Get Your Kicks at Bayreuth

Red Baron loves the theater, or should I write loved? I still remember the Golden Sixties of German stagecraft. Theaters in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich performed classical pieces by Lessing, Schiller, and Brecht, and modern pieces by Dürrenmatt, Frisch, and Kroetz. I was in Munich then and watched actresses such as Therese Giehse, Elfriede Kuzmany, and Edda Seippel, and actors such as Rolf Boysen, Thomas Holtzmann, and Romuald Pekny perform on stage. 

They are all long gone, but I shall never forget their fine acting and articulate speech. These artists had been educated at renowned institutions such as the Otto-Falkenberg-Schule, the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar, and the Folkwang Universität der Künste.

What a discrepancy between the past and today. Actors and actresses of the new generation prefer performing on TV, just moving around the set and mumbling their words. 

As far as theater performances are concerned, I no longer recognize the classical authors when stage directors rewrite the texts in what is called Regietheater in German. However, there are laudable exceptions. I remember a performance of Schiller's trilogy Wallenstein here in Freiburg, where the stage director had reduced the text so that the three-evening show fitted into one evening. In limiting the storyline to just two threads, the personality of Wallenstein and the love between his daughter and General Piccolomini's son, the plot gained density and depth. Eventually, it was only a detail that, in the end, the Irish Colonel Butler dressed in a World War I uniform killed Wallenstein with a six-shooter instead of using a halberd.

Coming back to Bayreuth. There is a crucial difference between spoken theater and opera: stage directors do not change the music. However, they compensate for their frustration by transposing archaic plots into modern times, as in this year's Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung at the Bayreuth Festival. In Rhinegold, the first part of the tetralogy, you meet some sluts and get your kicks in a motel on Route 66 instead of Wotan's Valhalla. Wotan is a noble rogue, and the Rhine daughters are saloon sluts. Black-and-white movies project gunmen onto a screen.

Rhinegold stage set 2013 (©Bayreuther Festspiele)

If you think this is going too far, look at Siegfried's set. A communist Mount Rushmore featuring Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao intrigued bourgeois spectators and elicited some boos. Siegfried whacks Fafnir, downgraded from a terrifying dragon to a mere crocodile, using a Kalashnikov AK-47 (Crocodile Siegfried?). Following a spaghetti and red wine orgy, the "Norne" Erda (Urd), wearing a blond headdress, gives Wotan a blow job. 

Critic Alexander Dick writes in the Badische Zeitung that Richard Wagner's music and Frank Casdorf's stage set have nothing in common, but so far, that is the only thing that hurts.

Siegfried stage set 2013 (©Bayreuther Festspiele)

Yet the real Wagner aficionado is not concerned. He will simply close his eyes and enjoy the music.

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