
new so although they're very long,
and I understand, why five hours?
It seems like a long time with
people singing and standing
in one place. Screaming!
Or screaming sometimes.
And yet, because of what the music
does underneath with the drama, it's
as if it's an enormous conversation.
Your mind goes on a journey of
connecting all kinds of
emotional states and all kinds of
philosophical thoughts.
I mean, I know it sounds so
pretentious, I'm fully aware of
how embarrassing it can be to
try and explain.
Why do you have to listen to
Wagner in Bayreuth, which is so
somehow symbolic for everything
terrible that has happened? Yes.
Why can't you just sit at
home and listen to a record?
It's a very good question.
I think I've spent my life listening
to the records and loving it, I've
never been to Bayreuth, Wagner built
the theatre specifically for it
and I suppose it's a way of
completing
a part of my life with Wagner as
it's been.
Maybe I'll be disappointed.
Well, you tell me when you
come back, what you felt like
in there on the shrine.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's...
Gosh, you've got me worried now!
I'm sorry.
No, no, it's right that you should.
I embarked on this whole project,
I was kidding myself, with an open
mind but I kind of thought, really,
I'll just cruise through this
and I know people will put contrary
points of view to me and say well,
yes, but think I've already got the
answers and I know why Wagner is the
greatest genius who ever lived and
I don't need anyone to tell me,
to give any more
pause to that than I already have.
But there is much in what you say.
So do you think I
shouldn't go to Bayreuth?
I'm sorry, I'm not going to
give you any advice, Stephen.
You have to do that.
You're quite right.
And I can't... No, why not?
Maybe you'll decide never again,
but you'll have experienced it.
This remarkable plot of ground will
never be a neutral place, of course.
For some, it's a shrine to one
of the world's great geniuses.
For others, it's a tainted reminder
of dark days in Germany's past.
Even this memorial bust was created
by Hitler's favourite sculptor.
But Wagner's music is
bigger, and better,
than Hitler ever imagined it to be.
And Bayreuth, the theatre Wagner
dreamed of creating for so long,
is also redeemed by that fact.
Which is why I'm not prepared to
surrender either of them
to him.
Well, here it is. In my hand,
one of the most valuable pieces
of paper in the world of culture.
One thing I'd leave
with is this thought.
If you've never heard the music
of Richard Wagner, if you've never
encountered his dramas,
I would urge you, because we're
only on this
planet once, to give it a try.
I still believe,
as firmly as I believe anything,
that his work is important
and is on the side of the angels.
It is, fundamentally, good.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd