What Would Wagner Think?
posted by Joanie Schultz
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: Would Wagner approve of our production of The Ring Cycle? Obviously, in some ways it doesn’t matter. The man is long gone, and his opera cycle had its premiere over 100 years ago, and we’re adapting it into a new form. But I can’t help but be curious. What would happen if Wanger was put in a time travel machine and appeared at The Building Stage to watch our creation of and production of his masterpiece, adapted into a play with rock music built from his score?
Wagner was a paradox of a man. He wanted to create new forms and insisted in his essays on collaboration in the project of creating his operas, but in practice was difficult to get along with and insisted on sovereignty over the work. He is known for asserting in his essay “The Art-work of the Future” the need to fuse the arts, “the three sister arts [dance, tone, and poetry] unite their forces in one collective operation, in which the highest faculty of each comes to its highest unfolding. By working in common, each one of them attains the power to be and do the very thing which, of her own and in most essence, she longs to do and be.” Within this concept he created, commonly called Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art-work” he explains in the same essay, not only do these art forms need to unite, but the artists themselves (specifically the performers) also need to collaborate, creating the art-work of the future in service of what he calls “the drama”. He contends that cooperation between all theater artists is key for each to create their best work, and that, “once the artist has raised his project to a common one, by the energy of his own enthusiasm, the artistic undertaking becomes thenceforth itself an enterprise in common.” However, in practice, all evidence shows that Wagner’s rehearsals were tailored to the wants and needs of the Master, and he was dictator of his own artistic fellowship.
I believe that we, as a group working on this massive project, are working in an attempt to create this collaborative environment that Wagner longed for but could not actually lead. In fact, since directing has grown from out of Wagner’s time (he is credited as one of the first who held the title of director), I believe that the trend of creating performance (at least in theater) is one of collaboration. This is not unilaterally true, but among those who I have worked with this continues to be the goal. I think that Wagner would appreciate and marvel at our working process.
On the other hand, Wagner was a great composer, a mastermind of composition for the operatic stage and created new ways of writing dramatic music that influence us still today not only in opera but in film composition. The very fact that we are not using his opera score might be offensive to him. But we are studying it, and using it in the scoring of our theatrical production. We haven’t thrown it out entirely, but we aren’t using more than a fraction of it in our play. I’m certain this would come as a great upset to him. But at the same time, we are living in an entirely new era. There are those who appreciate Wagner. I am obviously one of them. There is a devoted group who do go out of their way to experience the 16 hours of opera that make up the original cycle. There are those that still go to the Bayreuth Festival to see the cycle when it is performed each summer. But this is specialized group. Wagner wanted to reach a wide audience, he wanted to speak to the German people and create the work that united them (this, of course was tainted by Hitler, and now many Germans veer away from Wagner, but his work was created long before being appropriated by Hitler, and this taint on it I believe should not be a reflection on Wagner.) He wrote music that in his time was pushing his audience, but it now is classic, not only as part of the classical genre, but is from another, long gone time. It doesn’t speak to enough people for it to be widely sought after. Let’s face it: it takes effort and dedication to spend time with Wagner’s music, and in our fast paced world, there are few that will put out that effort. What we are creating is not a “watered down” experience of Wagner, but a new point of view on it, and one that I believe will be more palatable to our modern audience. So I’m certain that Wagner would be thrown by us not staying true to his composition, but because Wagner was more than a composer: he was a visionary and leader in the theater as well as opera, I think he would understand. Because Wagner believed in pushing forward and creating art forms that spoke to the audience of the current time, and so I wonder what he would think about his operas still being performed today, and the limited but devoted audiences that follow them.
If Wagner sat down for coffee with me, I would explain to him: “We are creating what we believe is the closest thing we, in our time and place, can to what you created. You wanted a festival, an experience like those of the Ancient Greeks, that would bring together community around this major art-work. What we are trying to do is the same: in our language (both musical and literal) and in our time, we are creating that community, not for three or four days, but for just one day. In an urban America that is so scattered, we are asking people to take an afternoon and evening to experience this world of myth that you so carefully constructed, and through that, reflect on our community and personal choices as you wished for these operas. We are attempting, for a modern audience, to create the total art-work that you wrote about. To create the art-work for the future—but our future is different than yours.” I like to think that Wagner would appreciate this, that he would nod understandingly, and bless our production. And then I like to think that Wagner would come to our rehearsals, and would see his text being played so genuinely and immediately between the fantastic cast that we have gathered, and he would see the sketches of our design work, and then he would want to hang out to see the result. Because he’ll know that what we’re creating is still what he set out to do: to create an encompassing event that takes an audience and entertains, overwhelms, excites, indulges, exposes, and makes them think.