How do you tell Tripst3r about the trip of a lifetime? Two back stories for starters.
Dr. Marilyn Heins Shares her Experiences and her Journey! Be sure to check out www.parentkidsright.com, her award winning parenting site.
Festspielhaus
BACK STORY #1
I saw my first opera at age four almost three quarters of a century ago. I was immediately hooked and have been an opera addict ever since. I have been to more operas than I can count and have criss-crossed the US and traveled as far away as Europe and Australia to hear opera.
The first Wagner opera I saw was Tristan und Isolde when I was about 13. (Young enough to giggle when a huge Isolde in a blue gown with long hanging sleeves embraced a much smaller Tristan. He completely disappeared during the love duet but he kept on singing!) Initially I was not a Wagner-nut. I loved his music but did not go out of my way to attend a Wagner opera. I saw each of the four operas that comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen at widely separate times and was not overly impressed. Why would I be? It was like only hearing one movement of a symphony, there was no way to comprehend the entirety.
I went to my first Ring Cycle in 1996 and the Bayreuth Ring was my eighth so it’s apparent that I became a Ring groupie fast. Why? Seeing the first Ring in its totality convinced me. This is arguably the greatest theater ever. (Don’t believe me? See a Ring Cycle for yourself. CDs can fill your house with the glorious music but to experience the totality of the Ring requires effort. It takes some pre-Ring preparation [reading about Wagner and the Nibelungs] and it takes about a week of your time [most Ring Cycles start on Monday and end on Saturday].)
BACK STORY #2
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is tough to write about. That Wagner was a creative, visionary genius is unquestioned. Wagner the man, both before he died and ever since, really pissed a lot of people off. Wagner is either loved or hated, emotional reactions run high.
Jesus, Napoleon, and Wagner are supposedly the three historical figures with the most words written about them. I read a lot of words about Wagner while preparing for my pilgrimage to Bayreuth and didn’t remove more than the top few flakes of the gigantic iceberg. Yet if asked to pick the one person among all who ever lived I most want to meet? Wagner, hands down. I fantasize a conversation over a glass of wine; I might manage to reconcile the genius and the arrogant monster though I realize wiser heads than mine have spent a lifetime studying this enigma without being able to do so. Which accounts for all the words; just about every author has to deconstruct Wagner’s life and write about both personas: the genius AND the monster.
I shall skip over the megalomania, arrogance, anti-semitism, and womanizing that characterize Wagner the man (and help explain why Hitler loved his music and visited Bayreuth) to tell you about the trip of my lifetime.
JOURNEY TO BAYREUTH
Bayreuth where Richard Wagner designed and built his Festspielhaus has been a pilgrimage destination…Mecca…for Wagner lovers since 1876 when it opened. However getting to Bayreuth is not easy. Geographically it is only a 2 ½ hour drive from the Munich airport. But getting tickets to an opera there is harder than getting 50-yard line seats at a Superbowl. Apply? Sure, it’s easy to do online but it may be 10 years before you get a ticket. Join a Wagner Society? This can work. But the Wagner Society of New York (I am a member) gets so few tickets members must enter a lottery.
My only hope was International Curtain Call (ICC) a Los Angeles-based company that specializes in five-star international music tours, mostly opera.. I tried to join the group in 2008 but the tour was fully booked so I applied my deposit to the 2009 trip. I made it! There was only one more hurdle: getting permission from my children to spend some of their inheritance. They told me, “Go for it, Mom!”
Wonderful seats, elegant meals, and a comfortable hotel near the Festspielhaus do not come cheap. Nor does business class air fare to Munich. The way I look at it, a one time splurge is easier on the budget than commitment to a big payment every month which is why I travel a lot and live modestly when it comes to house, cars, clothes. Travel enables me to do something very special: store up new memories. Bayreuth memories are strong, satisfying, and startling real over a month later.
I flew from Tucson to Los Angeles to board a convenient non-stop to Munich on Lufthansa/United arriving two days before the rest of the tour group. The last time I was in Munich was in the 50s and I was due for another look. International Curtain Call arranged for my room at the Kempinski/Munich Airport. All Kempinski hotels are superb (my favorite is in Istanbul where our room had a balcony overlooking the Bosporus) but this one is so close to the airport you can wheel your luggage trolley over and check in. Better than waiting for a shuttle.
Munich is a wonderful city to visit. Very easy to get around using public transportation (The S-bahn took me from my airport hotel to downtown Central Station in about 35 minutes.) I concentrated on art museums. The Alte Pinakothek, the Neue Pinakothek, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (you can buy one ticket to all three) are built around a big grassy park…the area looks like a college quad. The Alte has the old masters, one of the best collections in the world. The Neue Pinakothek has room after room of wonderful impressionist paintings as well as a collection of German art. The Moderne has rotating exhibits of modern art and design but I just glanced around because I had spent so much time at the Alte and Neue. If you go spend another day wandering around Munich as I did: churches, the Marienplatz, palaces. If you have time Dachau is only 20 kilometers from Munich (the town is reachable by the S-bahn train and then you can take a bus to the camp). I have never visited one of the camps and hoped to get there but ran out of time.
After meeting the rest of the tour group…9 congenial, knowledgeable Wagnerites plus the tour director, his assistant and our bus driver…we left by motor coach for Bayreuth, an enjoyable drive through the beautiful Bavarian countryside. Small green and golden farms, acres of hops (gotta have hops to make German beer), little towns, rest areas (sad to say a couple of them had Burger Kings where I hope at least they served good German sausage). The Bayerischer Hof hotel was pleasantly attractive and comfortable and even had a “Business Center,” a closet-sized room with a single computer that provided guests with free internet service (worked fine after you figured out where the @ is located on a German keyboard). All hotel service was 5 star. There was no air-conditioning but I was provided with a small table fan that had to be kept running all the time. The Bayerischer Hof was filled to capacity as was the entire town as its main industry is Wagner and the summer Festival.
We had a wonderful guide, Eva-Marie Rodl, who took us on a walking tour of Bayreuth, a tour of Wahnfried (“peace from madness”) the only house Wagner owned, now a museum where the composer is buried; the beautiful Margrave Opera House (Wagner originally thought to show his operas there but it was too small so he built the Festspielhaus.); the Palace; and the Hermitage. Eva told us the history of each place we visited and was both knowledgeable and articulate. Bayreuth was heavily bombed by the allies in World War II but reconstructed from old photographs with Marshall Plan money so it looks as it did before the war. Eva, like most Europeans you meet, was very well informed about the US and was following the health care controversy with great interest. She told me she could not understand how the US did not have health care for all. She was also astonished that there was so much distrust of our government. “My parents lived under Hitler, my uncle lived in Communist East Germany, those were governments that couldn’t be trusted. But you have a wonderful government and you don’t trust it!”
The Festspielhuas is a work of art in itself. Wagner had a heavy hand in designing it (he adapted the design without the architect’s permission from an opera house in Munich that was never built). Wagner, though sometimes penniless, was pretty good at getting money to carry out his dreams and managed to wheedle funds for the Festspielhaus from Bavarian King Ludwig II. The building is not a typical fancy European opera house, inside or out. It is quite plain and looks smaller than its seating capacity of 1925. The interior is almost all wood. There are bare wooden floors upon which the members of the audience “voice”approval by pounding their feet after a good performance. The famous armless wooden seats are covered with a very thin piece of fabric that could never be confused with a cushion (people bring their own cushions or rent them there; I schlepped a self-inflating cushion from home but only used it once as I was just as comfortable/uncomfortable without it).
There are no aisles, you enter from either the Rechts or the Links through the door marked on your ticket. The seating resembles the benches in a Greek amphitheater that rise steeply so people can see the stage. The orchestra pit is steeply recessed and the musicians are seated in an unusual way, balanced across the midline so there are the same number of drums on one side as the other. Lower pitched instruments are placed at the bottom of the orchestra pit which is covered by a curved wooden hood so no one in the audience sees the orchestra. (Wagner wanted the audience to concentrate on the drama being performed). Musicians can and do dress in shorts and tee shirts which is fortunate as the Festspielhaus has no air-conditioning. When the doors to the auditorium are opened 15 minutes before the performance the cooling system is turned off so nothing interferes with the acoustics.
The acoustics are glorious. The design of the orchestra pit and stage make for ideal acoustics for Wagner operas (nothing else is performed here) providing a wonderful rich balance between singers and orchestra. But the hood and wooden walls and ceilings make the sound reverberate in such a way that our guide told us that the musicians “hear pure cacophony” and it is challenging for the conductor to synchronize singers and orchestra. I can vouch for the reverberation of sound. No microphones or amplification are ever used but when the dwarfs in Reingold repeatedly strike rock to mine the gold it sounded as though the noise was everywhere (as it would be in a cave under the Rhine) including the ceiling and the back wall. I, and most of the audience, looked up wondering where the amps could be.
It was the sound that made Bayreuth the most wonderful musical experience of my entire life. It’s hard to explain to someone who has not heard it. I have CDs recorded at Bayreuth and they sound great but it is not the same. When I returned home I told my musician son about the Wagnerian orchestra pit and the way the instruments were placed. He mused, “I guess Wagner invented stereophonic sound.” But there is an enormous difference between hearing music on a sound system and at Bayreuth where there was nothing between my ear and the source of the sound, voice or orchestra. No mike, no transmitter, no amplifier. There was an intimacy between me and the performers that I shall never forget. And I now know why people go back to Bayreuth every year.
Opera at Bayreuth is an elegant experience. Most people are in formal dress and many women wear truly beautiful designer dresses. There were very few Americans there, most of the audience is European. The operas start at 4 in the afternoon with a one-hour intermission between acts. During intermission one can wander through the lovely grounds and purchase food at kiosks selling everything from sausage to ice cream, champagne to beer. Our group all elected to prepay for dinner in the elegant dining room. We had our own table and wait staff and were served half of our meal with appropriate wines in the first intermission and half in the second. The food was wonderful as Tour Director Jerry Glaser who has been to Bayreuth many times knew how to order superb meals for us. Wagner operas are long so we sometimes did not get back to our hotel until 11. By then my head was full of beautiful melodies. Tired, yes, but most nights I was too keyed up by the opera experience to fall asleep.
I am not a professional music critic but here goes: We saw 7 operas. The four operas that make up Das Ring der Nibelungen (Das Reingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung) plus Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal. The orchestra and chorus were uniformly wonderful. The majority of the singers were great although there were a couple of exceptions. The productions are controversial to say the least and the sets and costumes often downright weird. The Rhine is a huge culvert. The forest where Siegfried lives with the dwarf Mime has morphed into a science class room with blackboards, the periodic table on the wall, and a dangling skeleton. The man vying for the title of Meistersinger is dressed like a rock star, dark glasses and all. Every director at the mecca of all Wagnerian opera venues wants to leave a personal mark which means ignoring or re-interpreting Wagner’s specific directions (he wrote his own libretti). The most controversial opera these days is Die Meistersinger directed by Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter. Much as I love the Metroploitan’s traditional Mesitersinger I found this production creative, exciting, and thrilling theater but some members of the audience were horrified especially when a director (looking like Katharina Wagner) along with a conductor and designer are attacked and thrown into a dumpster where they are set afire. It is pretty obvious why the sight of people being burnt on the German stage where Hitler came to enjoy his favorite composer is offensive.
If you want to hear the best live sound in the world go to Bayreuth even if you are not an opera fan. If you want to hear Wagner’s music sound better than anywhere on earth go to Bayreuth.
If you are ever in Bavaria in August, are the adventurous type, and feel lucky you can line up at the box office very, very early on a performance day and try to get a cancellation. The lines were very long so it must happen once in a while.
Would I go back? In a heartbeat if I could afford it. But I am content. I feel blessed that I was able to make my pilgrimage and will never forget the wonderful sound of music in the Festspielhaus.
2573words/mh/9-15-09
