Bayreuth: The paradox of the sacred sanctuary becoming a gilded cage

“ Let us consider for a moment what the man's personal character and momentum enabled him to achieve. Finely endowed personalities like Mozart and Chopin did much: did they write a Ring or a Tristan? The question needs no answer. Did they or the still mightier Beethoven dream of creating a Bayreuth? In the midst of years of privation Richard Wagner planned and partly executed the Ring; he completed Tristan and the Mastersingers; as quite a young man he had dreamed of a Bayreuth; as an old man he turned his dream into a reality. ”

“ Being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. No omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at Bayreuth; no one except Wagner knew either the goal or the long road that was to lead to it. In the realm of art it signifies, so to speak, the first circumnavigation of the world, and by this voyage not only was there discovered an apparently new art, but Art itself. ”

“ All around us lay the pine woods, broken by the lawns and avenues that encircle the theater and embower it in a secluded world of its own—even as the Palace of the Grail was shut off from the profane world. Here, indeed, is truly the Montsalvat of the modern drama—a spot purified and sacred to the highest aims and noblest manifestations of Art. ”

“ As a shrine visited not only by the confessed admirers and followers of Wagner, but by a large public as well, it represents the embodiment of Wagner’s life and art, constituting a sacred temple of an art which, by virtue of its power, has forced the attention of the entire world. Bayreuth, moreover, preserving the traditions of the master himself, has served as an authentic training school to those hosts of artists whose duty it has become to carry these traditions to the various opera stages of the world.
Wagner was fated not to see the repetition of the Parsifal performances. ”

“ In order that music may one day exhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highest aims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seeking relations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. Behind all our artistic pastimes— theatres, museums, concerts, and the like—that aforementioned “friend of art” is to be found, and he it is who must be suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the State must be changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particular stress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by better judgment. ”

“ All the talk and noise about art which has been made by civilisation hitherto must seem like shameless obtrusiveness; everything makes silence a duty with us—the quinquennial silence of the Pythagoreans. Which of us has not soiled his hands and heart in the disgusting idolatry of modern culture? Which of us can exist without the waters of purification? Who does not hear the voice which cries, “Be silent and cleansed"? Be silent and cleansed! Only the merit of being included among those who give ear to this voice will grant even us the lofty look necessary to view the event at Bayreuth ”

“ Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.
He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship, or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we beheld as another Paraclete! ”

“ It is now one hundred years since Richard Wagner was born, thirty since he died. In every land he has his monument in one shape or another; his music-dramas can be heard all the world over; all the ancient controversies as to their merits or demerits have died down. The Bayreuth theatre, the outward and visible sign of his inner greatness, has risen to the point of its most splendid glory and lapsed into the limbo of tenth-rate things. ”

“ For it is impossible, if art is to flourish, to permit each individual section of this manifold complex to scream aloud, and that with all its might, in an endeavor to drown out other sections by coercing them into a parrot’s cage, where the most they can do is to observe an obligatory subserviency. ”

“ Everything is arranged for a solemn, festive effect. “That is no longer the theatre, it is [Pg 169] divine worship,” was the final verdict accordingly. “Baireuth” is the temple of the Holy Grail.
At length we come to the principal theme, and with it to the climax of this historical sketch of such a mighty and all-important artistic lifework, to “Parsifal” itself. The mere mention of its contents attests its importance for the present and the future. Wagner’s “Parsifal,” in an important sense, can be termed our national drama. ”

“ Here at Bayreuth the mystic drama is given before its thousands of devout pilgrims and music-lovers who gather to the little town as to a sacred spot from all parts of the world,—from Russia, Italy, France, England, and America,—and who enter into the spirit of this noble drama and feast of music as if it were a religious festival in a temple of divine mysteries.
The sources of Wagner's story deserve a few words. The legend of the Holy Grail took many forms during the Middle Ages. ”

“ In this way, all those who assist at the Bayreuth festival will seem like men out of season; their raison-d'etre and the forces which would seem to account for them are elsewhere, and their home is not in the present age. I realise ever more clearly that the scholar, in so far as he is entirely the man of his own day, can only be accessible to all that Wagner does and thinks by means of parody,—and since everything is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. ”

“ Often came the pure tones that told of the guileless One, or the strong chords of mighty faith, or the ebb and swell of mystic bells, or the glory of the sacred Spear. Now came the regal blasts for Parsifal, and often and through it all, the splendid music of the Grail itself. The music was like a fragrant atmosphere to the drama, softening and refining what was harsh, giving a needed stress here and there, and investing the whole story with a subtle and uplifting charm. ”

“ The marvellous music at Bayreuth helped in every way in the interpretation of the drama. Every part and phase of the thought and movement were brought forth in the various musical motives, adding emphasis and beauty and intensity of feeling. Now the music would whisper of the wondrous grace of the holy sacrament, or of the sweet beauty of God's world, clothed in the radiance of Good Friday; now it would reveal the sorrows of the gentle Herzeleide, or the awful anguish of Amfortas, or the deep rumblings of Klingsor's black art, or the fascinating music of the flower-maidens. ”

“ With the most consummate skill and precision, Wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in the realm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every one else. His music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a strictly individual passion ”

“ Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the ear we speak to. ”

“ As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius—the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. ”

“ Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business. Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck) ; they talk of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves ”

“ The individual must be consecrated to something impersonal—that is the aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which death and time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at any fraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacred may cross his path which will amply compensate him for all his struggles and privations. ”

“ How eloquent this little house within this shrine is of the vigor of democracy! There is nowhere in the land any home so remote, so humble, that it may not contain the power of mind and heart and conscience to which nations yield and history submits its processes. Nature pays no tribute to aristocracy, subscribes to no creed of caste, renders fealty to no monarch or master of any name or kind. Genius is no snob. ”

“ To our unhappy sex genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of Heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison. ”

“ A carefully-composed picture needs time for its appreciation, and no one could, or would, try to judge or be affected by an ever-changing series of pictures. Besides, if one did try, the attention would be hopelessly withdrawn from the main things—the drama that is going forward and the music. The picture plan is still tried at Bayreuth, with disastrous results. With the most beautiful scenery it would fail; and the Wagner family appear to be colour-blind, the magic garden, for instance, in Parsifal looking like a cheap bed-hanging. ”

“ But it requires a strong effort of common sense to shake ourselves quit of all that we have been taught for the last two centuries, and wake to the perception of a truth just as simple and certain as it is new: that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print ”

“ It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. ”

“ Others, which the negligence of clerical enmity permitted to escape for the time, were subsequently ruined by damp, by insects, by accidental conflagration. The carelessness of inappreciative governments, aided by the stupidity of the masses and the innate levelling tendencies of the uneducated, the invasions of foreign armies and the vicissitudes of revolution, have wrought the partial or complete destruction of many of the noblest monuments of architectural genius that ever illustrated the history of any people. ”

“ It scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. And every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of Wagner’s own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now presents us. ”