Munich model presentations
The so-called Munich “model performances” are opera productions that took place from 1864 and - especially for the productions of Wagner operas - wanted to achieve a role model. They form a clear cut in the history of German theater and especially in that of the stage design. They were closely connected to the person of Ludwig II , who had ascended the Bavarian throne in the same year. They also acquired their special significance because they served as models for his “fairytale castles” to come and for the design of the interiors of existing buildings.
prehistory
Ludwig II was 12 years old when he first came into contact with Richard Wagner's writings, and 15 years old when he was allowed to see his first Wagner opera “ Lohengrin ” in February 1861 . After he became King of Bavaria on March 10, 1864 at the age of 18, he met Richard Wagner for the first time on May 4. From then on, Wagner's plans were under special royal protection.
Ludwig persuaded Wagner to move to Munich in the year of his accession to the throne , and on December 4th the “ Flying Dutchman ” was the first of the so-called “model performances”, which were used for the interpretation of Wagner's operas as well as for style the whole Munich court opera should be trend-setting.
Ludwig's goal, as he wrote to Wagner on November 8, 1864, was “to bring the Munich public into an elevated, more collected mood by performing serious, important works such as those of Shakespeare, Calderon, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, and Weber to help gradually wean the same off those mean, frivolous tendencies […] by first showing him the works of other important men; because everything must be fulfilled by the seriousness of art. "
That was the basic idea behind the “model presentations”, which were carried out with great effort in Munich, which of course were not compiled from the fund and of which we still have a rich source material today. So they were expressis verbis intended, among other things, for the moral purification of the population, for the refinement of humanity with the means of art. This echoes the old idea of the ancient Greeks in Epidauros to use theater for mental healing.
Claim and Reality
Contrary to this very ambitious hope, however, stage sets were often created in Munich at that time that make a little ennobling impression for us today and that are sometimes not without involuntary comedy. As early as 1841, two years before the Dresden premiere of “Holländer”, Richard Wagner had called for a departure from the grand old-style opera, to which he himself had paid homage with his third opera “ Rienzi ”. He broke with this actually French tradition in the choice of his material, which was no longer taken from history, but now from legend, and thus tied in with the German romantic national opera, which reached its climax in 1821 in " Freischütz " by CM von Weber had - an opera that Wagner had always considered an ideal.
The stage design was also no longer to be an external illustration, as in the historically oriented performances of the Meiningen School , for example , but rather to carry the drama of the plot - an idea that was taken up again 50 years later by Adolphe Appia .
Wagner waged a lifelong struggle for a fully appropriate representation of his musical dramas. But he probably had more of a feeling for what he did not want than a fixed idea of how his music-dramatic visions could practically be brought onto the stage. He had enough to do with the fulfillment of his demands on the orchestra and the singers, as it became clear with the hectic history of the world premiere of " Tristan " in Munich.
Wagner had to be happy if a halfway acceptable performance came about. His information on the stage sets were sketchy or only emerged in the concrete examination of a current production, so they were tied to the way of thinking and working of the established stage people at the time and to his own viewing habits and were therefore not an original part of the score.
When dealing with the Lohengrin production, Wagner's own scene specifications were disregarded and nevertheless presented as a model performance in the sense of the composer, obviously with Wagner's approval. The fact that Wagner was actually never satisfied with the Munich productions can be seen from the fact that he forbade the performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre there under wild threats in 1869/70, which Ludwig II did not allow himself to be irritated.
The Bayreuth productions also never turned out the way Wagner wanted them to be. In a letter to Ludwig, he complained that the decorations were always designed as if they were to stand and be viewed all by themselves, as if in a panorama, “while I only use them as a silent enabling background and environment of a characteristic dramatic Situation. "And even more clearly:" ... and after I created the invisible orchestra, I also want to invent the invisible theater. "Such statements were not intended for the public, but can only be found in letters, conversations and diary entries that were only published after Wagner's death.
When evaluating the Munich model performances, the difficulty arises that it is difficult to compare the Munich and Bayreuth stage designs with contemporary alternatives, since hardly any image material has survived from other theaters, especially since many sets were put together from the fund, according to old theater practice. Only the new demands of Wagner and the constant interest of Ludwig II changed this situation, so that comparisons for this time take place in the narrow area of Munich-Bayreuth.
It is noticeable in the Munich model performances that the Wagnerian musical dramas, which break with several cherished traditions at the same time, are provided with stage sets that often strive for pronounced honesty, as if one wanted to make something unsettling through particularly harmless packaging just edible. The productions in Munich not only do not go along with Wagner's theater changes, but instead fall back on particularly conservative forms.
Wagner more or less sanctioned everything, which may be due to the fact that he could not change everything at once. This also explains the often inconsistent and contradicting statements made by Wagner about the staging of his works. He himself was tied to certain viewing habits that might have changed more quickly and approached his own dramatic conception if he had been assisted by the appropriate set designers, which were neither in Munich nor in Bayreuth.
Stage designs were often of decisive importance in the total of 209 separate performances that took place for Ludwig II from 1872 to 1885 either in the National Theater or in the Residence Theater. It is claimed that Ludwig only had some pieces played in order to be able to see certain locations on the stage. Other sets were simply shown before or after a play, without being closely related to the plot of the play.
From 1878 onwards, a total of 44 operas were shown as part of the separate royal performances, not just by Wagner, but also by Verdi , Gluck and Meyerbeer .
Sources - The Quaglio Collection
There is no comprehensive systematic description of the development of the stage set in the 19th century.
For a limited geographical area, research can be based on the history of the Munich and Bayreuth theaters, as the Quaglio Collection has a unique overview of the period from 1790 to 1900 and the staging models made for Ludwig II even have three-dimensional images of all Munich models of Wagner operas.
The development of the Bayreuth stage design from the beginning of the Festival in 1876 is also available in plans, models and later even in photos of the scenes. Due to special historical circumstances, the reconstructable history of the stage design in Germany is often identical to that of the Wagner stage. It would be much more difficult, for the most part impossible, to go into the development of stage sets for operas by other composers. The role of the Bavarian King Ludwig II is of eminent importance here. Because image material for Wagner productions before the time around 1865, when Ludwig had just ascended the Bavarian throne, is hardly available.
The first artists in Munich
In Munich, Angelo Quaglio the Younger should be mentioned first, who became a royal court theater painter in 1850. He was generally considered a Wagner specialist and in this capacity was also hired on other stages, where he most likely created very similar sets. In a form of division of labor, he and his colleague Heinrich Döll , who had been at the Court Opera since 1854, were responsible for all sets for the first and world premieres of Wagner operas during the period in question. Quaglio and later Christian Jank worked out the scenes that were more determined by architecture, Döll was considered a specialist in landscapes.
In addition, Michael Echter made color sketches from these productions on behalf of the king, which were to serve as a template for the wall paintings of the Wagner halls planned in the Munich residence. This already indicates a very interesting connection, which occurs in this form only in Richard Wagner's operas and is unique in cultural history, namely the sometimes intensive connection between the planned sets of new productions and the interior fittings of Ludwig II's castles that are still to be built. or the furnishing of existing buildings such as the Munich Residenz here . In this context, some stage sets take on a completely different meaning that goes far beyond a one-off opera event.
The Flying Dutchman, 1864
While CM von Weber in his “Freischütz” 1821 was primarily about the dark mysticism of the forest, Wagner in “Holländer” 1843 was concerned with conveying the “experience of the natural force of the sea”, as he himself once did on one Had experienced a boat trip to London. In the theater routine of that time, such artistic skills fell into the area of responsibility of the stage machinist, who was supposed to show the stormy movement of the waves and especially the two ships as realistically as possible.
At that time, it was also customary on large theaters to provide the decorations for new operas largely from the fund, and so it was - against Wagner's intention - at the world premiere of "Holländer" in Dresden in 1843, for which no set designs have survived. We know from the Berlin premiere in January 1844 that the decoration “Gretchen's room” from an earlier Faust performance was used for the scene in Act 2 in Daland's apartment. Strangely enough, however, in his "Comments on the Performance of the Opera: The Flying Dutchman" published in 1852, Wagner refers precisely to this Berlin production. Wagner's recommendations in this regard were not always consistent and understandable.
The sets for the "Dutchman" in Munich, on the other hand, were newly created in 1864 by Döll and Quaglio. Wagner had ascribed particular importance to the "lighting and its manifold changes" corresponding to the change between storm and clearing sky, which placed additional limits on an interpretation of the set design at the time. Because we have stage models and plans available, but we do not know how the actual stage design worked in the respective lighting together with the stage machinery and what the singers looked like in it.
In Bayreuth, where we can later use photographs for checking purposes, the differences between plan and execution are sometimes striking. No photographs are available for the Munich performances, so we can only assume the models.
The stage set for the first act by Heinrich Döll is the earliest of those "sample stage sets" which were supposedly made exactly according to the composer's instructions, as was generally believed at the time and is still claimed in various encyclopedias today. In fact, one can hardly speak of an “ideal” solution here. With the waves visible here, the illusion of a stormy sea could not be created, which, according to Wagner's idea, should symbolize the “inner” mental processes in the Dutchman as an “external” image.
The two ships were much too small for the action to be carried out meaningfully in and between them. The Munich Latest News wrote: “But the machinist seems to have been expected to do the impossible in part. The ships he made were small and unsightly: it was laughable to see how the helmsman put on the mouthpiece to call people he could almost reach by hand. "
The whole scene seems simple-minded and not appropriate to the drama of the plot. After seven years of restless wandering around, the Dutch are supposed to step on solid ground for the last time in order to seek their redemption, their liberation through death.
After his initial enthusiasm for the project of the “model conceptions”, Wagner himself expressed himself clearly resigned after a month of his own cooperation. In a letter to Ludwig II dated September 12, 1864, it says: “The difficulty is enormous. A single conversation with one of the unfortunate people, who move like unconscious machines in the common tracks of the theater and music routine, often throws me back on the run from the world [...] And yet it has to be! Therefore - courage! "
And later he wrote, again to Ludwig, on July 21, 1865: "The painter who is able to fully correspond to my view is therefore still to be found." Even in Michael Petzet's opinion, Wagner never found this painter during his lifetime. On August 28, 1880, Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary: "On the occasion of his letter to the king, he thinks with horror of dealing with [...] the decorative painters Döll and Quaglio, and is annoyed by the indecision there."
Act 2 takes place in Daland's apartment. Quaglio, who was responsible for architectural scenes, was able to refer to family traditions when designing the fisherman's hut, which he generally liked to do, sometimes in a way that can be described as a smooth copy. He liked to fall back on drafts from his father Simon, as far as they were available, or on those of his colleagues. In 1825 father Simon Quaglio had already painted such a scene in generous dimensions, which is more of a hall than a hut.
Angelo comes a little closer to the realistic appearance of a fisherman's hut, which is supposed to represent the middle-class comfort of Daland as a counter-image to the mythical world of the Dutchman, but makes the scene appear like in a doll's house. The actual interior, narrowed by the wooden beam ceiling, should offer a homely atmosphere with numerous realistic details. The tabernacle-like chimney on the right, with its antique shape, doesn't seem to fit into 16th century Norway, and certainly not into a fisherman's hut. It was then replaced by a wall fireplace in the Bayreuth premiere in 1901.
The stage design for the 3rd act is again by Heinrich Döll. According to the score, what is required is a “bay with a rocky shore” in front of Daland's house, which Heinrich Döll once again depicts in a folksy and conservative manner, as if it were the setting for a happy drinking bout. Senta's jump into the water can only be poor here: the rock from which she is supposed to fall is hardly bigger than herself.
The contributions of Heinrich Döll, who was once referred to as the “painter of the mystical-romantic”, are so stylistically similar in the various productions that a detailed appraisal can be dispensed with, as is not even mentioned in Thieme-Becker's dictionary of artists .
Here a very characteristic trait of the Munich stage world of that time seems to become clear: a strong desire for colorful splendor, which, despite all the desired grandiosity, is very reminiscent of naive fairy tales and petty-bourgeois after-work cosiness. Hellmuth Wolff says: "Such things can only be considered a curiosity today, while baroque stage architecture [...] can now be viewed as fully valid works of art."
Tristan and Isolde, 1865
The following year, on June 10, 1865 took place with "Tristan und Isolde" is not only a model representation, but also the first Munich great sideshow of a Wagner opera instead. After various personal difficulties with his finances and his opera plans - he was in the midst of the instrumentation of the Nibelung material - Wagner had intended to quickly compose an opera with a few people that could be performed immediately anywhere and should bring him corresponding royalties. This resulted in an opera, “Tristan und Isolde”, which was completed in August 1859 and which for a long time was considered unperformable and which today can cause even large theaters to face difficulties with casting.
Attempts to perform "Tristan" in Karlsruhe, Paris and Vienna had failed, and the Munich premiere only came about after several postponements, but then it was a great success. The sets were also unanimously praised. In contrast to the “Holländer” and the “Lohengrin”, the action of Tristan does not take place at any specific historical time, and the geographical information is very general. Wagner saw his first perfect work of art of the future in “Tristan” and emphasized the primacy of landscape painting for the stage sets. The decoration should take a back seat as a “warm background” behind the “inner happenings” of the plot and only follow the musical symbolism.
Wagner's own sketches for the stage set from a piano reduction are limited to the bare essentials. Everything else he called "scenic nonsense". In comparison, the furnishings of Quaglio are extraordinarily lavish and full of color. The possibilities of decorative painting have been fully exhausted and offer the eye numerous points of reference in the event that in the unusually long first act the plot, more narrated than acted in dialogues, is no longer able to completely captivate.
In spite of all the majestic power of this set, the opposite of what Wagner wanted has occurred: This grandiose scenery is more likely to have used the “inner plot” of the opera as a background instead of itself as a background. In Ludwig II's separate performances, the action generally served to legitimize the most splendid stage possible. Wagner wrote in an open letter: "Beautiful decorations and highly characteristic costumes have been taken care of with such zeal as if it were no longer a theatrical performance but a monumental exhibition."
A similar relationship prevails in the third act. Quaglio only adheres to Wagner's sketch in the basic disposition of the building parts. The small sentry box has become a stately Romanesque gateway, flanked by parts of a large castle complex. The impression of decay and abandonment, which is supposed to symbolize and accompany the crippling infirmity of the sick Tristan architecturally, is difficult to relate to.
Obviously, a renowned stage painter like Quaglio felt it was beneath his dignity to provide an entire act of opera with only scant wall remnants, as Wagner intended - and that at a world premiere . Presumably, if he had, he would actually have been convicted of lack of imagination at the time. At that time an opera production had to be gorgeous.
Lohengrin, 1867
We also have sketches for the production of “Lohengrin” by Wagner's own hand from a letter to Franz Liszt dated July 2, 1850. The “noble, naive simplicity of that time”, which Wagner emphasizes for the 10th century, the time of action, is particularly evident in his design for the first act (“on the banks of the Scheldt”). None of the productions of the epoch to be dealt with here reached this stage design in terms of abstraction to the essentials, let alone surpassed it. In the said letter it says: "The drawings I have made for this reason will give you great pleasure: I count them among the most successful creations of my spirit."
Even if the ironic undertone cannot be overheard, it becomes clear that Wagner had anything but lavish pomp in his head. In 1850 he wrote to Franz Liszt on the occasion of the Weimar premiere of “Lohengrin”: “I don't care if you give my things: I only care that you give them the way I thought they would, who doesn't want it and can, he should let it stay. ”But he was never consistent in this attitude.
Nothing has survived from the stage sets of the Weimar premiere on August 28, 1850. The first Munich version from 1858, long before Ludwig's accession to the throne, offers a dreamy, naive, fairytale-like picture, already painted by Heinrich Döll at the time. The treetops formed an arch over the central plot under a bright, bright sky with a castle in the background. Contrary to Wagner's statements, the river does not flow across the stage, but into the depth of the picture. For the new production on August 1, 1867, Döll changed little.
For the second act, which shows the courtyard in Antwerp, Quaglio was of course hired as a specialist in architecture. His father Simon had already taken over the decoration of the 2nd act in 1858. For the stage version, however, his architectural fantasies were reduced in height, made clearer and regrouped for the scenic needs. There can no longer be any question of an orientation towards Wagner's drawing, although one naturally has to ask the question whether Quaglio even knew Wagner's drawings, in other words whether Wagner made them accessible to him at all, or whether it was just a kind of joke in a private letter to Franz Liszt.
Quaglio's model of the new production from 1867 showed only minor changes compared to the conception of the father. The large number of historical buildings was further reduced so that unobstructed views were possible between them. They were designed more three-dimensionally, no longer such strong surface decorations. But it was still more of a medieval marketplace than the required courtyard.
Wagner was not satisfied with that. In a letter from 1870 he speaks of the "Munich Decoration, [...] which, without my knowledge, has been designed incorrectly in most points." Wagner wanted to see the arcade of the bower and the stairs moved more forward so that the bridal choir and the warriors came into their own. Wagner wanted the decoration in such a way that his opera plot would be transparent and understandable, and not be forced to give architecture just a musical framework.
Quaglio was also responsible for the design of the bridal chamber of the 3rd act and was able to rely on models from his father Simon from 1858, who this time thunder out the information from Wagner's drawing in a particularly splendid way. Angelo first presented a set of the bridal chamber of the 3rd act in Munich in 1865, which can be described as a direct copy of his father's design.
In 1867, Angelo designed a room that was more clearly structured. The father's double arches were replaced by a single arch. The bridal chamber no longer looked quite like a public hall in which the entire castle crew could have found space. But it was far from a realistic Romanesque bedroom to which Wagner alluded.
Opera production and Ludwig's dream castles
There is another aspect that is very important for the history of the Wagner productions in Munich. From the moment he ascended the throne, Ludwig II saw in Wagner a kind of heroic model, a fulfillment of his longing fantasies. That changed when he became king. Now, with the power and especially with the money of the Bavarian King, he was able to realize some of the plans that were previously just fantasies. He was now able to build his dream castles, from which the Free State of Bavaria still lives today.
And the design of these palaces, both in terms of the architecture and the interior decoration, often went parallel to the new staging of the Wagner operas in Munich. This gives rise to the immense importance of the stage design for Ludwig II. Not only was an opera staged here for him, but here he had the models of his dream castles in front of him, which he was willing to build. The basic similarity between the palace buildings and the stage sets can be clearly seen.
Tannhauser, 1867
Just a few weeks after the Munich premiere of “Lohengrin”, “ Tannhäuser ” was re-staged on August 1, 1867 . This topic is interesting for a reason. Because for the staging of the 2nd act, for the singers' hall, a unique encounter in German cultural history occurred between 1.) the restoration of a real medieval castle, namely the Wartburg in Thuringia, between 2.) an opera production and 3.) the design of a new castle, the singers' hall in Neuschwanstein .
Angelo Quaglio made the model for the singer's hall of the second elevator 'Tannhäuser' from 1867. If you compare the original singer's hall in the Wartburg, it already looks a bit absurd at first glance. Obviously there is no resemblance between the two rooms. This could demonstrate what to think of the so-called historical accuracy, the much-cited realism, which is often ascribed to the Munich stage sets of that time in specialist literature.
However, it must be said that the Wartburg's singing hall is not the original one. It has only been called that since the 19th century because of Richard Wagner's opera . Significantly, the historical sources are now somewhat confused, with the relationship between 'original' and 'copy'. What is actually original?
On the long side of this 'original' singer's hall of the Wartburg there is a huge fresco with the theme of the singer's war, which is anything but medieval, but was painted by Moritz von Schwind in 1855 , ten years after the premiere of Tannhäuser in Dresden in 1845 - that is with high probability also a consequence of the opera . The original Singers' War took place in 1206–1207.
The ballroom of the Wartburg, which takes up the entire length of the hall on the upper floor, was made possible at the beginning of the 13th century by adding heights to the older outer walls. In 1850 the walls were raised again and a new coffered ceiling was put in - this also happened after the premiere of Tannhauser. In 1867 Franz Liszt conducted the re-performance of his oratorio “The Legend of Saint Elizabeth” in this hall to mark the 800th anniversary of the castle.
What is the relationship between the Wartburg and the topic - beyond the medieval-historical connection? Both Richard Wagner and Ludwig II were here personally and took decisive suggestions with them. In 1842 Wagner returned home from Paris and made the decision to turn the Tannhauser saga into an opera. 25 years later, in May 1867, Ludwig II visited the castle incognito. This ballroom, which had just been redesigned in its current form, stayed in his memory. He stylized it as the epitome of a medieval knight's hall, which it was n't , and made it the model for the later singers' hall in Neuschwanstein.
The similarity of this hall to the Wartburg down to the last detail cannot be overlooked. That is to say, to get to the heart of the intricate historical dependencies: The reconstruction of the ballroom of an original medieval castle is based on an opera that allegedly refers to this castle itself in order to bring the medieval atmosphere to life. In other words: the original copies the image . Or to put it even more clearly: There is no original at all! What we have in front of us here - at the Wartburg, in the opera and in Neuschwanstein - are exclusively visions of the Middle Ages - regardless of historical models - a constructed Middle Ages.
literature
- Petzet, Detta / Petzet, Michael: The Richard Wagner Stage Ludwig II. Munich 1970 (most comprehensive documentation on this topic)
- Strobel, Otto: King Ludwig II and Richard Wagner, correspondence in five volumes. Karlsruhe 1936–1939
- Wagner, Cosima: The Diaries. Munich 1977 (p. 606)
- Wagner, Richard: About the performance of "Tannhäuser". In: Schriften und Dichtungen (9 vols.), Vol. 5. Leipzig 1872. (pp. 164–165).
- Wagner, Richard: Comments on the performance of the opera: "The Flying Dutchman". In: Schriften und Dichtungen (9 vols.), Vol. 5, Leipzig 1872. (pp. 207–208)
- Wagner, Richard: The artwork of the future. In: Schriften und Dichtungen (9 vols.), Vol. 3. Leipzig 1872. (pp. 147–148, 152–153)
- Wagner, Richard: The Paris Tannhauser Performance [1861]. In: Die Hauptschriften, Stuttgart 1956. (pp. 204–215)
- Wagner, Richard: Munich. In: Die Hauptschriften, Stuttgart 1956. (pp. 215–218)
- Wagner, Richard: The first festival of 1876. In: Die Hauptschriften, Stuttgart 1956. (pp. 357–358)
- Wagner, Richard: Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882. In: Die Hauptschriften, Stuttgart 1956. (P. 363–367)
- Wagner, Richard: The audience in time and space, 1878. In: Die Hauptschriften, Stuttgart 1956. (p. 399–411)
- Westernhagen, Curt von: The stage design / vision - regulation - realization. In: Richard Wagner and the new Bayreuth. Munich 1962 (pp. 183–206)
- Wolff, Hellmuth Christian: The stage design around the middle of the 19th century. In: Stage forms - stage spaces - stage decorations. Contributions to the development of the venue. Herbert A. Frenzel on his 65th birthday. Berlin 1974 (pp. 148–159)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Strobel, p. 36
- ^ Westernhagen, p. 195
- ↑ Wolff, pp. 148-159
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 6
- ↑ Munich Latest News, entertainment paper, December 8, 1864; quoted according to Petzet, p. 27
- ↑ Strobel, p. 19
- ↑ Strobel, p. 130
- ↑ Cosima Wagner, p. 606
- ↑ Petzet, color plate I, p. 17
- ↑ as in the 2nd act Tannhäuser to that of the Parisian Despléchin (cf. Petzet, figs. 203-207)
- ↑ Petzet, color plate II, p. 25
- ↑ Wolff, p. 157
- ^ Petzet, color plate III, p. 57
- ↑ Petzet, figs. 36–39
- ↑ Wagner to Uhl, April 18, 1865, cited above. after "Hauptschriften", p. 216. Significantly, Michael Petzet quotes this statement as evidence of Wagner's satisfaction (Petzet, p. 61)
- ↑ Petzet, figs. 59–60
- ↑ Petzet, figs. 87–89
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 92
- ^ Petzet, color plate V, p. 89
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 94
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 95
- ^ Petzet, p. 99
- ^ Petzet, color plate VII, p. 105
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 97
- ↑ Petzet, fig. 99
- ^ Petzet, color plate X, p. 129