BRATTLEBORO — There are no shortages of guides and studies and introductions to Richard Wagner in every conceivable medium. I would heartily recommend these three to anyone, especially a newcomer.
The great Stephen Fry (a university classmate of Tundi Productions Music Director Hugh Keelan, as it happens) made a wonderful documentary, Wagner & Me, about going to Bayreuth for the first time and his love for (and struggles with) his favorite composer-dramatist. It's well worth seeking out.
Wagner & Me is available on YouTube, though with a few passages of music suppressed (presumably for copyright reasons), as well as on Amazon Prime with a subscription to its Fandor streaming service.
WNYC, the public radio station in New York, has created two radio documentaries: The Tristan Mysteries (2007) and The Ring and I (2012). Both are excellent and entertaining.
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Not convinced yet? I've heard plenty of reasons for not taking a chance on Wagner, and Jenna Rae and Hugh Keelan have shared with me reasons they've heard as well. Here are some of the ones that get repeated the most often:
• How can you sit through something so long? Das Rheingold is about 2{1/2} hours, without intermission. If it had been one of the films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture from this last year it would have been more or less in the middle of the pack of nominees, in terms of length.
Die Walküre is quite a bit longer, as are the other “Ring” operas and most of Wagner's other operas. But there will be two intermissions. Tundi will be following the Bayreuth tradition, with long intermissions, so you'll be able to attend to the callings of biology, eat, drink, and, most importantly, talk about what you're seeing with fellow audience members.
The length is part of it. The effect of these works is cumulative. The music makes its way into you, breaks down your resistance, and removes you, degree by degree, from the everyday world into Wagner's world. He demands much of us, but he rewards us in turn.
• It's so expensive! Of course you can pay a premium for the absolute best seats if you really want to, but the Latchis is a small house; there aren't really any bad seats, and the least expensive are a very reasonable $25. You won't be able to attend any professional theater for less, or any high level sporting event.
If you become hopelessly addicted, as I have, and you find yourself crossing oceans and continents and international borders for these works, that will cost you a few dollars. But if you get to that point, you won't mind.
• I don't know anything about “classical” music. Neither does my mother. When I was growing up, in the 1970s and 1980s, she listened to lots of Billy Joel, and Phoebe Snow, and the Roches. When I introduced her to Wagner (by accident) 18 years ago, she had maybe heard two or three symphonies in her life and attended one or two operas.
She immediately fell under Wagner's power (especially the power of Die Walküre, and if she doesn't cry it's not a good performance). Now she's as far gone as I am.
Just as you can enjoy Goodfellas without having to know exactly how Martin Scorsese accomplished the Copacabana shot, you don't really need to know about how Wagner constructed his large musical edifices.
If you want to delve into it all, it's certainly interesting and illuminating, even for non-musicians like me. But Wagner's technique is the building blocks of his art, not his art itself.
Just approach his dramas with an open mind and open heart, and he'll tell you everything you need to know.
• I don't really enjoy fantasy. Wagner based most of his works in myth and legend because myths and legends are universal and eternal and not weighed down by the specifics of the present moment. His plots are often fantastical but the characters that inhabit his dramas are fully realized, fully human - even the giants, even the dwarves, even the gods, and especially the gods.
You don't see many characters in fantasy literature for which that's true, with the notable exception of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Up there on the stage you'll see real people - larger and more intense versions of ourselves.
• Wasn't Wagner a really bad person? In a word, yes.
While Wagner was clearly a charismatic genius, by all accounts he could be a thoroughly loathsome person. Vain, unscrupulous, full of himself, given to running up huge debts and fleeing from them, leeching off generous patrons and sleeping with their wives, he was, as they say, “a nasty piece of work.” In his later years he even managed to destabilize the government of the Kingdom of Bavaria.
Even in a generally and casually antisemitic age, he was noted for his antisemitism, which, of course, leaves the darkest mark against him. There's really no getting around that. (And his reputation was certainly not helped, years after his death, by his genuinely despicable extended family's enthusiastic embrace of Hitler and the Nazis and by the Nazis' appropriation of his work.)
The Catholic priest Father M. Owen Lee wrote a number of books about Wagner, one subtitled The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art. For some, the terrible man is too much, and that's understandable. Me, I look to the truthful art.
I agree with Stephen Fry, who said: “Wagner's music is bigger and better than Hitler ever imagined it to be.” In some ways, it might even be bigger and better than Wagner himself ever imagined.
Many great Jewish interpreters of Wagner's works, from his time to ours, include Hermann Levi, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, and Daniel Barenboim. And innumerable Jewish devotees of his work include Theodor Herzl, Tony Kushner, and Fry.
Which in no way absolves Wagner. The man was awful, it's true, but his works are not poison. If you're not already an antisemite or a fascist, Wagner will never turn you into one.
• It's in German; I don't speak German. There will be supertitles in English. The Tundi production team actually considers them an integral part of their stage design. And they're creating their own translations.
• What about the pandemic? Tundi will be following whatever mitigation protocols the Latchis Theatre has in place in August, which could include proof of vaccination and mandatory masking. Tickets are refundable up until Aug. 10 and refundable upon request if any performances have to be canceled due to the pandemic.
Above all, let's all keep one another safe.