CRITIC AT LARGE

KULTUR KLUB

Judith Martin gets the last laugh at Bayreuth

Wagners always laugh; Wagnerites never do," said Friedelind Wagner during what she claimed, not for the first time, was hei last time at the Bayreuth Richard Wagner F estival.

Certainly Wagnerites do not laugh. In the theatrical temple Miss Wagner's grandfather created as his cult headquarters, laughing at Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg just because it happens to be a comedy is as great a sin as applauding instead of re-

ceiving it in religious silence. The few misguided souls who committed these transgressions at Bayreuth last summer got the glarings of their lives.

This is not to say that Wagnerites do not enjoy themselves. Standing around the Festspielhaus in the midafternoon heat or rain in their evening clothes, they ap-

peared deeply, if gloomily, gratified. It is just that their idea of fun is not everybody's, and the holiday atmosphere at Wagner Central is, as Miss Wagner put it, decidedly grim. If you want a merry summer festival, go to Pamplona.

We are not talking nights at the opera, bracketed by cafe gossip and laughter. Mere weak-minded music fanciers, the sort of people a Bayreuth reveler witheringly described as relishing Der Rosenkavalier in Salzburg, need not apply. We're talking total-immersion music-drama, seven nights of it, at an average of six hours plus, preceded by morning lectures. In the remote Bavarian setting selected by Richard Wagner for its unlikelihood to offer pilgrims distractions from Wagner worship, even Wagnerites who show too much fondness for Lohengrin are under suspicion of frivolity.

Bayreuth is the Wagnerian Endurance Olympics, where heavy-duty Wagnerites proudly demonstrate their physical vitality, patience, imperviousness to bodily or emotional hardship, and unlimited attention spans—in short, their worthiness to be devotees of Richard Wagner.

It is Friedelind Wagner's contention, borne out by the uniquely frank and joshing atmosphere in the Wagner family box, that such standards of humility and blind devotion disqualify the fourth generation of Wagners, several of them professional successes elsewhere in music and theater. Except for her brother Wolfgang, who presides at the festival with his second wife, Gudrun, formerly of the festival's tight-lipped press office, Richard and Cosima Wagner's direct descendants lost their rehearsal privileges and their invitations to official receptions this year.

But, then, affability is not a festival characteristic.

Tickets are haughtily and arbitrarily granted and withheld. The 1,925-seat theater, neither air-conditioned nor heated, has no aisles, and the orchestra seats are the armless, wooden, pop-up kind found in junior high school auditoriums. Cushioning them, management and audience agree, would ruin the acoustics. There is some thin upholstery in the box towers, but, by way of compensation, no air circulation.

Although Bayreuth weather simulated laboratory conditions for creating head colds— intense heat, followed suddenly by steady, chilling rain—coughing and sneezing are not permitted. No human frailties whatsoever are in evidence. In any other theater in the world, bathrooms are under mass siege after forty-minute acts. In the Festspielhaus, where eighty-five minutes is nothing for a single act, and beer and champagne are consumed throughout two onehour intermissions, there is never a lounge line of more than three.

When the temperature inside the theater reached 104 degrees last summer, not one person left before the very end. Not even one relaxed enough to pass out.

It is true that a number of male weaklings removed their jackets and ties, and rolled up their pants to the knees, under cover of darkness, but they always dressed in time for intermission. And the orchestra is granted immunity from dress codes because of its covered pit. Sir Georg Solti, it was rumored, conducted the first cycle barefoot.

t the 1983 festival, there was, in addition to the attraction of a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the special treat for Wagnerites of its being the hundredth anniversary of Wagner's death. One can only attend the music-dramas from four in the afternoon until tenthirty or eleven, and even stretching this out with ovations of three-quarters of an hour or more, during which no one departs ("Of course not— they lock the doors," said a Wagner family intimate), leaves plenty of time for gravesite visits and ceremonies. Those staying in the little nearby town of Pegnitz could also watch the previous Ring production on film during time off, and peruse an exhibit called ' Richard Wagner undder Champagner, " featuring the Master's unpaid bar bills.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of this year's audience was its stoicism when the touted new production turned out to be a postmodernist pastiche of nostalgic and abstract elements, a style change not based upon a new conviction about meaning, but upon the conviction that there ought to be a style change.

During the first of three Ring cycles, many exercised their right to boo the director, Sir Peter Hall. But by the second, when he had inexplicably left town, the booing ceased, except for a few catcalls because the naked Rhinemaidens donned kimonos for the curtain call. Word started charitably going around, first by mouth and then in a leaflet by the Action Committee for the Work of Richard Wagner {Aktionskreis fiirdas Werk Richard Wagners), that all new productions need a few years to settle in. After all, people kept reminding one another, the 1976 Chereau production of the Ring (the nineteenth-century Marxist interpretation seen on television earlier this year) was cordially hated when it opened, but a benevolent feeling for it developed as soon as its end was in sight.

This seemed sufficient consolation for those lucky enough to be allowed to attend the new Ring's first season— the 5,775 who got tickets, out of the 270,000 Wagnerites from seventy-three countries who had written, begged, and used up all their contacts trying to get subscriptions.

The best approaches for getting tickets, it is agreed, are to obtain a German cabinet post first, or to preside over a major and consistently generous corporation, or to descend from an ancient family. But these are no guarantees. The Friends of Bayreuth, heavy donors distinguished by the dime-sized versions of Alberich's gold ring they wear on their lapels, are allotted only half enough tickets for their 2,300-odd members.

Even the dowager Begum Aga Khan, whose bejeweled presence has been the social centerpiece of the festival since its postwar reopening in 1951, was not present during the Chereau Ring years, an absence she variously explained as cultural disapproval, political disapproval, illness, the death of a close friend, and concern that the Ring is dominated by men. Those who know the Begum in other contexts note that she is unusually docile in Bayreuth. At any rate, she had her ticket this year, and the Prince of Liechtenstein, the Duke of Kent, and former British Prime Minister Edward Heath had theirs.

"Bayreuth is the Wagnerian Endurance Olympics"

The patronage of such personages naturally heralded the inevitable declaration that the audience was split between the secretly bored rich, who come to show off their clothes, and the poor but genuine music lovers. That declaration, of course, is heard in every opera house in the world. But in Bayreuth, it is the funniest thing you will hear all week.

In the first place, any rich person who can't think of an easier way to show off than round-the-clock Wagner ought to have his power of attorney taken away; and in the second, the fashion standard in Bayreuth is aggressive dowdiness, and those who arrive looking chic soon shrivel from unkind stares. The classic Bayreuth costume for a female Wagnerite is a long print dress, daytime leather shoes with knee-high stockings (the elastic tops become visible when skirts are hoisted for the steps), and a fur stole with lots of dangling claws and jaws. For men, it is either oversized pussycat bow ties with black evening clothes or the newest look: white dinner jackets worn over black shirts with white bow ties, giving elderly male Wagnerites the look of art deco gangsters.

The alleged poor, if they are able to scrounge tickets on the sidewalk, run home and dress. There are no blue jeans worn at Bayreuth—"It wouldn't be respectful," said a long-haired motorcyclist—any more than there are funny Wagnerian T-shirts or punning buttons. The only two men who sported velvet berets wore deadly serious faces underneath.

A Munich youth, expounding on the class division by bragging that he and his friends "save up all year for one twelve-mark ticket, and stay in youth hostels," was asked how they afford evening clothes. "Oh, that doesn't cost anything," he replied, astonished. "We all have those from ourparents."

fficially, the audiences are said to be selected by a computer that, for the past decade, has been compiling dossiers on hopeful Wagnerites. The rule is that you must apply by November 15, all applications received previously being treated as equal, and be prepared to wait until January to find if you have been selected. The goal, said the press officer, is to have one-third of the audience at each festival be new people.

A "new person," by his definition, is one who has applied in vain for three years. According to the German old ladies hanging around the theater with one or two precious tickets apiece, ten years on the waiting list is more like it. And then, several reported, you are likely to be favored with admission only to an old production—not, for example, any part of the coveted new Ring.

In any case, skipping a year's pleading blots your record in the dreaded Wagner Computer, on the grounds that you aren't serious if you decided to fritter away a single summer with other recreational plans instead of reserving it in case you got the call. There is a superstitious terror of the powers of the Computer—a Wagnerite considering picking a flower from a festival hedge to woo a box-office attendant was warned that the Computer would get wind of this crime. Miss Wagner suspects that the Computer is her sister-in-law.

Dozens of people who don't receive any tickets at all show up from near and far, hoping for returns. Parading daily in front of the Festspielhaus wearing signs ("Searching for Walkure"... "Will trade Tristan for Siegfried"... "Please! Gotterdammerung/"), they give it the look of being permanently picketed. Tickets cost from just over $2 to $70, and there is virtually no black market—even the most desperate seekers will rush inside to report anyone offering to answer their prayers at a profit. So they pounce on passersby with the demand "KartenP Kartenr

It is the ticketless who enjoy the quintessential Wagnerian festival experience of redemption through suffering. This is carefully orchestrated by the tyrannical ladies who run the box office, where two or three tickets are returned daily for resale (at a 10 percent penalty to their owners), and a crowd lines up at seven-thirty or eight A.M. for the chance to beg for them when the box office opens at ten.

Being first in line means nothing more than the chance to dash to the front row along the counter, while the box office attendants hold aloft the prizes and smilingly encourage supplicants to give cry to their hopes. A young German who had been waiting at dawn every day was scornfully told, "You had a ticket last week!" as if appearing again were criminally selfish, and the ticket was handed over his head to a more obsequious latecomer.

The runner-up quintessential experience is going through Peace from Madness (Wahnfried), Wagner's home, now his museum. A three-story exhibit is carefully arranged so that the visitor must make three separate round trips on different staircases in order to see adjoining rooms. Wagner originally named the house Annoyance (Argersheim).

Among Wagnerites, conversation is always the same. Chiefly, it is a competition based on who heard whom sing where. Someone drops the name of Birgit Nilsson with a satisfying Wagnerian clash, and then, in turn, is blasted away by someone else throwing in the name of Kirsten Flagstad, and so on. Occasionally, a thesis is expounded, such as that Wagner kept his music-dramas entirely clean of the antiSemitism of his other writings, but it usually turns out to have been lifted intact from one of the essays in the seven-volume official program.

Under the first two generations of Wagners (Richard and then Cosima; followed by their son, Siegfried, and then by his widow, Winifred), audience and musicians used to mix after the performances in the two festival restaurants, fancy and cafeteria, both of which have the same dimensions as the stage and double as rehearsal rooms. Traditionally, no curtain calls were allowed at Bayreuth, so performers got individual applause only if they descended the staircase to join the audience in a snack. Now, curtain calls go on even after the iron fire curtain is down—it has a door cut into it for this purpose—and sixty-five curtain calls at a single performance are not extraordinary; singers can escape their fans through an underground tunnel; and the restaurants close after the second intermission.

The musicians' social life consists of select dinner parties at the Wolfgang Wagners' for important soloists, and modern traditions, such as the soloists' party for the production crew (freshmen soloists are liable for an extra round of beer), the choir's cabaret, the orchestra's free public concert at the swimming quarry, and the male soloists versus the townspeople at Fussball, a game that is rendered unexciting by the soloists' fear of injury, so that those valuable bodies rarely make more than a token, ten-minute appearance each.

Some, like team stalwart Graham Clark, an English former sports teacher who did research for his thesis at the Henry Street Settlement on New York's Lower East Side, go in for a round of partying. He did what he could last year to enliven one of Wolfgang Wagner's parties by pretending to have gotten his finger stuck in a bottle. "I'm only in music for the fun of it," said Clark, who sings David in Meistersinger and Melot in Tristan. "All my previous jobs were altruistic."

"It's a good thing I'm a country girl and like to read, do needlepoint, and go to bed early," said Johanna Meier, who was born to the rigors of serious summer festivals. While she sings Isolde at Bayreuth each summer, her father is getting nailed to the cross in Spearfish, South Dakota, where the German-born senior Meiers produce the Passion Play, with a winter season in Florida. After her singing career, she plans to retire into her mother's role of Mary.

Mostly, the singers hang around the Festspielhaus canteen. "They come in every day and say, 'Oh, wow! Knodel again!' " said Jeannine Altmeyer, who can't manage that degree of enthusiasm herself— "If you don't like Schweinefleisch around here, you're out of luck"—and was pleased to have the interruption of an early summer engagement in Spain, "where I got all my iodine back. "

Altmeyer, who sings Sieglinde, is also understudying Briinnhilde (whom she plays in the San Francisco Ring cycle), but with the stipulation that she will not hang upside down under the production's giant moving platform for six minutes, her head lower than her body, as does Hildegard Behrens'm Siegfried (Rchxzns's doctor has assured her that it will notcutoffhercirculation). Altmeyer was also able to see the other productions—because she ordered full-price tickets in advance.

Only Fifty people work yearround at the Festspielhaus, but the summer staff, including production crews and musicians from other great opera houses of the world, numbers 780. They come with their families, some enrolling children in Bayreuth schools, for wages consisting mostly of prestige. This also applies to the stars, one of whom explained, "You take half your fee here so that you can charge ten times as much elsewhere because you've been in Bayreuth."

"If the festival givesyou a headache, you seek relief atthe Parsifal Apotheke"

The locals rent them farmhouses or apartments and go off on their own holidays, or else they act as resident landlords, collecting rehearsal passes as part of the rent, and enroll their own children to play Nibelungen. It is a big season for the Bayreuth fire department. The Festspielhaus, with its extensive use of wood, has a smoke alarm system so sensitive that an office toaster got confiscated for unduly arousing the occupants of a fire truck routinely parked on the grounds, and the city fire commissioner himself must be present in the wings when Valhalla is burned down.

Bayreuth, current population 70,600, is a town created by two celebrities, each of whom built a theater still in use. Wagner originally came there to consider consecrating the 1748 court theater of Frederick the Great's sister, the Margravine Wilhelmine, to his purposes,* before deciding to build the Festspielhaus to his own exquisite specifications. His famous hidden orchestra pit is not only built out of previously aged wood, set on poles, so that experiencing its resonance is accurately de-

scribed as "like being inside of a fine old violin," but it has a trapdoor behind the conductor's head to enable the Master, sitting in the front row during actual performances, to rise easily from his seat, flip it open, and tell the conductor that he hated his tempo. The wooden floors of the house also create resonance, which is the reason for the Bayreuth tradition of foot stomping to show approval.

Half the streets in town are named for Wagner relatives or characters (Hundingstrasse turns into Siegmundstrasse), and if the festival gives you a headache, you seek relief at the Parsifal Apotheke. Time was, said the city editor of the Nordbayerischer Kurier, when life stopped for the festival. But now an unrelated youth festival was held simultaneously, and even the mayor, who used to concentrate on playing the cosmopolite for big-shot visitors, was distracted by the rumor that the cigarette factory, a major employer (which, oddly enough, attempted to attract Wagnerite business with a Carmen advertisement), was planning to relocate in Berli

It was considered amazing that Bayreuth was able to recover international prestige after having been, during World War II, the cultural headquarters of the number one Wagner groupie, Adolf Hitler. (He was, however, not the sturdiest one, and donated air conditioning that the house used only during intermissions, and is now entirely rid of.) There was one sidewalk observer this year who didn't even want a ticket—a native of Bayreuth, now of St. Louis, Missouri, on a sentimental voyage to the spot where she used to be taken as a child to cheer for the Fuhrer, who appeared on the same Festspielhaus balcony where the brass section now plays leitmotivs to announce the commencement of each act.

In a time when Ring cycles are performed within commuting distance of many of the pilgrims—the United States had them on both coasts this summer—with even some

creature comforts available, does the Bayreuth mystique still mean anything?

"There's a lot of singing around now," said Johanna Meier, obviously meaning the musician's equivalent of sleeping around. Where the company once spent the entire summer creating artistic unity, there are now a mere six weeks of rehearsal, and performers dash in and out for other engagements. With a big Mercedes, like the one James Levine's brother keeps out front with the motor running, it is possible to star in the simultaneous Bayreuth and Salzburg festivals.

Also, Meier pointed out, "the family of Wagnerian singers is small—maybe six viable Isoldes, fewer Briinnhildes, two or three Wotans, no Siegfrieds," and they make all the rounds, appearing worldwide. Bayreuth, which used to set the pattern and develop the artists, may be becoming just another stop on the Wagnerian map, although the singers all say that one is not truly anointed as a Wagnerian unless one has appeared there.

he Festspielhaus is unrivaled as a theater, and the discipline of its audiences makes a difference. When Levine conducted the Metropolitan Opera's Parsifal, he did not attempt the silent pauses he put into Bayreuth performances, where real silences, undiluted by the hum of air conditioning or audience shufflings, are possible. No one ever steps on the last notes of an opera by starting the applause before a respectful silence.

And the festival dress rehearsals are regularly the gathering place for the musical titans of the world (who this year abandoned their customary professional courtesy and booed).

Friedelind Wagner, who used to give master classes at the festival, believes that the spirit has vanished. She was referred to, in one of the numerous small ceremonies this year, as "the bad conscience of Bayreuth" for her impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, and says

that the allegedly sensitive Bayreuthers "tried butchery and that didn't work, so now they're trying culture."

"Everybody here used to mix—the whole town had gaiety," she recalled. "Hitler killed a lot of that. And with the festival becoming a trust, the family has no rights anymore." She was referring to the Richard Wagner Foundation, in which national and local bureaucrats—she described one as "a rural despot who doesn't even like dead Wagners, but prefers Liszt [Miss Wagner's great-grandfather] and sports"—outvote the family. Since the death of her brother Wieland, her younger brother, Wolfgang, has rented the festival from the foundation.

"We're not wanted in this town. You would think that having living Wagners running around would be an advantage—there are no live Mozarts running around Salzburg—but we're wanted everywhere but here.

"My nieces and nephews are all highly talented. That's their trouble. If they were stupid instead of brilliant, there would be no problem. You know politics. Everybody here is busy making money, so there's no time to laugh. Better to be starving and free. I don't see much point in this anymore."

Miss Wagner devotes her time now to being president of the International Siegfried Wagner Society, promoting her father's operas rather than her grandfather's. She was asked, after an intermission, whether she was planning to attend a performance she had seen in rehearsal. "Why? I'm not a masochist."

The line, with her dry delivery, got a big laugh and startled Wagnerites, who turned to see a woman who correctly describes herself as looking "like Wagner in skirts." Miss Wagner sighed. "My friends tell me I'm the only person who laughs around here anymore," she said. And she swears she is not coming back.