Bayreuth Festival

“ In 1881 he became the patron of the Bayreuth festival. He ordered that the orchestra and chorus of the Hof Theater should be for two months in the year at the disposal of Richard Wagner. In 1882, when Parsifal was given for the first time, he expressed a wish for a private performance at which he could be present unnoticed. He changed his mind, however, at the last moment, perhaps because the German Crown Prince was to be among the audience. Some time afterwards Parsifal was played in Munich, with the assistance of the same artists who had sung at Bayreuth. ”

“ Here he proposed to have what he called a stage festival—the singers to contribute their services gratuitously, the honor of being selected for this place, and the advantage of the experience, being regarded as ample compensation. The orchestra, likewise, in great part was to be composed of virtuosi—also to play without pay. All these expectations were realized. Leading the violins for several years was the famous [Pg 426] virtuoso, Wilhelmj, and the singers of the Bayreuth festival were the best that the German stage possessed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As an important addition to the work of the theatre, a permanent school has been established at Bayreuth for the sake of training young musicians to take part in the festival performances, which were at first exclusively, and then partially, undertaken by artists from other German and foreign theatres. The special feature upon which most stress has been laid, ever since Wagner’s death in 1883, has been not so much the musical as the dramatic significance of the works ”

“ I mention these incidents because I think they help to disprove the notion that modern music has less power over the actions and feelings of men than primitive and ancient music. It was the wild enthusiasm inspired in me by Wagner's earlier operas that led me irresistibly to Bayreuth, and I really would have been willing to toil as a slave for years rather than miss this festival. ”

“ From that time she continued to make rapid strides in her professional status, and gave promise of being one of the best contralto concert singers of her time, when her career was brought to a sudden close by an untimely death, when she had been before the public scarcely six years.
At the commencement of 1876 Garcia received the letter from Wagner to which attention has been already called, embodying the offer for him to train the singers for the first Bayreuth Festival. This, however, he was obliged to refuse, owing to his large clientèle in London. ”

“ A series of brilliant model performances of the Wagnerian music-dramas was instituted in Munich under the personal patronage of the king, and when the further plan of erecting a great festival theatre in Munich for the performance of Wagner’s “music of the future” broke down in the face of the passive resistance of the local circles interested, the royal enthusiast conceived the idea of building at Bayreuth, according to Wagner’s new principles, a theatre worthy of the music-dramas. ”

“ At Triebschen he completed Die Meistersinger, Siegfried, and the first two acts of Götterdämmerung, besides writing any number of treatises, articles, and the like. Here, too, the idea of a great festival theater was born in him, and the originality of the thing soon won many influential supporters to the cause. By 1871 a site was found for it at Bayreuth, Germany. The next year he put the finishing touches to the Ring and the Bayreuth project grew in proportion to his frantic efforts to raise money for it. In all, it took some four years to erect this shrine to Wagnerian music. ”

“ He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Brünnhilde since last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. ”

“ From Bayreuth he wrote “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness.
This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad ”

“ When I receive his answer I shall so arrange things that my visit to Schillingsfurst is paid as is agreeable in tempore opportuno.
From the 3rd to the 15th August I shall be in Bayreuth; after that I shall this year end with Weimar (without playing "Tannhauser" there, as a guest!) at the Carl-August Festival on September 3rd, for which I have written a short and simple chorus in popular style, the text of which is furnished by King David: "The Lord preserveth the souls of His saints, and light is sown for the righteous." ”

“ Parsifal, “a stage-consecration-festival play” in three acts, book and music by Richard Wagner, was first performed at Bayreuth for the patrons, July 26, 1882. The first public performance was on July 30, 1882. Hermann Levi conducted.
Wagner’s version of the story of Percival, or, as he prefers, Parsifal, is familiar to all. There is no need in a description of the prelude to this music drama of telling the simple tale or pondering its symbolism. The ethical idea of the drama is that enlightenment coming through conscious pity brings salvation. ”

“ His fame increased, and lavish offers from across the sea came, proffering him such wealth and honor as were not for any other living artist.
A theater was built for the presentation of his productions alone; the lovers of music from every nation made Bayreuth a place of pilgrimage.
When the man died—passed peacefully away, supported by the arms of the one woman he had loved—the45 daughter of Liszt—the art-loving world paid his genius all the tribute that men can offer to the worth of other men. ”

“ It is certain that in Bayreuth even the spectator is a spectacle worth seeing. If the spirit of some observant sage were to return, after the absence of a century, and were to compare the most remarkable movements in the present world of culture, he would find much to interest him there. ”

“ I wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to the bad—but it is not yet time for detailed criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One can't judge Wagner at a concert. You must hear him in the opera-house at Bayreuth." Since then I have been several times to Bayreuth; I have seen Wagner's works performed in Berlin, in Dresden, in Munich, and in other German towns, but I have never again felt the old intoxication. People are wrong to pretend that closer acquaintance with a fine work adds to one's enjoyment of it. It may throw light upon it, but it nips one's imagination and dispels the mystery. The puzzling fragments one hears at concerts will take on splendid proportions on account of all the mind adds to them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There should be mentioned the palace of Duke Alexander of Württemberg, the administrative offices, the statue of King Maximilian II. (1860) and the collections of the historical society Among the ecclesiastical buildings, the Stadt-Pfarrkirche, dating from 1439, and containing the monuments of the margraves of Bayreuth, is the most important. Bayreuth is a railway junction and has an active trade, chiefly in grain and horses. It manufactures woollen, linen and cotton goods, leather, delft and other earthenware, and tobacco, and has also several breweries and distilleries. ”

“ Well-trained in Bayreuth tradition, this singer was no believer in it; she saw no reason for clinging to outworn ideals simply because they prevailed at the Master's own theatre. However, she did not see how an individual could break with tradition in these works without destroying their effect. The break must come from the stage director.
"If Wagner were alive to-day," she once said to me, "I don't believe that he would sanction a lot of the silly 'business' that is insisted upon everywhere because it is the law at Bayreuth. Wagner was constantly changing everything. ”

“ He had his lieutenants—big men always have their lieutenants—but the idea, the purpose, and the force behind were his and nobody else's than his. Bayreuth does not stand for very much to-day; in the 'seventies it stood for a fierce attack on the general sloppiness of opera performances all the world over, for the setting up of an ideal to which there is no parallel in the history of the art of music. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That Bayreuth with Wagner's death did not become a mere tradition, that the Wagner performances still continue there, is due to Frau Cosima. She is Bayreuth. No woman has made such an impression on the music of her time as she. Yet she is not a musician! ”

“ As at Bayreuth, the solemnity of the whole thing makes one almost nervous, for the first few minutes of each act; but, after that, how near one is, in this perfectly darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the music surges up out of the "mystic gulf," and the picture exists in all the ecstasy of a picture on the other side of it, beyond reality, how near one is to being alone, in the passive state in which the flesh is able to endure the great burdening and uplifting of vision. There are thus now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at. ”

“ At a performance in concert a great deal is lost to many people, especially to those whose imagination cannot function without the stimulus of scenery, costumes, and dramatic action; but at that time this was the only opportunity for American music lovers, who could not make the long trip to Bayreuth, to become acquainted with the music. ”

“ Without going into questions of principle, an impartial friend of music must admit that even the performances of Parsifal were artistically not inferior to those of Bayreuth, and the audience was quite as much in sympathy with the great masterpiece as are the assemblages of tourists at Bayreuth. The artistic education proceeding from these larger centres is felt through the entire country, and there is a growing desire for less ambitious but permanent opera companies. ”

“ A plan for a sort of school for the performance of classical orchestral music, together with classical operas, and ultimately of his own works at Bayreuth, came to nothing. Greatly against his wish he was obliged to permit Der Ring des Nibelungen to take its chance at the German theatres. The first number of 'Bayreuther Blätter,' a monthly periodical edited by Herr von Wolzogen and published by and for the Wagner Verein, appeared in January 1878. Wagner, whilst at work upon Parsifal, found time to contribute a delightful series of essays: 'Was ist Deutsch?' 'Modern'; 'Publikum und Popularität' ”