A smart, splendid account of the world's most famous - and
quirkiest - serious music festival. Less than a century elapsed
between the age of Mozart, when musicians were the servants of
great princes, and the age of Wagner, who made royalty his servants
and idolaters. The crowning act in this unparalleled social role
reversal was the erection in the early 1870s of a temple in which
to stage the Meister's lengthy music dramas, particularly the
four-opera, 19-hour Ring cycle and the "sacred festival play"
Parsifal. It was (and still is) a peculiar, wooden barnlike
structure on a hill in a drab, sleepy, and otherwise
undistinguished provincial German town. Yet for 118 years, the
Festspielhaus has hypnotized the world's musical and social
aristocracy, who brave the August heat, the uncomfortable seats,
and the cramped accommodations to sit in hushed reverence for hours
of music - afraid to cough or stir for fear of their neighbors' icy
glances. It's all very German, and Spotts, an associate of the
Center for European Studies at Harvard, does not slight the story's
darker side: Bayreuth's symbolic significance as a shrine for
German nationalism and, ultimately, fascism and anti-semitism.
Richard Wagner died before the festival was a decade old; its
management passed to his widow, Cosima, and later to his children
and grandchildren. Unsurprisingly, given his own craziness, Wagner
spawned a sizeable population of difficult characters and a few
genuinely talented artists, in particular his grandson Wolfgang, a
superb director who dragged Bayreuth into a new age of theatrical
innovation after it had been tarred by the racist brush of the
older generation. Spotts decribes them all perceptively and is also
good on the unusual acoustics of the theater itself, with its
famous hooded orchestra pit. An important, elegantly written,
deeply engrossing cultural history of this unique (and uniquely
strange) cultural institution. (Kirkus Reviews)
Germany's cultural glory and for a time Germany's political shame:
the operatic festival established by Richard Wagner in 1876 is one
of the most intriguing phenomena in modern European intellectual
history. The oldest and best known of all musical festivals,
Bayreuth soon after Wagner's death in 1883 became the center of a
reactionary and nationalistic ideological cult. This book is the
first to provide a frank and fully rounded account of the
institution and the way it operates. The focus of the study is a
critical analysis of the performances and productions, brought
alive with photographs and sketches of stage settings, conductors,
singers, and costumes from 1876 to 1990. Around this artistic
history is woven the remarkable story of why, against tremendous
odds, Wagner built his famous Festspielhaus and established his
controversial festival and of how his descendants have managed to
keep it alive. At the same time, the book traces the institution's
association with nationalism and racism, its eventual debasement
into "Hitler's court theatre," and its postwar liberation from its
chauvinist, anti-Semitic past. With its own form of Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk-linking art, the personalities of the Wagner
family, and German ideological development-this provocative study
will be compelling reading not only for Wagner enthusiasts but also
for anyone interested in European intellectual history since 1876.
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