Like Christmas on Eastenders, midsummer brings blood and tears to Bayreuth, home of the annual Wagner festival and the composer’s dysfunctional family. Have you been following the opera soap?
Bayreuth is run by two half-sisters, Katharina and Eva, daughters of Wagner’s grandson, Wolfgang. Katie was her daddy’s favourite, Eva was an outcast child of a previous marriage who went to work for a living at Covent Garden and the Met.
For seven years, the sisters have run the festival in relative peace and harmony. Angela Merkel turned up each summer to make sure all was well. But now Katie has told Eva in a lawyer’s letter not to show her face again in Bayreuth.
Eva, who’s seventy, was due to retire in August, so her banishment is bilious even by Wagner standards. Daniel Barenboim, who conducted 20 summers in Bayreuth, calls it ‘inhumane’ and wonders how such a thing is possible in a free and democratic country. Well, there’s nothing free and democratic about Bayreuth. It’s the last absolute monarchy in Europe, a hereditary autocracy answerable to no-one except a board of local yesmen. No wonder the family’s so screwed up.
The trouble stems from the founding father, Richard Wagner. While composing the four-hour unresolved chord of the adulterous Tristan und Isolde, Wagner was having babies with Cosima, daughter of his best friend Franz Liszt and wife of his conductor, Hans von Bülow. That’s the opening episode. Wagner went on to write a four-night Ring cycle in which brothers sleep with sisters and everyone tries to steal the magic ring of power. Opera does not get much messier, or more compulsive.
On Wagner’s death Cosima denied the paternity of one of her daughters and married off her gay son Siegfried to an English orphan, Winifred, who became infatuated with a young visitor called Adolf Hitler. (Still with the plot?) Bayreuth became a citadel of Nazi power; Siegfried’s sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, ran a small concentration camp in the grounds. After the War, the families of Nazi leaders put the festival back on its feet. When Wieland died, Wolfgang banished his children. That’s how the family functions.
How do the Wagners get away with it? Because they are the nearest thing the boringly efficient Bundesrepublik has to a royal family, not to mention a soap opera. Their antics add mightily to the public levity and give tabloid readers a feeling they know something about art.
As for the art, it’s all downhill. The last memorable Ring cycle was put together for its centenary year in 1976 by two Frenchmen, Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez, sanitised its more odious and racist connotations. Since then, the dreary, provincial Wagners have traded on a distant past with ever diminishing returns. The Lohengrin I saw had men dressed as rats in its chorus, an unintended metaphor.
Vastly subsidised by the state, yet accountable only to a rubber-stamp board, Bayreuth needs to be liberated from its Wagners if it is ever to be viewed as something other than a television saga that has run far too long. But who has the pluck to pull the plug? Who will rid us of these pestiferous Wagners?
The paper has finally got around to talking to the Leipzig string quartet leader, Stefan Arzberger, who allegedly rampaged naked through a New York hotel ten weeks ago and was subsequently charged with attempted murder.
It looks from the context as if the interview was brokered by or through Kurt Masur, who was Stefan’s conductor in Leipzig and a former music director of the New York Philharmonic.
Most of the salacious details reported by the local tabloids are omitted. As are many of the things that Stefan and his lawyer have said before but couldn’t apparently, get past the Times censors.
Two protestors, who named themselves as composers Kate Honey and Dr Chris Garrard, held up a banner and chanted slogans on Wednesday night at the end of the first interval of La Bohème. Others continued the protest outside.
The banners read ‘End Oil Sponsorship’ and were aimed at BP, a major sponsor of the ROH and the British Museum.
Honey said: ‘By accepting BP’s money, the Royal Opera House is giving BP a legitimacy that it does not deserve. With this ‘social license’, BP is able to keep drilling for new sources of oil that will push us into runaway climate change, putting my generation’s future at risk. As composers and musicians, I feel it is our responsibility to defend classical music from appropriation by corporate criminals like BP.’
Garrard added: ‘The conductor Claudio Abbado once said, ‘Everything that is not for freedom, I protest’. By supporting repressive regimes in West Papua and Azerbaijan, BP has made it clear that it is not on the side of freedom. BP should have no place in our cultural institutions when these are spaces where freedom of expression is celebrated. This is why I felt called to protest BP’s presence at the Royal Opera House.’
Photo by @yanniknaud
The FT reports: The Royal Opera House, which said BP had been with it “through thick and thin” with a partnership beginning in 1988, said it had begun the staff consultation process on sponsorship renewal.
The Kickstarter for Verbier Summer Music Camp 21 has raised just 11% of its target, a mere $3,916 in 25 days.
There are six days to go and the $35,000 goal seems a distant mirage.
Lessons to be learned?
1 Verbier’s in Switzerland. It’s not Third World. The money’s there for the taking. Nobody believes it’s in need.
2 Kickstarter is for individual human causes, not institutions.
3 Don’t start a summer camp unless you can finance it. The only outcome is a lot of disappointed kids.
A tricky one, this.
A Florida insurance company is suing its former agent, and a business rival, for poaching four clients. One of them is the Florida Orchestra.
The defendants are accused of donating $20,000 to the orchestra to wean it away from its original insurer.
Trouble is, most orchestras – especially smaller ones – are not much bothered where their money comes from, so long as it comes in.
From a correspondent in Athens:
Yesterday was the first day of the reopening of ERT orchestra and chorus. We celebrated it with a short concert. Greek Radio music ensembles are back and they will have full schedule from September.
That is because of people efforts that changed the government. Yesterday 11/6/2015 exactly two years after the closing.
You may remember the tears on that occasion.
Oleg Vedernikov was principal cellist of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra when a drunken incident on a train three years ago resulted in him being kicked out of the orchestra and the country. He was accused of insulting a Chinese woman.
Oleg returned to Russia, played in a string ensemble and rebuilt his life. A few weeks ago he messaged that he was about to undergo a serious operation and asked for prayers. Death notices have now appeared on his social media.
May he rest in peace.
Davide Martello, from the German town of Konstanz, has been granted the civic award of the European Parliament for his ‘outstanding contribution to European cooperation and the promotion of common values.’
Davide, 34, travels around conflict zones, playing the piano, forming a cultural barrier between citizens and oppression. He appeared in the Taksim demostrations in Istanbul…
in the Maidan revolution in Kiev and in the thick of the civil war in Dontesk. He has also given a Christmas recital for German troops in Afghanistan.
He names his website stop-killing.com.
The cellist and teacher Alison Moncrieff-Kelly, a musician with long experience of music schools, has written a powerful reflection on the flaws and dangers of the music education system.
Among other observations, she highlights how easy it is for untalented individuals to rise within the system and exercise an uncontrolled influence. Alison writes:
Unfortunately, it would seem that many of those to whom we have entrusted talented young musicians, are people of proven flaws; and not just small frailties – no, appalling, huge, catastrophic personality disorders that are a long way beyond Miss Jean Brodie and her somewhat homo-erotic fantasy.
No, this is a vast panoply of contenders, some very skilled musicians (of which much was made of that in both the Layfield trial, and that of former Guildhall School teacher Philip Pickett earlier this year) some unknown for any professional playing, but who have carved out work lives as ‘career teachers’. Those people often have their own universe of issues to address, because within their ‘vocational’ teaching world may well exist a whole raft of elements like disappointment, bitterness, jealousy…and yes, some of those people may be capable of subjugating those issues to the back-burner and be the best possible teacher; but some won’t, and will work a terribly odyssey of vicarious pressure on the students who come their way.
These are possible scenarios, and I would argue, all extant in the UK. What is only now coming to light is how ruthlessly and systematically some of the least capable, the least emotionally suitable, and above all the least self-aware people achieved positions of power within the specialist music world. In these positions, they were enabled and facilitated to wreck young lives and pervert the healthy growth of vulnerable young people.
In today’s JC, I publish an open letter to Daniel Barenboim on his latest shift on the Middle East, announcing a qualified support for the BDS movement which calls for the economic and intellectual isolation of the state of Israel. What Daniel said was: ‘‘I think the boycott movement BDS is absolutely correct, its perfectly right and necessary with one limitation…’ You can read the full text here.
I believe he has crossed a Rubicon, a point of no return. Among other things, I remind Daniel:
In a maestro milieu where most music directors look no further than the fourth horn, you stuck your neck out for a prickly cause that was always bound to earn you more heartache than acclaim.
I applauded your gumption, your physical courage and your personal commitment to Israel, where you continue to maintain a home. You talked to me once, in Paris half a lifetime ago, of your idyllic boyhood in the young state of Israel, where girls wore no lipstick and men no ties. Something of that naked idealism, that transcendence of spiritual values over material display, is imprinted on the artist you became – one of the foremost classical interpreters of our time, perhaps the only one who commands the attention of world leaders when you speak on great issues of the day….
On Sunday morning, November 14, 1943, Bruno Walter called in sick with flu and the New York Philharmonic had to find an instant replacement, without rehearsal, for its nationally broadcast afternoon concert.
Assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein had been out partying all night. He took the call, dropped by Walter’s sickbed to check his score markings and ripped into the concert as if life itself depended on it.
Next morning, Leonard Bernstein made the front page of the New York Times.
A star was born.
Yesterday, a major conductor came down with an ear infection, hours before a concert that was to be broadcast nationally on BBC Radio 3. A young assistant stepped in ‘at very short notice’.
The concert went out last night. Nobody noticed.
We hear from musicians that Alpesh Chauhan, 25, did extremely well in Andris Nelson’s place, never having studied the Strauss horn concerto before and leading unflappably through Schubert’s Unfinished and Dvorak 7th symphony.
There are no reviews this morning, no media excitement.
What has changed? In 1943, radio was the only domestic entertainment and there were few available channels. The nation huddled around the receiver on a Sunday afternoon for whatever it might yield. A change of maestro was big news.
In 2015, there are so many other things we can do at home, and very little attention to live concerts on Radio 3, a background burble at best. A sign of our times, perhaps, but a sad one for new talent.
Bookmark the name: Alpesh Chauhan. He used to be principal cello in Birmingham’s youth orchestra and he’s yet to make his official debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. That will come on June 25.
