Twelve Days in the Year: 27th August 2024

Slept heavily, with extremely strange dreams – the combined result of several beers, a hefty Schmorbraten, and drifting off to sleep with ideas about the Bayreuth-set Krimi that A. has decided I need to write, for which I have at least the beginnings of a plot. At any rate the dream at various points included some sort of complicated negotiation with my mother about buying ingrediants and an extended chase sequence through ancient stone corridors and very Mitteleuropa woods, possibly involving some aliens. A unfortunately has slept very badly, again, and is feeling very delicate; we make plans for how to carve out a bit of peaceful alone time, despite being here with friends and so obligated to make a fair amount of conversation, in German.

Yes, it’s Festspielzeit in Bayreuth once again – quite a coincidence that last year’s performance was also on the 27th – and we’re back in our favourite hotel. Breakfast is as good as ever (except, A reports, the Teig for the waffle machine is a bit too thick), and conversation with M and C ranges over the doings of our various children – a bit of tension on their side, which we don’t push – the idiocies of Brexit and limited hopes to be had for the new Regierung, and the ghastly situation of Saxony in the impending regional elections with the rise of the AfD. I go to book our places in the shuttle bus up to the Festspielhaus for the afternoon, and have a pleasant chat with the owner about her 25th Jubiläum – with a very self-interested wish for twenty-five more years (A discovers next day that the real path to her heart is to ask about her bee-keeping).

The four of us wander into the centre of town together – I had been all set to be very German (that is to say, a variant of the Cordelia Chase principle that “tact is just not saying true stuff”) and insist on A and I heading off alone, but she had a burst of social conscience and also an intimation that C might want them to do their own thing anyway, which was in fact the case after barely half an hour. We look in various shops – not least in a fruitless search for somewhere selling the brand of jeans I like – and fail to find a suitable replacement for our favourite Konditorei which which has closed since last year (not to eat any cake, as breakfast still weighs quite heavily, but for future reference). We then go for a stroll under the trees in the Hofgarten, seeing a nuthatch and some dragonflies; we run into C and M again, walk together back to the hotel, and then reconvene for lunch at a place we haven’t tried before; quite fancy by Bayrisch standards, not bad though I would happily have omitted the vaguely sweet-sour sauce and fruit/vegetables from my grilled Lachsforelle (trying to eat quite healthily after quantities of pork products over the last couple of days; foiled by the chef’s over-generous applications of butter so I could have quite happily have had the fangfrische Forelle in Buttersauce to the same effect…).

Back to the hotel once again for leisurely shower and a bit of a lie down, before assembling for the shuttle bus to the Green Hill at three. Weather is glorious – clear skies, warm but not uncomfortably hot. It means that the areas around the Festspielhaus don’t feel too crowded, as everyone is walking around, looking at the gardens and generally enjoying themselves, rather than all huddling under the limited number of umbrellas. Lots of fun people-watching – the second wives seem to be especially obvious this year, markedly blonder and younger and more skimpily (but presumably expensively) dressed – and increasingly I also seem to have developed a very late-blooming interest in men’s fashion, so eyeing up ties (little to rival my Duchamp, though it was one of my subtler ones) and jackets (one rather nice glittery purple one, though I am undoubtedly too middle-aged and plump to carry something like that off, and too undemonstrative and stingy to contemplate trying). Some really scruffy characters – either a statement of artiness and contempt for material things, or their luggage perhaps got lost in transit – and one especially striking young man in shorts made from fluorescent safety clothing.

And so to Tannhäuser. I had heard great things about the production from my go-to Wagnerian’s blog, and it did not disappoint; the troupe of alternative performers, including Tannhäuser as a clown, driving around in Venus’s old van, with clever use of video to tell the story of why T decided to leave; the pilgrims travelling to Bayreuth, where T meets his old comrades in ordinary clothes with their performers’ access passes, and then the Wartburg song contest as a very conventional Wagner performance, with the video of the view from backstage now highlighting the artifice of it all; Venus and company breaking in via a ladder to the balcony at the front and hanging a banner with the youngish Wagner’s ‘Frei im Wollen! Frei im Thun! Frei im Geniessen!’ on it (which, of course, was actually there when we came out for the second interval). My big regret is that I hadn’t spent more time studying the text of the song contest, to have a stronger sense of what was being said, in order to understand properly what it might mean in this new framing – but who needs to be so serious when the action is juxtaposed with Katharina Wagner calling the police and police cars rushing up the hill to the Festspielhaus, and then policemen actually bursting onto the stage to arrest Tannhäuser?

C had come out of the first act in highly critical mode, especially of Ekaterina Gubinova’s performance as Venus; the rest of us tentatively offered the interpretation that this was deliberate acting (and one might say the same of Klaus Florian Vogt, whose Tannhäuser at times seemed deliberately harsh and unmusical, in contrast to the clearly pure and proper singing of the Minnesänger). She was very definitely not in the mood for a proudly camp performance from Venus and troupe at the bottom of the hill during the first interval, so sadly I caught only a glimpse of this – but we enjoyed a pleasant glass of Sekt instead (as ever, champagne for A). In the second interval, we suddenly noticed that Bayreuth has introduced free lockers (maybe they were there last year, but it was raining too much to notice…) – so next next we solve the problem of €20 glasses of champagne by bringing a bottle and a picnic…

I’m still thinking through the third act; easy to imagine what a challenge it is to reinterpret the whole ‘granted forgiveness as a result of the saintly woman dying’ thing outside a Christian context (actually still quite challenging within such a context…), harder yet to follow a coherent thread through the multiple striking, thought-provoking images on offer. Insistence on purity and high art leads to desolation and misery, Wolfram is clearly open to the other world (even if his motives are questionable at best) – but association with Venus and her ceaseless demand for acts of passionate rebellion leaves at least some mortals broken? I think the character I’m not yet grasping properly is Elisabeth – make sense of her, and the final act may fall fully into place. A thinks it’s all about Oskar, and purity of soul; I think the, or at any rate a, key theme is authenticity (which may be the same idea). But still tremendously powerful and moving, and we’re going to be thinking about this for months to come. A thinks it’s the best production of an opera she’s seen; I’d still go for Castorf’s Ring, but it’s definitely up there.

Again in contrast to last year, the journey back to the hotel is very straightforward; no rain, no arguments with the driver to let us onto the shuttle. We have a light meal and drinks, and I get the bat detector out to see if there’s anything interesting around – one common pipistrelle, flying energetically round the car park. We don’t have too late a night – bed by eleven, and more strange dreams.