Deconstruction and the Modern Bayreuth Festival

In this article, first published in 2014, Edward A. Bortnichak and Paula M. Bortnichak take a post-dramatic approach to Wagner’s great tetralogy and offer a dramaturgical analysis of the 2013 Castorf Bayreuth Ring. 

 

 

I. Setting the Stage: A Primer on Post-Dramatic Theatre and Deconstruction

‘Du – bist nicht was du dich wähnst!’ (You are not what you think you are!)

The Wanderer to Erda, Siegfried, Act III, Scene 1

Richard Wagner’s oft-quoted rallying cry of ‘Children! Create something new! Something new! And again something new!’ takes on renewed meaning today due to the remarkable stream of bold interpretations of his works at Bayreuth over the past decade beginning with Christoph Schlingensief’s Parsifal in 2004 and continuing without interruption up to the bicentenary production of the Ring by director Frank Castorf.[1] These productions have revealed a plethora of new interpretative potential embedded in Wagner’s rich musical and poetic language.

 

Act I of Frank Castorf’s 2013 Bayreuth production of Götterdämmerung

 

We will discuss the origins and logic of these new modes of dramaturgical narrative, examine how they can flow naturally from the fabric of the text and music of the works, and conclude by providing a dramaturgical analysis of the Castorf Ring which will demonstrate how a post-dramatic approach to Wagner’s great tetralogy opens up new vistas of understanding. An appreciation of this production requires nothing less than for us to engage with Richard Wagner's ever-vital ‘Artwork of the Future’ by becoming that audience of the future that he envisioned – audience partners who are open to emerging trends in world theatre, as Wagnerian music drama is both an integral part of, and a potent force in shaping, those prevailing currents.

1. The Relativity of Meaning

Before we consider the modern stage representations of Wagner, we must first consider the context for those presentations. That context ultimately requires a basic understanding of the options available to us for how we communicate with and understand one another, and an appreciation that the range and nature of those options have taken major strides forward over the past half-century. Pivotal scholarship in philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism and the social sciences has advanced our knowledge of how we interact and have had a profound impact in shaping contemporary society and, with it, contemporary artistic expression.

Although recognition of the elusive meaning of words and actions is not new, allowing this very imprecision to take centre stage certainly is. Consider an example from one of the most cherished icons of Western culture, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, specifically the following, apparently straightforward, exchange between Polonius and Hamlet in Act II, Scene 2:

Polonius: ‘What do you read, my lord?’

Hamlet: ‘Words, words, words.’

Polonius: ‘What is the matter, my lord?’

Hamlet: ‘Between who?’

Polonius: ‘I mean, the matter that you read, my lord?’[2]

 It is still an open question as to what either of these characters intends to communicate in this brief exchange (one of a myriad of such enigmatic exchanges in this play) and, more importantly, what the play, Hamlet, indeed may ‘mean’. Each of us, with each new exposure to the play, may perceive the meaning of any line differently, and the shifting nuance of meaning drives our personal interpretation of the characters, their situations and, ultimately, of the drama itself. Seen on a different day, in a different personal context and with a cast ‘feeling’ the play differently, we might take away something entirely different from the experience. The essential elusiveness of Hamlet’s meaning here, or of Wotan’s rationalisation that Brünnhilde is an extension of his ‘will’ in Act II of Die Walküre (certainly Brünnhilde fails to ‘read’ her father correctly in that instance, or does she?), or to something as seemingly mundane as greeting our neighbour with the expression or question ‘how are you?’, are symptoms of the inherent imprecision of language and the root of our (mis)communications. The ultimate struggle of our common humanity, and the engine that sets in motion the events and concepts that shape our existence – our friendships formed, our business transacted, our battles fought, and our deities worshipped – is our perpetual struggle to be comprehended and to comprehend. It is the defining feature of our current era that we can no longer ignore this reality. Theoreticians from a plethora of fields have focused our attention on this fact of our human condition, and our art over the past half-century, to various degrees, reflects that new-found focus. Contemporary ‘legitimate’ experimental theatre has taken the vanguard in expressing the ambiguity of meaning with movements, such as the Theatre of the Absurd. Modern opera production, in the form of the imprecisely named Regietheater, has more recently taken up the challenge.

The insight that we have today into the structure and function of language is largely due to the remarkable achievements of 20th-century scholars, especially in post–World War II France, building on the vast cultural history and philosophical traditions passed down to them through the ages. This will, perforce, be a selective overview of those achievements, but it will attempt to identify what is essential to understand from this scholarship before considering the Castorf Ring at Bayreuth. We will focus on the two schools of thought that most directly frame our understanding of current staging practice, structuralism and post-structuralism, and the two philosophers–linguistic scholars, Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, that respectively led these movements toward a richer understanding of the mechanics, function and ‘meaning’ of language, and of all cultural applications, including theatre (and opera), dependent on it.

Ferdinand de Saussure and Structuralism

The origins of structuralism can be traced back to the work of the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).[3]

 

Ferdinand de Saussure

 

Saussure’s theories fuelled applications in early 20th-century philosophy (e.g. Louis Althusser), psychoanalysis (e.g. Jacques Lacan), and anthropology (e.g. Claude Lévi–Strauss); the last of these, Lévi-Strauss, first labelled the movement ‘structuralism’. Other prominent thinkers who expanded the horizons of the movement and led to its evolution into post-structuralism were the literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes and the social historian and philosopher Michel Foucault.

Structuralism can be summarised as the belief that the phenomena of human life can only be understood through interrelations between the various components or facets of existence, and that this complex web of defining, essential connections (i.e., ‘structure’) is governed by fixed, abstract, cultural principles. Furthermore, structuralists, across all disciplines, hold that analyses of language, in all its constituent components of sound, structure and sense, provide the key to deciphering the structures governing human existence. This structure behind everything may not be immediately apparent, but, through linguistic study, it is discoverable. Language encodes as well as determines the structure of our culture, in that language, and our resultant perceptions as based on it, are built up of largely binary opposites: yes or no, have or have nots, agreement or disagreement, belonging to a specific group or not, etc. The concentration on language as the key for making sense of everything stems from the foundational work of Saussure that held that linguistic signs (i.e. words) can be divided into two components: a signifier (i.e. sound pattern) and a signified (i.e. a meaning or idea). These signs are arbitrary and are assigned differently in various languages and cultural systems. Finally, the meanings of signs are based on their relationships and their contrasts with other signs. ‘Meaning’ is not universal; it does not come from any external reference point in the world, but, rather, it is the unique invention by language in each culture. This inherent quality of difference as the driving force of all language and the relativity of meaning had profound implications for understanding the world from the perspectives of every field (including national politics) and as represented in all the arts. Saussure’s study of semiotics was published, posthumously, in 1916 in his monumental Course in General Linguistics. This model for how we communicate and derive meaning from our words, as based on principles derived from analysing the structure of language, provided the framework for understanding human interaction, in general, for the first half of the 20th century.

 Jacques Derrida and Post-Structuralism

The post-structuralists began by expanding on their structuralist roots and eventually concluded that attempts to discern the structure underlying everything (pivoting, as always, on the dissection of language) were futile and misguided. Instead, post-structuralists hold that our communications, and indeed the totality of our interactions, as reflected in human discourse, can only be interpreted by exposing the alternatives and inconsistencies in that discourse. The goal of their efforts is to liberate language and us from all socially embedded conceptual constraints, and to enable each of us to derive the associations that we perceive to be most meaningful to us at any given moment. Vive la différence! It is important to clear up a common misunderstanding from the start and emphasise that the post-structuralists are not arguing that words and symbols and the text/speech streams of which they consist have no meaning, but rather that they can have a variety of meanings and that choosing between these alternatives is each reader/hearer’s responsibility. Reading, listening and, by extension, theatre- and opera-going are not spectator sports for adherents to this school of thought – they demand active participation from their audiences.

The chief analytic method used to expose the imprecision of all signs and symbols is the semiotic process of ‘deconstruction’, and the French linguist and philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in his magnum opus Of Grammatology (1967) is the pivot point for the analytic method of deconstruction and for the entire post-structuralist movement which hinges upon it.[4]

 

 

Post-structuralism, or ‘Anti-structuralism’ as Derrida preferred to call it, is a component of ‘post-modern’ thought and society – the broad designation for the period that we now live in which is marked by the ideas of Derrida and other, similar-minded ‘Cold War’-era thinkers and artists.[5] Derrida’s Of Grammatology is an essential, but, admittedly, difficult book, and the concepts contained in it are probably most readily grasped by considering the changes in literary criticism and artistic expression that were directly catalysed by its publication.[6] In a sense, it is best seen and appreciated by its reflected light, and that light was, indeed, bright. Its impact on the theatre has been especially pronounced in that it either directly or indirectly provided the theoretical framework for all forms of contemporary experimental theatre practice, including Absurdist Theatre, multimedia stage installations and Regietheater.

What are the essential principles of a post-structuralist analysis of a text, or of any phenomenon, using the deconstructive approach proposed by Derrida? At the core of deconstruction is the hypothesis that, to quote the excellent introduction by Christopher Butler, ‘the relationship of language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs'.[7] This is in direct contradistinction to the pervading assumption throughout prior centuries of western philosophy, including ‘pure’ structuralist thought, that there is an inherent and discernible fixed relationship between language (i.e. how we express things) and the world – that is, there is an absolute meaning that is uncovered once one deciphers the governing structure of a given sign system. Ultimately, ‘God’ is traditionally considered in most cultures to be the ur-structure, the grandest of all grand narratives, and the font of all meaning, but a Derridean analyst would not automatically conclude that even such a culturally endorsed and cherished construct is the sole explanation for a given phenomenon. Deconstruction is a method of analysis that begins by rejecting the existence of any grand narrative, and this renders it completely unpalatable to some who are wedded to a single social, political, or spiritual ur-solution. It removes the traditional anchors, and forces the individual to reassess and reset balances; this can be intolerably disruptive and disturbing for some, and herein lies the continued controversy surrounding post-structuralism and its methods. It must be stressed that deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction; Derrida was emphatic about countering that common misreading of his work. The deconstructionist is, rather, like a fine arts restorer who painstakingly, and with reverence for his object, scrapes away the layers of accumulated materials that have, over the ages, served to obfuscate the work, in his attempt to reveal again the nuanced masterpiece that lies beneath. Derrida’s method of deconstruction can also be likened to Freudian psychoanalysis in that thought associations float in and out of consciousness and morph in meaning and significance as the analysand lives, reflects and continually integrates old memories with new experiences. Indeed, Derrida frequently acknowledged Freud as the immediate precursor to his own work. Derridean philosophy, like Freudian psychology, also shares parallels with the fluid, non-representational and integrative nature of the Buddhist spiritual tradition. (We note here Richard Wagner’s enormous attraction to Buddhist thought from the early 1850s onward.[8])

To propel his arguments forward, Derrida introduced a plethora of linguistic and semiotic principles and technical/operational terms, but, for our present purposes, we will offer the following distillation of the principles of deconstruction (sans jargon, wherever possible), as is generally useful to understand applications to theatre, and, by extension, to opera:

a) Neither the written nor the spoken word (de Saussure posited speech as the preeminent form of expression, but Derrida does not give pride of place to either), or musical notation, as heard or written, is definite; all signs and symbols are open to a myriad of meanings depending on context, and we constantly construct and deconstruct meanings from such fragments.

b) Any artwork always accommodates and transitions between multiple meanings. There is no one or even a small set of inherent meanings placed into the work by its author, as the author’s thoughts and words (or music, in the case of a composer) are subject to the same natural evolutionary process of deconstruction as are those of his audiences. This point concerning the author is made especially powerfully by another post-structuralist pioneer, Roland Barthes, in his seminal 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’.[9]

 

Roland Barthes

 

Barthes’s observation that the author (or composer) is, figuratively and often quite literally, dead, in the sense that he cannot now, or ever could, ‘set’ the one true meaning for his work, is an essential principle underlying all deconstructions. Nothing is fixed or ‘given’; there is complete relativity in everything. As in particle physics, the building blocks of nature – atoms in the physical sciences and words in semiotics – are in constant motion and transformation. Structures are ultimately mutable and indeterminate; only change is a constant. This is a basic principle for how a post-structuralist perceives the world.

c) The job of the interpreter/director of an artwork, especially evident in live theatre and opera, is to search for and creatively utilise the points of alternatives inherent in the work that could lead to major new avenues of interpretation. The emphasis on ‘major’ is important; as the moral philosopher Bernard Williams has pointed out, an effective post-structuralist production will never be a mere comment on the work, but rather will materially change how an audience perceives that work.[10] These points of alternatives upon which the deconstruction pivots are generally referred to as ‘deconstructive nodes’. Interpretative concentration along such naturally occurring ‘fault lines’ within the work will help the audience realise potential alternative meanings for their consideration and integration. Also, particularly relevant in applications to Wagnerian music drama, with its heavy reliance on characters recalling past events as supported by new leitmotif underpinnings, is the Derridean principle that ‘iterability alters’ – that is repetition is a signpost for the presence of deconstructive nodes in that no repeat or recollection carries identical meaning to prior instances.[11]

d) The task for the director/artist is not to resolve conflict, but rather to enable it to enrich how we perceive the work and its relevance to our lives. Authors/composers of genius have given us especially rich vehicles to stimulate valuable and highly personal associations once their work is freed from convention through such deconstruction-driven production approaches. It is our job, as an audience, to integrate, interpret and, indeed, ‘co-create’ the work anew with each exposure to it.

These constantly evolving meanings are driven by the inherent opposition in meaning embedded in all sign systems, already observed by Saussure and others during the structuralist period. For example: traditionally, we can force an understanding of what is ‘male’ only by knowing what is ‘female’. However, a Derridean would expand this example by noting (correctly, as we now recognise from transgender studies in a variety of both natural and social sciences) that even gender is ultimately a social construct and not just a binary choice dictated by biology. Every word association, in context or in isolation, is made up of such choices between options, and, upon closer inspection, the options for meanings are not as limited as first thought. To capture this essence of language, either written or oral, Derrida coined the term ‘différance’ (with the ‘a’), which is deliberately homophonous with the word ‘différence’.[12] Différance makes use of the fact that the French word différer means both ‘to defer’ and ‘to differ’. Thus, in this invented term which sounds like either root, Derrida demonstrates the fluidity of meaning in all language. Finally, the deconstructive nodes inherent in the text of any language are marked by such literary devices (and their musical complements if we are considering opera) as irony (in many forms), parody, mirroring, metaphor and ‘erasure’. The latter, ‘erasure’, is the practice sometimes encountered (and a favourite of Derrida’s) of leaving ‘cross-outs’ in a text and thereby visibly acknowledging that a term that one is forced to select is inadequate yet necessary because nothing better exists. All of these literary devices are signposts pointing to deconstructive nodal points. In the following two sections we will explore these ideas further with respect to the works of Richard Wagner. Wagner’s music dramas have already been ‘mapped’, both in theory and in actual theatrical practice, as to the possible location of these deconstructive nodes. Indeed, the Bayreuth Festival in recent seasons has provided an especially vital laboratory for such theatrical voyages of discovery.

2. Wagner as Post-Structuralist Visionary

Richard Wagner died approximately eighty years before the formal exposition of post-structuralist thought, but we contend that a close examination of his output for the stage, as well as his theories of art, shows him to be a visionary in the interpretation of text that makes his artwork especially ripe for, and compatible with, contemporary deconstructionist treatment. The usual question asked by audiences when evaluating a new production of a Wagner work, or, for that matter, any stage work, is ‘what did the author/composer intend?’, or, alternatively, ‘is this staging being true to the author/composer?' (In German, Werktreue). However, to follow through with Derridean logic, we must conclude that these are not useful or answerable questions. Indeed, there exists an extensive and complex literature within aesthetic philosophy on ‘intention’ in works of art, and this body of scholarship is unanimous, through various lines of reasoning, that we can never definitively know what an artist ‘had in mind’ (i.e. ‘intended’) with a work of art. Thus, there can be no ‘right’ answer to what a piece of art means. This has been famously dubbed the ‘intentional fallacy’, originally by Winsatt and Beardsley in 1946, and it argues against limiting the interpretation of a work to its source and to aspects of the artist’s biography.[13]

Those who still today cling to the illusion that we can determine what is faithful to the intent of the artist either do not know or deny the existence of this long-standing body of scholarly work. We are also reminded by the previously cited Roland Barthes paper that our author, Richard Wagner, is most certainly ‘dead’, in every sense of that designation, and that is true even in Bayreuth where, ever since his physical death in 1883 and continuing until only recently, powerful production biases, abetted by an unusually tradition-bound audience, have conspired to convince us otherwise. Instead, let us employ a Derridean perspective to turn this question into something potentially meaningful and instead ask ‘what is the evidence from within the works, and from the author’s biography and theories of art, that points to viable options for relevant interpretations in our own time?' Recognising that it is not possible ever to obtain one ultimate answer, and that judgmental positions are anathema to free discourse (Derridean or otherwise), we will investigate what paths open up wide before us when we employ post-structuralist analytic methods.

3. Wagner in Theory and Practice

Even a casual review of the composer’s biography and theoretical writings quickly leads to the over-riding conclusion that we are dealing with a highly progressive and unconventional thinker with regard to the arts. His views were considered incendiary in his own time, and are still considered ‘cutting-edge’ today. This impression is confirmed in countless biographical accounts and critical studies of his life and art, and is well documented by the tepid or even hostile reception by the operatic power-brokers in his lifetime of his major ideas, and by the active debate that such theoretical works as ‘The Artwork of the Future, ‘Opera and Drama’, and ‘Religion and Art’ can still stimulate today. Clearly, one well-established context for understanding the works and the man himself is as social revolutionary, and a long line of Wagner scholarship from the early 20th-century commentaries of Bernard Shaw on the Ring to the work of the present authors on bioethical themes in recent Bayreuth productions, certainly fits into this category.[14] Another well-travelled avenue for placing the artist and his accomplishments in perspective is that of Wagner as insight-oriented psychological pioneer, as the compelling Jungian analysis by Robert Donington of the Ring, or of a multitude of Freudian analysts of the man and his work, such as Otto Rank’s analysis of Lohengrin or of Richard Chessick’s evaluation of the Ring as the composer’s fantasy of pre-oedipal destruction, clearly attest.[15]

The masterly study by Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, provides a detailed account of Wagner’s many innovations, both before his Bayreuth period when he was hostage to the routine of the established theatres of his day, and, of course, afterwards when he enjoyed relative control over staging and acting practices in his own theatre at Bayreuth.[16] Carnegy makes the essential point that what Wagner theorised and what he could actually achieve on stage, even in his Festspielhaus, were often divergent, and that this can be attributed to the practical, technical limitations of stagecraft in his day. His achievements must be seen in the context of his time. After the inaugural Ring production of 1876, he was sufficiently dissatisfied with the theatrical realisation of his work to remark famously to his staging assistant and movement consultant, Richard Fricke, that ‘next year we will do it all differently!’[17] Parsifal in 1882 was more of a success in terms of staging, but even then he was especially pleased with unconventional choices that did not always please his colleagues or audiences, for example, the impressionistic, carnivorous, over-sized and menacing flowers in Klingsor’s magic garden.[18] His choice of scenic designer for that inaugural Parsifal production was Paul von Joukowsky, a modernist portrait painter who had never before designed sets for the theatre.[19] Joukowsky’s lack of prior theatre experience, and consequently the absence of any traditional preconceptions that would have come with such experience, were considered by Wagner to be major points in favour of Joukowsky’s selection as a collaborator – a fact we would do well to consider before criticising the relative inexperience with opera of some of the stage production talents engaged at Bayreuth in recent years. In contradistinction to many of his late Romantic-era contemporaries, ‘realism’ was not a literal mandate for Wagner; he sought to represent the inner essence of a scene with whatever means were available. Verisimilitude to Wagner meant faithfulness to the ‘spirit’ of a moment, not necessarily to its ‘letter’. Although an accomplished conductor himself, it is significant that he entrusted Hans Richter, whom he admired but did not consider fully authoritative on musical aspects of his Ring, with the conducting duties of the 1876 Bayreuth premiere, while he himself concentrated on the stage direction of those first performances. He paid meticulous attention to nuances of acting and preferred to refer to his cast as ‘singing actors’. His direction of his 1876 Ring cast, as documented in the accounts of Richard Fricke and of Heinrich Porges, show him to have been predisposed to what we would now term Personenregie.[20] He also especially admired the use of mime – as exemplified by the acting of Joseph Jefferson as Rip van Winkle – as a compelling means for suggesting meaning.[21]

 

Joseph Jefferson as Rip van Winkle

 

He saw theatre as public ritual or ceremony, and he envisioned each stage representation to be a unique event, after which he even indicated that he would like to ‘burn the score’. Again, this demonstrates that he did not view his works as museum pieces, but rather as living, evolving canvases. One is reminded of a recent, great Bayreuth practitioner, Christoph Schlingensief, who would select fresh video images and blockings for each performance to accompany the stage installation used as the environment for his Parsifal production. This is very much in keeping with the sentiments that Wagner expressed in his ‘burn the score’ and ‘do something new’ comments, and it is all very post-structuralist (as well as Buddhist) in orientation. All of this is evidence that Richard Wagner was moving toward a fluidity of expression and openness to ‘meaning’ that is consistent with modern-day post-structuralist thought and practice. Directors and scenic artists, starting with Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig in the late 1880s, and continuing to the post-modernists of today, look to Wagner’s writings on the theatre, as well as to the unique design features of his Bayreuth Festspielhaus in promoting illusion, mysticism and total immersion and concentration of an audience, to support their own uniquely different interpretations of his works.

Wagner’s theoretical pronouncements about art show great consistency with regard to his desire to produce innovative works that would invite and demand interpretation. His main theoretical manifesto, ‘Opera and Drama’, has, as its central purpose, the objective of breaking with the artistic practices of his day, uniting the fragmented arts of the theatre, and resurrecting the function and status of performance art as the potent socio-political, integrative force in the community that he (correctly) surmised it had once served in ancient Hellenic society.[22]

 

First edition of the first part of ‘Opera and Drama’, 1852

 

‘Opera and Drama’ also clearly presents his expectation that generations to come would re-interpret all myths handed down to them, including those new ones that he constructed as vehicles for his own works, as warranted by the unique needs and perspectives of those future audiences which would be, of course, unknowable to him. Wagner had no illusion that a single, ‘right’ meaning could ever be assigned to complex mythic or legendary material for all peoples in all times. Scholars such as Theodor Adorno and Mary Cicora have compellingly argued that Wagner’s own philosophy of art, as detailed in ‘Opera and Drama’, and as evidenced by the structure and function of the ‘texts’, both literary and musical, of each work in the Bayreuth canon, was a precursor of Derrida, deconstruction and the post-structuralist movement.[23] It follows that the origin of the Regietheater approach to the presentation of his music dramas is rooted in the deep musings of the artist about the ephemeral meanings of words and music. Significantly, he struggled with the problem of how even to name his works from the very beginning – his early references to Der fliegende Holländer are as a ‘dramatic ballad’, the Ring was ‘a stage festival play’, Tristan und Isolde was an ‘action in three acts’ and Parsifal is still referred to by his original characterisation of it as a ‘stage consecrating festival play’. All very Derridean, indeed! 

4. The Deconstructive Potential in Wagner’s Music Dramas

The comparative literature scholar Mary Cicora published a remarkable series of books in the late 1990s to early 2000s that map the potential deconstructive elements in all ten of Wagner’s mature stage works. [24] This was the first such comprehensive attempt to dissect the works from a post-structuralist perspective, and it remains singularly important amid the vast literature available on this composer. It deserves to be much better known than it appears to be, judging from its infrequent referencing in both popular and scholarly recent encyclopaedic publications on Wagner. Cicora’s analysis holds Wagner to be a forerunner of Derridean deconstruction. The composer’s complex and multifaceted blending of history, contemporary social criticism and re-fashioning or retro-fitting of myth (i.e. second-order mythology), combined with the creation of introspective and strikingly modern characters who undermine the structures of signification of their own storylines along deconstructive nodal points in the drama and score, is recognisable today as being completely consistent with the principles of Derridean literary criticism. Cicora is especially concerned with a type of literary device that regularly serves to mark deconstructive nodes in Wagnerian opera, and in the literature of the 19th century in general, especially evident in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of Wagner’s favourite authors: Romantic irony. Romantic irony is a specific form of expression in which an author ‘breaks character’ within a work and reveals his recognition of his work as a fictional illusion.[25] It is the literary expression of self–consciousness, and Wagner, through the words and leitmotif underpinnings of his characters, regularly exhibits this trait of switching back and forth between planes of perspective. The persistent reflection and self-insight of nearly all principal characters in Wagner (one may think of Wotan and Amfortas as especially notable examples of this) underscore the composer’s heavy reliance on Romantic irony as a prime device in his works and thus the opening-up of deconstruction of meaning. Deconstruction yields significant new interpretative possibilities for contemporary directors and scenic artists. Cicora provides detailed examples from each of the music dramas in the Bayreuth canon, and her exhaustive investigations will reward careful study.

Cicora dedicates an entire book to evaluating the post-structuralist essence of Wagner’s vast Der Ring des Nibelungen; we will attempt to summarise both the points she raises and our own, as stimulated by her scholarship, in just a couple of paragraphs.[26] In brief, the main deconstructive textual elements occurring in the works other than the Ring are clearly operating in the Ring as well: the invented myth that merges contemporary history and social critique with the epic world of the sagas, the creation of an archaic-sounding poetry (i.e. Stabreim), the dominance of the literary devices of deconstruction – especially metaphor and Romantic irony – and the evolution of a new and uniquely multivalent system of signification for the symbols presented. Added to all of this, the Ring is the ideal vehicle to concentrate attention on one more essential building block of the Wagnerian art of transition and musical organisation: the leitmotif system. It is a system that is first developed to its full range in the composition of the Ring. The leitmotif structure is, in itself, the ultimate deconstructive weapon in the Wagnerian arsenal by virtue of its ability constantly and seamlessly to trigger reminiscences and associations in the hearer and thereby to stimulate the listener continually to re-evaluate and, perhaps, alter meaning, within the work. 

Wagner’s literary magnum opus, ‘Opera and Drama’, published in 1852, stands as the theoretical blueprint for his magnum opus for the stage, the Ring cycle.[27] Cicora persuasively argues that the far-ranging political and aesthetic programme proposed for opera in ‘Opera and Drama’ is practically demonstrated in the complex, multilayered sequence of alternative meanings in the Ring, and that the cycle is a vast example of a ‘myth as metaphor’ (Cicora’s phrase) which the composer openly invites every generation to interpret anew with the statement, in ‘Opera and Drama’, that the ‘highest possible task of the poet [is to] clearly and consciously re-create myth to suit the needs and world view of the present day and bring this modern myth to an understandable presentation in drama’.[28] It follows, then, that the ‘meaning’ of the Ring is expected by the composer to be constantly changing and open to debate; the work is constructed in both words and sound to be a dynamic system which emerges out of the primal E flat major of the Rheingold prelude and the nonsense syllables of the Rhinemaidens, and never settles into a single system of signification that can adequately embrace it in its totality and for all time. This is entirely by Wagner’s design. It is ‘peopled’ with self–reflective, richly drawn characters infused with Romantic irony, of whom Wotan is the most striking example, that continually question, probe, analyse, evolve and morph in their perspectives on the drama. As they progress through the experience, so do we also have that same opportunity to reassess and reset how we consider the work. This entire manufactured myth is set within a Gesamtkunstwerk frame, as specified in ‘Opera and Drama’, that seeks to drive synergy between the disparate arts that had become fragmented in the grand opera model of Wagner’s day, and that he attempted to harness into the service of a comprehensive, communal, theatrical–ritualistic–socio-political experience which could rival ancient Hellenic models, as he understood them.

This attempt to enable layers of meaning, many of which carry liberal and non-traditional socio-political implications, or at least stimulate such manner of debate, prefigures the stated intent of much post-modern art today. Post-structuralist deconstruction-based art is overtly political, and generally to the left of the political spectrum, as was Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk in his own time. All of this is aided and abetted in the Ring, especially, by the ‘motifs of reminiscence’, as Wagner preferred to call his leitmotifs.[29] Through this system, he had a highly plastic medium of sound to, by turns, amplify, complement and contradict the meaning embedded in the speech and actions of characters. As an especially prominent example of how a web of leitmotifs can set up interpretative alternatives, consider the case, elaborated on at length by Bernard Williams in his essay ‘Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics’, of one such deconstructive ironic interplay between text and music in Act III of Götterdämmerung: the celebratory funeral music for a ‘hero’ (Siegfried) who is not a hero.[30] In this very clear example of the power of the leitmotif system, the music compels the audience to review the murdered man’s life and re-evaluate the evidence for how to consider that life. Carl Dahlhaus summed it up best when he referred to the entire leitmotif superstructure of the Ring as ‘resounding metaphors’, and explained that the ‘meaning’ of any given leitmotif at any moment was established by its associations within the fabric of the work.[31] No leitmotif has an absolute, constant meaning and, in this respect, it is the perfect deconstructive element.

5. Everyman’s Bayreuth: Using Deconstruction to Achieve a New Social Consciousness 

In prior sections we have attempted to lay the groundwork, as reflected in Wagner’s theoretical writings, staging practices, social revolutionary positions and, most importantly, in the content and method of his compositions, in support of his status as a harbinger of the post-structuralist movement, which employs deconstruction as a primary tool for textual analysis and presentation. Current productions based, to various degrees, on deconstruction of his works, especially the steady succession of stagings seen at Bayreuth over the past decade, are serving to free Wagner from the confines of his own texts and initial stage directions. In considering these new staging approaches, a useful reference point might well be to recall Patrick Carnegy’s observation about Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s objective in translating Parsifal to film as being the creation of ‘images not illustrative of the music, but rather inspired by it’.[32] This also perfectly sums up what modern post-structuralist stage directors and scenic artists do. Audiences are invited, in a manner akin to Brechtian theatre, to witness, participate in and interpret these works as never before. The inconsistencies, contradictions, darker implications, social commentary, spirituality and transcendent glories all contained in these works are not reconciled for us, but, rather, they are laid bare for our personal consideration and integration. It is not all neatly tidied up for us, just as the genius of Richard Wagner, and the complexities, both of the man and of his times, cannot be reduced to a simple explanatory soundbite.

As so often with movements, it is not easy to assign an exact date for when the post-structuralist production trend started at Bayreuth. We contend that the earliest production that clearly employed major deconstructionist elements to achieve its effects was the centenary Ring of Patrice Chéreau at Bayreuth in 1976.

 

Gwyneth Jones as Brünnhilde in the final scene of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary Ring  

 

Chéreau, like Ruth Berghaus shortly afterwards in her equally important Ring production for Frankfurt (1985–7), embraced the non-concordance of potential ‘meanings’ within the cycle, and provided audiences with a plethora of novel, fresh images via which to forge their own comprehension of the work. The social consciousness of the presentation also marked it as theatre of the post-structuralist genre. In the extreme post-structuralism of post-dramatic directors, such as Christoph Schlingensief and Frank Castorf, the function of their theatre, consistent with Wagner’s own views, is overtly to stimulate political debate and catalyse social change.[33] What was hinted at by Chéreau in his 1976 Ring is now front and centre in the recent era of German theatrical heritage, perhaps most provocatively exemplified today by the artists of the Berlin Volksbühne, including Frank Castorf. 

It is important at this point in our review of the Bayreuth experiments to note that the arrival of deconstruction and, more generally, of post-structuralist, socio-politically probing interpretations, on the Green Hill coincides with the heyday of Derridean philosophy in the 1970s and 80s, and with its propagation by Derrida and his students beyond theory to applications in fields ranging throughout the arts and sciences.[34] By the early 1980s, even though generally imperfectly understood and variously defined, ‘deconstruction’ was something of a household word on both sides of the Atlantic, as everyone appeared to be attempting to deconstruct everything. Indeed, by 1997, it was sufficiently entrenched in the popular imagination that Woody Allen provided an application of Derridean philosophy to character portrayal in his film Deconstructing Harry. Its hold both inside and outside academia was shaken in the late 1980s with the highly publicised discovery of the appropriation by the Nazis in occupied Belgium during World War II of some of the writings of Paul de Man, one of the Derrida inner circle and, at that time, the chief proponent of deconstruction in North America. The ‘de Man affair’, combined with the subsequent re-reading in some quarters of several of Martin Heidegger’s wartime writings (seminal literature for both Derrida and de Man) as anti-Semitic, further encouraged critics of Derridean philosophy to intensify their attacks on this entire body of thought and practice as politically irresponsible and dangerously ahistorical.[35]

Although Derrida and his supporters successfully defended themselves against these mis-readings and mis-perceptions, and their explanations and clarifications largely restored the momentum of deconstruction in most of Europe, especially France and Germany, by the early 1990s, the discipline never regained its former high status in America or Britain. It was into this cauldron of continuing controversy over the ethics and value of deconstruction that it made its full-force entry onto the Green Hill in 2004 with the Schlingensief Parsifal. Schlingensief and all the directors in this tradition that followed him to the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth were central Europeans brought up, intellectually, in the glory days of deconstructive theory and application, and by virtue of their upbringing behind or near the Iron Curtain, retained a practical respect for the utility of this line of thought as an effective antidote to political repression.[36]

 Whereas those not sharing their formative experiences, such as many of their American critics, today view deconstruction as passé and self-indulgent, many European theatre talents regard Derridean philosophy and its applications, with its celebration of alternatives, intellectual provocation and questioning of the status quo, as vitally necessary. Finally, it is important to note that both Derridean philosophy and the modern discipline of bioethics – the latter being a body of thought upon which all Bayreuth productions over the past decade have pivoted – had their origins in the aftermath of World War II and have shaped our current concepts of civil and human rights encompassing our universal concern for the protection of each unique individual as (alternately) patient, research subject, citizen and victim of war.

The period at Bayreuth between the landmark Chéreau Ring and the start of the current ‘Everyman’s Bayreuth’ regime of Katharina and Eva Pasquier-Wagner was a period of twenty-five years of experimentation with a variety of approaches, the productions during this transitional period making steadily increasing use of deconstructive methods, but not, for the most part, as fully committed to this path as compared to the productions of the past decade.[37] Highlights in this regard during the time of transition were Harry Kupfer’s Holländer (1978) and Ring (1988), Götz Friedrich’s Lohengrin (1979) and centennial Parsifal (1982), Heiner Müller’s Tristan und Isolde (1993) and Claus Guth’s Holländer (2003).[38] We also recognise the importance of the highly imaginative and deconstruction-oriented interpretative insights of the Jean–Pierre Ponnelle Tristan und Isolde in 1981 and the Keith Warner Lohengrin of 1999.

 

Act I of Stefan Herheim’s 2008 Bayreuth production of Parsifal

 

This brings us to the current regime at Bayreuth, ushered in with the landmark post-dramatic production of Parsifal by the late Christoph Schlingensief in 2004, and continuing, with ever-growing gale force, to the present Frank Castorf Ring (2013). Along the way, the post-structuralist heritage has been maintained through Christoph Marthaler’s Tristan und Isolde (2005), Tankred Dorst’s Ring (2006), Katharina Wagner’s Meistersinger (2007), Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal (2008), Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin (2010), Sebastian Baumgarten’s Tannhäuser (2011) and Jan Philipp Gloger’s Holländer (2012).

As we have explored all of these productions in detail elsewhere, we refer interested readers to that material for an extended discussion of this most recent decade at Bayreuth.[39] Suffice it to note here that this has been a virtual tsunami of deconstruction-based production by some of the movement’s best direction, scenic design and dramaturgical talents, all united in the common goal of challenging traditionally held beliefs on the meaning of these works as conditioned by their 19th-century origins, and in discovering potential new systems of signification embedded within them that will enable new associations and resonances for today’s audiences.

Castorf’s Ring rounds out this remarkable decade with a heavily deconstructed production that presents the Nibelungen myth as the modern parable of our own crazed fixation on the quest for power and world domination through the control of ‘liquid gold’ – oil. His Ring is populated by places and characters that we can recognise over the tortured past century of that search, and that mirror what we have, as a result, ourselves become. If the perversion of the symbols of our ‘success’ – such as that of the iconic statue of the bull in front of the New York Stock Exchange, or the faces of the Communist ‘heroes’ superimposed on Mount Rushmore – repulse us and make us uncomfortable, then Castorf and his creative team have achieved their objective of making us see ourselves in a different, less flattering, light than that to which we are normally accustomed, and to seriously reconsidering the lessons for us inherent in Wagner’s Ring. We turn our attention now to an in-depth exploration of the dramaturgy of this landmark post-dramatic production.

II. Overview of the Dramaturgy of the Castorf Ring  

1. The ‘Stations of the Hero’ in the Oil Wars

The underlying organising theme of the Castorf production has been clearly identified by the creative team in the programme book published by the Bayreuth theatre for the premiere season of this production in 2013 – the ‘gold’ which is the object of the conflict between the principals in Wagner’s original 19th-century scenography has been updated to our more recent past, present and future ages of personal and societal anxiety as the greed for power and political world dominance through competition to control oil-derived wealth and oil-driven technology.[40] Although an excellent starting-point, such updating is not, in itself, sufficient to mark this as a landmark concept. The unique contribution of the direction of Frank Castorf, the dramaturgy of Patric Seibert and the associated stage installations of Aleksandar Denić derive from a recasting of the Ring in the strikingly original deconstructed frame of post-dramatic theatre – a uniquely bold recasting that facilitates a fluidity of expression and audience associations as free-flowing as the liquid ‘black gold’ itself. 

The overall plan of organisation is best presented diagrammatically and is summarised in the figure below illustrating the ‘Stations of the Hero’ which drive the production. The cycle moves freely back and forth through capitalist, transitional revolutionary and socialist phases of socio-political control reflecting the cyclic tension and transfer of power between these same forces on the 20th-century world stage. Within each phase, the definition of the societal ‘norm’, and with it the identification of the ‘hero’ in Wagner’s cosmology, transitions. Each phase, demarcated roughly as the province of each of the individual Ring dramas, oozes and bleeds (literally and figuratively) naturally into its neighbouring phases around the circle/cycle, with each both presaging the next and recalling the prior in a manner that can only be adequately represented with the resonance-expanding devices unique to deconstruction-based theatre.

In Rheingold we are introduced to Wotan and Alberich and the model of the hero in capitalist society as combined master and slave: both Valhalla and Nibelheim chiefs are the makers and breakers of laws, driven by their all-controlling and self-enslaving greed for power through ‘black gold’. The production sets Rheingold close to our own era as exemplified by the materialistic excesses of the 1950s and 1960s in the American centre of oil culture, Texas, on the modern mythic highway to freedom and adventure, Route 66.

 

 

A few words are in order on the critical concept of ‘transhumanism’ and the opposing concept, ‘posthumanism’, which will figure prominently in the rest of our discussion. In brief, the progression of transhumanism to posthumanism charts the increasing intersection over time of technology (i.e. oil dependency in the case of this production) with human functioning and both the positive and negative influence of that technology on the individual and on society. Man creates the technology but the technology also determines, for better or worse, human values and social constructs. This is the endless loop within the Ring cycle and it reflects Wagner’s own misgivings about the effects on people and society of the industrial revolution in his own time as well as our own experience of the present biotechnology revolution. Transhuman states are interim stages on the post-industrial revolution continuum, with posthumanism being the near-future endpoint of the process, the beneficial or detrimental nature of which has been the topic of fierce debate from the turn of the 19th century to the present time.[41] Contracts are easily made and even more readily broken in Castorf’s portrayal in Rheingold of the American (and, more generally, Western) immediate post-World War II transhuman experience, as both the environment and human nature are subjugated in the mindless acquisition of the ‘bling’ that litters the stage in this production. At the final curtain, the birth of the hero as social reformer and redeemer is in the mind of both master–slaves, as represented by the late 1960s flower-children who gyrate in a drug-induced dance in response to the strong rhythm of the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla which, in this context, appears like a rock anthem for the coming revolution.

Die Walküre takes us backward in time to show us the dilemma of the only traditionally recognised pure hero in the cycle, Siegmund, at the dawn of the age of oil, circa late 1890s in the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan. This is the hero as outcast rebel and would-be redeemer, and it is initially the drama of the struggle for human identity exemplified by that hero.

 

Die Walküre, Act III 

 

Siegmund’s death represents the failed rebellions of 1848 in Wagner’s own time and the accompanying defeat of individuality and subjectivity which sets the stage for the socio-political upheavals of 1905 and 1917 in Russia – all of this clearly indicated by projections on screens above the stage and by images on the stage throughout this drama. The latter half of the opera, from the Act II, Scene 4 Annunciation of Death onwards, chronicles the emergence of Brünnhilde as a new, alternative model for the heroic and a symbol of the hope for a future humanity not obsessed by control for capital. This division of Walküre into two intertwined stories, that of the law-breaking Volsungs and that of the law-making gods, is, of course, completely consistent with Wagner’s original plan of organisation of this drama, even though what Castorf does within this basic structure is highly novel. The Castorf staging also honours Wagner’s placement of the heart of the entire four-evening drama in Act II of Walküre with Wotan’s monologue of self-awareness and resolution to destroy Siegmund. As Michael Steinberg summarises the central position of this episode: ‘The death of Siegmund at the hand of the self-entrapped father Wotan is a horrendous allegory for the destruction of subjectivity at the hand of a self-entrapped modernity, where rationality has produced not freedom but Weber’s iron cage.’[42] The ensuing Ride of the Valkyries is literally the sound of the world coming apart at the seams, just as the Holländer in the earlier opera graphically foretold the world cracking open (‘Welt zusammenkracht’) at the Day of Judgment, and it is a chilling foretaste of the Götterdämmerung to come.

Siegfried is the next phase of this trajectory of the human in society and the station of the hero once rebellion has run its course and the will of the individual has been subjugated to the needs of the group. It is the transitional, transhuman, socialist phase (as opposed to the transhuman capitalist phase presented in Rheingold) and Castorf and Denić set it against the backdrop of a parody of Mount Rushmore with the faces of the iconic American presidents replaced with the images of the equally iconic four founding fathers of Communism: Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

 

Siegfried, Act I  

 

Significantly, the Mount Rushmore parody set, whenever seen in these final two operas, is surrounded by scaffolding, both as a practical solution to providing more playing surface and to indicate that the socio-political system is forever a work in progress. We are reminded that the term, ‘political science’, has deep meaning in so much as all systems of government are, like biological natural selection, ultimately only experiments. Here too the Alexanderplatz in Cold War Berlin makes its first appearance (in Act II) as the great dividing line between the cultures of our modern East and West, just as the Neidhöhle of Wagner’s poetic landscape represented the no man’s land of the sagas.

 

Siegfried, Act II  

 

For Castorf, the Alexanderplatz is both the real and the modern mythic transitional zone marking the transition of power in our own time and socio-cultural and physical milieu for Siegfried, the product of this troubled and confused time, as he reaches the pivot point in his hero’s journey toward Brünnhilde. What manner of man is the new hero in this 20th-century time of troubles and transition? This alternative for the hero is the anti-social ‘Wildman’; he rejects human society rather than force-fitting into it. He is the unsocialised human isolated at a societal and philosophical crossroad, symbolised by the Alexanderplatz at the time of the Berlin Wall, in which the revolution is over, God is dead, and a new order with new social norms for human interaction are yet to be fully established. It is ‘every man for himself’ in the no man’s land of the Cold War. Siegfried is the severely abused and developmentally stunted child Kaspar Hauser grown into an insecure, depressed and antisocial adolescent bully. As we point out elsewhere, the characterisation of Siegfried, in this Castorf production, as soul-murdered child–man akin to the famous historical Kaspar Hauser case from Wagner’s lifetime, is one that is entirely consistent with a presentation that modern psychiatry would find plausible, given the particular nature of his extreme abuse in childhood by Mime and given his genetic inheritance as deduced from our observations of the behaviour of his grandfather and the depressive nature of the father whom he never knew.[43] Power passed to such a compromised individual can easily be taken away by others, as will be seen in the concluding drama of the cycle. The hope raised at the end of Walküre for Brünnhilde as the new heroic model and the character who might break the cycle of dysfunction is dashed when she awakens at the end of Siegfried, much the same as she appeared in Act II of Walküre, uninterested in a larger role in the drama, and instead now so fixated on the achievement of domestic order through marriage that she ignores the many warning signals clearly given her that Siegfried is not the marrying type. 

Finally, in Götterdämmerung we witness the rise of the hero of our near future, Hagen, and we recall that he is so identified in both the Nibelungenlied medieval source material and in Wagner’s libretto.

 

Götterdämmerung, Act I 

 

For Castorf, this is the posthuman hero as master controller in the coming age, as predicted by many, when man is in danger of being completely de-personalised and defined or controlled by the technology of his own creation. As in Rheingold, he is again both master and slave – we have come full circle in Wagner’s Ring, in Castorf’s presentation of the journey of the hero, and in our own evolution. It is a world in which societal structure is set and enforced as concretely as the grey heavy structures dominating the stage, and gratification once again as in Rheingold comes through acquisition of objects of dubious real value and born out of oil money, like Gutrune’s prized Isetta or the Rhinemaiden’s luxury sedan. It is the pendulum swung full circle after the collapse of Soviet Communism, and similar to the prior capitalist social order but yet more extreme in reaction to past history and due to the multiplication over time of man’s technical prowess in producing objects. It is an amalgam of many cultures and socio-political systems, and the Gibichung mob in Act II waves the flags of multiple nations. We struggle to identify the national allegiance of these people, and we ultimately wonder if it really matters. There is now only the dim remembrance by the hero of the primordial pure pre-Rheingold natural state, as evidenced by projections of Hagen plodding through forest glades during Siegfried’s Funeral Music. The final music drama as set in this posthuman collage of surrealistic New York Wall Street intermingled with modern German multicultural street scenes raises a critical question for the audience to consider: will the new posthuman hero reflect on his station and evolve? How will the cycle of the stations of man, the hero, be deconstructed in the future? Where do we go next? This ultimately was Wagner’s open question; it is equally Castorf’s and it continues to remain without resolution. Our final image at the end of the Castorf cycle is of Hagen broodily staring into the fires of destruction around him. As the closing chords of the orchestra sound a benediction over the proceedings, we can only hope that this is what he ponders. Therein alone lays our hope for humanity.

2. The Operation of Sheer Forces 

Overarching this entire cyclic model across the four Ring dramas, there are three categories of sheer forces exerting pressure on the system, propelling movement through the phases of the story and affecting the characters caught in this web of their own (and our modern-day) history: characterological, socio-political and environmental. We describe these axes next.

Characterological

The characterological axis embraces aspects or qualities of individual characters, including placement of the individual on the transhuman to posthuman continuum.[44] This particular characterological dimension of transhumanism/posthumanism is very much dependent on the time period (or, in the case of the Castorf Ring, the individual opera). All of these characterological components make up the unique identity of persons – who we are, how we behave, what we feel, our drives and interests: our persona. As society values different characteristics of individuals over time, so does the concept of what is ‘heroic’ also morph.

Socio-Political

The socio-political axis is a broad category of forces that have to do with how individuals are governed and organised into societies. This set of powerful sheer forces of the group range between the rule of consumerism that underpins capitalism, at one extreme, and the opposing societal organisational system of communal sharing of wealth under socialism, at the other extreme. In the Castorf Ring, as in the European realpolitik of the time, the post–World War II eastern bloc socialist system meets the western capitalist alternative in the socio-political pivot-point of the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. In this production, as in actual recent history, the Alexanderplatz will be the portal between alternative, imperfect worlds. It is both reality and mythic space: the socio-political battleground and the place where past, present and future most tangibly coexist. This all-important element of time, a component of the next axis, the environmental, is most palpably present here, and in a very real sense, Castorf fuses time into the physical space of the Alexanderplatz with all the resonances of that particular place for the socio-political context of the drama. This further serves to stimulate new associations for the audience as characters interact and in turn are developed (i.e. the characterological sheer forces), as they so often are, in this potent, twilight-zone-like setting. It is a dramaturgical stroke of inspiration of a fittingly Wagnerian scale in its boldness and integrative power.

Environmental

The foregoing discussion of ‘time’ leads us naturally into a description of the last of the three sets of sheer forces operating in the production: the environmental axis. This refers to the physical environment outside the individual (i.e. the characterological) or the group (i.e. the socio-political) that impacts on both. It is the natural world context in which we all live and in which mankind, regardless of his stage of technological development, has always lived. The environmental sheer forces reveal nature harnessed and enslaved, like the oil forced out of the ground through a well, or freed to exhibit its power uninhibited, like the fiery destruction of that well in an explosion, both shown in Walküre. As previously indicated, time itself is one of these inexorable forces of nature, and the Castorf team incorporates and makes visible this critically important, but commonly overlooked, external environmental force in uniquely imaginative ways. Time is, ultimately, the frame for all deconstructions, in that as Derrida established, ‘iterability alters’, and nothing can be iterated unless time passes. Appropriately, Castorf gives time pride of place in his post-dramatic production of the Ring.

3. Deconstructive Devices Utilised Throughout the Production 

The unifying technique employed throughout this production is the use of irony to enable the exploration of alternative interpretations to the Ring at both micro- and macro-levels. All commonly accepted principal categories of ironic expression – verbal, situational and dramatic – are employed as well as hybrid forms of irony such as Romantic irony. All these varieties capitalise on the variance between the prior conditioned expectations of an audience and their actual observations of what they are presented with during the performance at the deconstructive nodes identified within the work. The function of all forms of irony in a deconstruction-based production is to stimulate the audience–partner to recognise new associations and ultimately to consider new interpretations of the drama. This heavy reliance on irony is a characteristic of all post-dramatic theatre, and it was clearly identified as a key technique in the Castorf Ring in the 2015 programme notes via the numerous quotations from the 1964 article ‘The Irony’ by Vladimir Jankélévitch, and by direct reference to this device by the production dramaturg and assistant director, Patric Seibert.[45] In the service of enabling exposition, ironic or otherwise, in all parts of the cycle, five strategies or devices are consistently employed. All of these facilitate our ability to see and hear the work in a fresh perspective and, once again, to experience it as if for the first time. (Recall here Wagner’s plea down the corridors of time of ‘Kinder, macht Neues!’) Our detailed discussion later of the main images in the production in selected scenes will illustrate multiple specific examples of how each of these devices is used. These devices are:

a) Liberal Use of Plastic or Elastic Objects as Stage Properties

Plastic is a product of oil, and the ‘bling’ that litters the stage, particularly in the first and final operas of the cycle, to signify mindless materialism, is an ever-present reminder that the source of these trappings of affluence is itself an exploitation of the environment. The omnipresence of plastics and references to oil, oil exploration and petroleum-based industry is a potent visual leitmotif and a stand-in for the ‘gold’ in this concept. It also serves as the visual parallel to the musical structure of the Ring, which, like the overtly oil-based composition of the sets, is composed out of these fluid, malleable, ever-present and endlessly transforming building blocks of reminiscences which are the leitmotifs. The staging reflects the same principles of compositional organisation as does the music.

 

The mime character in Das Rheingold

 

b) Insertion of a Mime Character into the Drama

Each of the music dramas in this production introduces a mime character actor who plays various roles – a gas station and convenience shop attendant in Rheingold, an oil field labourer in Walküre, a bear, a menial worker and a waiter in Siegfried, and a döner-kebab- stand owner in Götterdämmerung. As discussed earlier, mime is a highly suggestive form of expression in that it requires the audience actively to engage with the performer to interpret non-verbal behaviours and gestures, and this promotes consideration of alternatives of meaning. Thus, it fits very well into the present deconstruction-based production of the Ring. A mime does not tell you the story, as modern adult audiences have come to expect; instead, you piece it together as you understand it from his/her body language. Here again, the Castorf reliance on a device has clear Wagnerian lineage as Wagner was known greatly to value this very elemental, ‘plastic’ manner of expression, most evidenced, as already cited, by his well-documented admiration of the mimetic abilities of the American actor Joseph Jefferson on the London stage in Rip Van Winkle in 1877, and we infer that the striking mime episodes for both Parsifal and Kundry in his final opera provide further support of his appreciation of this art form. In addition, it is very important to note that the production ‘architect’, Patric Seibert, portrays all of these mimed characters. This is significant in that the very presence onstage of the creative team colleague most responsible for the concept and assisting in the direction of the performance, is also interacting with Wagner’s prescribed characters as an integral part of the drama. This points up the drama as a construct and prompts the audience to question what belongs to the play and what is external to it; what is fiction and what is reality. In this manner, this particular mime actor is the very embodiment of Romantic irony.

c) Use of Prescience or Foreshadowing

Throughout this staging, images bombard us that connect the experienced Ring audience member (as it is fair to assume describes all who attend the Bayreuth Festival) both backwards and forwards into the drama. There are numerous image frames in the production devoted to foreshadowing of events or character prescience, and we illustrate with just a few particularly striking examples: the (Russian) proletariat bear of Siegfried first appears as a bearskin rug at the end of Walküre for the capitalist overlord, Wotan, to tread upon; the Russian Orthodox icon of St George the Dragon-Slayer is the final image seen at curtain fall accompanying the Magic Fire Music of Walküre, indicating that the hero of the future in the next drama will be a product of post-communist revolution Soviet culture; the Wanderer plays with a string during the prelude of Act III of Siegfried, presaging the rope of fate of the Norns in the next instalment of the drama; and Alberich and Mime appear already bound at the start of the Nibelheim Scene in Rheingold, portending their ultimate fate in the cycle. On an even grander, macro-scale, recognition that the Rheingold staging, overall, represents a time period (1960s America) very similar in appearance to that of the ‘futuristic’ Götterdämmerung (circa 1960s America and East Berlin), and that both are more recent than, certainly, the setting for Walküre (circa 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions) and possibly that for Siegfried (an indefinite Cold War period), reminds us that beginning and end are relative and a matter of perspective. It is interesting in this regard to recall that Wagner, in developing the prose sketch, did start his concept at the end, with Siegfrieds Tod, and then worked back to the beginning. Use of the device of foreshadowing or prescience, on either a micro- or a macro-level, compels us to accept the uncomfortable truth that we are in an infinite loop, a circle that has no beginning and no end; the end is embedded in the beginning and the beginning already includes the end. We are, both figuratively and literally, caught up in a ‘cycle’. Being compelled by this device continually to confront this continuity and inevitability of events constitutes a visual analogue to the operation of fate, a powerful force propelling the drama forward, and it serves to unify time and space in a manner that can disorient the audience and force reconsideration of events just seen, as well as provide a novel context for anticipation of those yet to occur.

d) Omnipresence of Video Projections, Cameras and Film Crew

The production makes constant use of images within images as captured on film by a cameraman who is visible to the audience. These film sequences (i.e. how the camera ‘sees’ the action) are instantaneously projected either onto large-motion picture screens, as in Rheingold Scenes 2 and 3, or on small television monitors, as in the Norns’ Scene and the Hall of the Gibichung set in Act I (the döner-kebab stall, in this production) of Götterdämmerung. In this manner, the audience can choose which perspective to consider: that captured by the camera or the action as viewed ‘naturally’ as it unfolds ‘live’ on stage without the aid of selective camerawork.

 

The döner-kebab stall with TV monitor in Act I of Götterdämmerung

 

This forces alternatives in perspective to be considered as the strategy presents the viewer with multiple, simultaneous views of the same moment of action. An especially useful exposition of the effect of this technique appears in Tash Siddiqui’s 2014 review in The Wagner Journal in which she provides specific examples of how the screen detail often amplified her own experience of the drama.[46] In this production, the audience must continually decide how and what they wish to see, as this device recurs regularly throughout the four evenings. Very importantly, this omnipresence of camera images and a film crew promotes our recognition of the Romantic irony that abounds throughout the Ring. We are presented with life observing itself and with the constant question before us of what is real and what is fiction; which is the true representation of the events on stage – that which we see directly ourselves or that which we see through the camera lens?

e) Sets as Portals and the Incorporation of Anachronistic Stage Properties

The stage installations of Aleksandar Denić are fluid, surrealistic portals, recalling Alice in Wonderland, that allow a rapid cycling back and forth between locales and time periods. These are parallel universes – an apparent homage to the immediately preceding Ring at Bayreuth of Tankred Dorst – that become more inseparable as the drama progresses and the boundaries between eastern and western Cold War socio-political systems and their similarly destructive effects on the characters blur. Whereas the Rheingold scenography, like its leitmotif structure, is relatively monochromatic (a seedy 1960s motel along Route 66 in Texas), by the time we progress to Götterdämmerung the stage picture, like the associated sound-world, have become so complex and laden with multiple resonances that in the final act of the cycle a plastics factory, a GDR apartment building, a Turkish kebab and vegetable stall, the Reichstag wrapped Christo-like, the New York Stock Exchange and the Mount Rushmore monument parody all appear in rapid succession on the rotating stage. The evolution of the scenography is, broadly, paralleling the evolution of the music, and both are illustrating a world increasingly out of control, with actions of characters, such as the murder of the mime actor playing the kebab-stall owner, followed by the bludgeoning to death of Siegfried, less and less anchored in reason. As the action grows more complex and rotates (both literally and figuratively) in and out of view, the increasingly dense scenography marked by this rapid cycling through time and space serves further to disorientate the audience and jolt it into recognition of new patterns of association in an attempt to restore balance. Wagner’s parable of mankind’s ever-growing dysfunction and breakdown of world order is ultimately a terrifying vision of human de-evolution, and the Castorf production, as aided by this device, gives the audience a taste of this directly through its own discomfort caused by the disorientation caused by the rapid cycling of stage images. Added to this manic fluidity of the stage picture is the frequent incorporation within scenes of anachronistic props, for example: Siegfried wields both Kalashnikov automatic rifle and sword, the Valkyries sports mixed-period costuming, and Siegmund escapes on a bicycle, having just recovered a weapon, a sword, which is characteristic of an earlier era. This further intensifies resonances for a modern audience, draws attention once again to the relationship between time and space, and prompts new thought patterns about ‘meaning’.

Acknowledging Wagner’s own expectation that he had created a living myth that needed to be recreated anew down the ages by audience-participants; equipped with a background of deconstruction-based post-dramatic theatre; realising the concept of ‘stations of the hero’ underlying the Castorf production; recognising the sheer forces operating to move the production forward; and recalling the devices consistently utilised in the production to realise aims, we are ready to apply all of this knowledge in a detailed dissection of a selected key moment in the performance that we have not yet commented upon in the foregoing discussion of individual elements making up the concept: Siegfried Act III, Scene 3. The awakening of Brünnhilde through to the end of the opera occupies approximately one hour of performance time at the epicentre of the tetralogy, and is one of the most challenging sequences in the entire cycle, as it is the point at which there is the first clear transition to a new order (i.e. God is dead). The difficult-to-place ‘persona’ of Siegfried, as the (now sexually awakened) adult protagonist, must be established, the reborn heroine needs to be defined, and the thorny matter of the hero ‘learning fear’ must be resolved. Truly, this is a momentous juncture in the epic, and an acid test for any director. The approach of the Castorf team to this sequence illustrates their handling of the entire cycle, and therefore, although only a sample, serves as representative of the whole. Consistent with the Derridean tradition of the Castorf–Seibert–Denić achievement, we will not attempt to assign meaning – that is the responsibility and the privilege of each audience member who considers it from his or her own unique vantage point of person, time and place. It is the most democratic of all theatrical systems, and in that it is a fitting frame for the masterwork of this most democratic of masters.

III. Analysis of Siegfried Act III, Scene 3 in the Castorf Production and Wagnerian Free Association on Crocodiles

As the scene begins, Siegfried has just passed through the fire and arrives at the place where Brünnhilde sleeps. Perhaps the first thing we notice is that the background of the Mount Rushmore parody begins to fade and the faces of the Communist heroes become less distinct. This is practical in that it focuses our attention on the principals as well as signifying to us that the socio-political sheer forces, always in operation, will recede from the centre of attention for the conclusion of the act. We notice Brünnhilde now in the foreground in front of the monument, lying motionless and encased in what appears to be large green plastic trash bags. These plastic bags again remind us of the omnipresence of oil-lust as the pollutant of every section of the Ring, even if, as in this scene, it is not directly on the minds of the characters on stage. It is, nonetheless, inescapable, for it defines all worlds in the cycle. The full power of the trash bag image will only hit in the next segment of the cycle, as the appearance of the plastic disposal wrap here foreshadows the appearance of Siegfried’s shroud, the protective wrapping on Gutrune’s Isetta, and the bags that Hagen lugs around as baggage (i.e. the weight of the sins of the oil-crazed world), all in Götterdämmerung.

As Siegfried notices the sleeping figure and rhapsodises about who, or what, it might be, the black-and-white silent film sequence projected in the background shows a woman being dragged through a forest glade, ostensibly against her will, by a powerful male who cannot be identified. We are reminded that Brünnhilde is another one of Wagner’s dreaming women as well as potentially given insight into the mind of Siegfried, as Wagner’s leitmotif system is doing at the same time, a cavalcade of motifs associated with both passing through the orchestra. Is it Brünnhilde’s night terror of being awoken from her ‘magic sleep’ by an unwelcome intruder? Is it a foreshadowing of what will happen to her in Act II of Götterdämmerung when she is betrayed by Siegfried in the guise of Gunther? Also, it could well be a projection of Siegfried’s disturbing imaginings of Mime’s treatment of his mother prior to his birth. Alternatively, it could well be Siegfried’s fantasy of how he will overpower this strange new creature before him. All of these interpretations, and others, of this haunting image are possible and completely valid depending on the perspective of the viewer. Each adds dimension to the concept of this production and the characterisations of the principal characters. As he tears open the plastic covers on the figure, his outburst of ‘Das ist kein Mann!’ (That is no man!) makes complete sense in the context of this production in which Siegfried is portrayed, very realistically, in a clinical psychiatric sense, as a ‘soul-murdered’ Kaspar Hauser figure. We understand the Castorf Siegfried as meaning ‘man’ in the sense of ‘mankind’. It is pure Derrida in that ‘man’ is one of those words that can have alternative meanings depending on context; it can mean, literally, a male or it can stand in as a reference to all who are human. This emotionally compromised and severely sensory and socially deprived foster child of the abusive Mime does not recognise humankind. He has only known the creatures of the forest – the surrealistic sex object, the Forest Bird, the brute Fafner and the usurer Mime. This is a new creature, and he quickly runs through the possibility that it might even be his mother. In the Castorf portrayal of the character of this severely compromised Cold War-era wild man, the line comes across not so much as ‘this is not a male’ (and by inference, this must be a female), but, rather, ‘I don’t recognise this as one of my human kind!’. To us, it is poignant and sums up the crisis of this character. If heard as humorous, then, again, no harm is done in the service of a very different appreciation of the production. As we shall soon see in the next segment of this scene, the Castorf team recognises that comedy and tragedy must coexist, and that Siegfried, in particular, as the ‘scherzo’ of the Ring, as it is so often called, offers many moments that can be seen as providing comic relief within the vast, all-consuming drama of the cycle.

We come now to what may be the most brilliant theatrical stroke of all in this Ring: the manner in which Castorf provides a solution for how Siegfried learns fear. Castorf translates into modern terms what would be fearful to such an emotionally undeveloped man–child as Siegfried. Our hero is not fearful of threatening men or beasts: he is fearful of commitment to other humans as he has never been taught how to associate in the world of humankind. This will prevent him from forging a mature, stable relationship with a woman, as we will soon see in this opera, and it will make it equally impossible for him to navigate the often treacherous world of other males, as we shall see in the next work. He is anti-social and not only trapped in the socio-political no man’s land of the Cold War of his time, but so impossibly trapped in his own inner conflicts that he is unfit for human society of any type; he is a modern-day Kaspar Hauser. The Castorf production demonstrates this in the most dramatic (or, more properly, post-dramatic) manner. For the final sequence of the act, the stage turntable revolves to take us back to the Alexanderplatz set where Siegfried and Brünnhilde are getting to know each other, in typically modern fashion, over a few drinks and a meal at a café table. While the orchestra sounds the central theme familiar as well from the Siegfried Idyll during the passage beginning with Brünnhilde’s line ‘Ewig war ich, ewig bin ich’ (I always was, I always am), she emerges from behind a portion of the set in a wedding dress and veil. It is the outfit seen before in Act I, when the bear–proletariat expressed the desire to form an allegiance with the hero. Clearly, the allegiance that his new-found companion wants to form is the bond of marriage, and, whereas the ‘bear’ was just ignored, Siegfried starts up from the dinner table in absolute terror of this proposition from Brünnhilde. Furthermore, the traditional orientation of Brünnhilde is made even clearer in that she carries a doll to indicate her desire for children, and with religious iconography incorporated into her wedding costume which resembles the attire seen on the statue of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. As the wedding-attired Brünnhilde appears from stage right, at the same moment two giant mechanical crocodiles and a smaller juvenile crocodile emerge from stage left along with the reappearance of the Forest Bird, Las Vegas-like attired chorus girl with whom Siegfried had engaged in sexual play in the Act II Forest Murmurs sequence.

 

Siegfried, Act III  

 

There is a tug of war between the two women for Siegfried’s attention, and he is clearly more interested in the casual sex offered by the Forest Bird than by the commitment offered by Brünnhilde. As the act closes during the final duet, beginning with Brünnhilde’s line ‘O kindischer Held’ (You childlike hero), Siegfried begins to feed the crocodiles as if they were pets! In addition, at other moments in this closing scene, the two adult crocodiles are seen copulating. Never have we seen this line characterising Siegfried as ‘childlike’ rendered more tellingly. What he should be afraid of – man-eating giant reptiles – he merely laughs at. Indeed, these reptile monsters do proceed next to attack and eat the Forest Bird, and Siegfried is engaged in pulling his sex playmate out of their jaws while he sings his closing lines of the opera. His priorities are clear; this hero has demonstrated fear, fear of commitment to another human, but he has not matured emotionally during the course of this opera which concerns his development, and this fact, made so clear in this scene, portends both his own undoing in the next opera and the coming cataclysm of society.

Finally, we explore some of the myriad, rich associations generated by the choice of crocodiles, intended to show just how out of sync Siegfried is with ‘normal’ human functioning. This will also serve to highlight, more generally, the concept of this production. First, it should be mentioned that the appearance of these creatures was foreshadowed in several ways previously, and thus their sight, although shocking and also comical, is something that Castorf has already prepared us for, so that their entrance in this act has a degree of inevitability about it. Most noticeably and immediately, in the second act, Siegfried plays in puddles in the Alexanderplatz that have formed in the dinosaur tracks on the floor of the stage. In reality, dinosaur remains are to be found in the vicinity of the Alexanderplatz, as Berlin’s Museum of Natural History houses one of the world’s premier collections of prehistoric reptiles. This is a reference to parallel universes – the past and the present fusing into one. It is also another reference to oil, as the time of the dinosaurs was when this fossil fuel was created in the earth, and man’s attempt to draw it out of the earth is, in one sense, a disruption of the remains of ancient animals. The crocodile is one of the few animals alive today that also belonged to that time long ago. The choice of crocodiles to underscore Siegfried’s lack of appropriate fear is a compelling one, as there are few animals that live on land that are as universally terrifying. Anyone who has been socialised will exhibit fear of such an uncaged beast, and it is significant that such fear is learned. In this context, it underscores the lack of socialisation of Siegfried. As a model for this aspect of Siegfried’s personality, the actual wild man in Wagner’s lifetime, Kaspar Hauser, was, like Castorf’s Siegfried, not afraid of fire and other ‘normal’ stressors when initially challenged with such threats by those that studied him.[47] The onstage copulating of the animals is also significant, as it signifies the carnal single-minded interests of Siegfried, like his grandfather, in all women, including the Forest Bird and Brünnhilde, and in Gutrune soon to follow. Lastly, the use of crocodiles draws potential parallels with a story, entitled ‘The Crocodile’, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a contemporary of Wagner’s and, like Wagner, a socially conscious and revolutionary artist.[48]

 

 

In this 1865 novella by the Russian writer, a civil servant is swallowed by a crocodile and lives so happily in the belly of the beast that he does not want to be rescued. The works of both Wagner and Dostoyevsky were major influences on the Russian Symbolist movement at the turn of the 20th century, and it is fitting that they come together in this heavily ironic Castorf production through the imagery of the crocodile.

IV. Some Concluding Observations and Thoughts  

1. On Turkeys and a ‘Bear’, and How Clothes Make the Woman

As demonstrated with the foregoing analysed example of Siegfried Act III, Scene 3, the deconstruction-based approach of post-dramatic theatre facilitates a rich array of resonances throughout the vast tetralogy, and thus facilitates Wagner’s objective to invite new audiences to explore novel insights and recreate the myth of the rape of the gold of the Rhine for their own time, as he translated that same myth from ancient and varied source material into the symbolic language of his own era. At all times, it is an approach that honours Wagner’s dictum that opera is drama, and it treats that drama as seriously as it respects the ‘letter’ of the score. Literally, any moment in this staging of the Ring can be analysed to yield alternative meanings as compelling and in keeping with the underlying concept of the production as that demonstrated for the closing hour of Siegfried.

During the course of describing this production and its dramaturgical elements, many images have been already briefly indicated, but, as a further more detailed example, consider one that is perhaps initially particularly jarring: the two caged turkeys seen onstage throughout the duration of Act I of Die Walküre. The axis to which this image seems at first most readily to belong is ‘characterological’, in that it is clearly a projection of the immediate situation of the Volsung twins – they, like the birds, are prisoners of Hunding and of the system he represents. It is characterological too with reference to Hunding’s character as the brutish captor of these birds, as he is of this woman and this man. On closer examination, this is also a foreshadowing of the death of Siegmund and Sieglinde, as these caged turkeys are not being kept indefinitely but will be sacrificed to feed their captor. Carrying this further, one considers the commonly held attitudes about poultry and livestock in general – they are believed not to have an appreciation of their fate. Likewise, the human lovers do not fully appreciate the peril of their situation. In particular, the cluelessness of Siegmund as to his origins is in direct parallel to the seemingly unwitting nature of these birds. Finally, on the characterological axis, the sight of birds causes us to recall the very different predatory bird species, the raven, that symbolises the very different nature of the father; his offspring are prey, not hunters, and these children are the mirror opposites of their war-father. The image of the turkeys in a cage is also an environmental analogy for nature enslaved. On one level these caged animals are another representation of gold–oil – natural power harnessed by humans. Finally, this latter reference to perversion of the natural order reminds us of the consumerism rampant through much of this Ring, and, specifically, of the capitalist exploitation of resources for power. Thus, the image of the turkeys also has ties to the socio-political axis, and this is further reinforced when one recalls that livestock are a product to sell for profit in industrial societies. Indeed, the sight of the turkeys can elicit a variety of associations and feeling states in the audience that, regardless of which predominate, all serve to move Wagner’s storyline forward within the framework of the Castorf production concept.

The previously briefly described serf–bear mime character in Siegfried Act I provides a particularly striking example of how we all see differently, and how a post-dramatic production facilitates alternative interpretations within the frame of the unifying concept. This tethered, scantily clad, grim, oil-tinged character’s inquisitive rooting and climbing into the stacked books strewn around the trailer home of Mime does mimic that of a bear cub rummaging around an interesting camp site, but it can have other connotations within this production as well, if the audience is open to consider further. Knowledge is power in this new world, and Mime has it and seeks to hold it as zealously for himself as Fafner hoards the purloined black ‘gold’. The ‘bear’ is also a symbol of the downtrodden proletariat from the prior drama – workers compelled to labour for the ruling class, deprived of education or comfort, and confined on a short tether which they long to break in order to experience the world more fully. This bear is also the symbol of the people – the Russian Bear broken loose from its chains in the rebellions of 1905 and 1917, the period of the prior drama. It is now struggling to find its new place in the world against the resistance of a new set of masters who prove to be no more accepting than the previous controllers. The ‘bear’ works the bellows to forge the armaments for the empowerment of the new master, just as he worked the oil fields for the old ones. The bear evokes characterological resonances as well as socio-political associations of the time and the environmental force of a being still struggling to express its essence. Thinking about it still further, we can project that it is also a representation of Siegfried, the wild boy–man who acts through animal instinct, is deprived of knowledge of his origins, and also longs to break his tether to Mime. As the act ends and Siegfried at last wields a weapon and frees himself from his trailer prison, the ‘bear’ dons a wedding dress – a symbol of the sexual awakening of his new master, Siegfried, a foreshadowing of the constricting binds to come (as this is how Siegfried will view marriage), and/or a representation of the yearned-for bond of the people with this new hope for their future in the post-Revolutionary world. Patric Seibert, as the bear–serf, can evoke all of these associations and more and all are in line with the drama; depending on one’s perspective, the bear can represent any or all of these and it can alternately bring comic relief, evoke rage at oppression, engender sympathy, and provoke our exhilaration at the new possibilities now opened up in the drama. Ideally, before the conclusion of Act I of Siegfried this image will accomplish all of these objectives in rapid succession, but, if it only triggers some of these associations, it still works as a powerful mechanism for stimulating thought pertinent to the Ring.

To take a very different set of examples of imagery in this production and analyse it at some depth, consider the contribution that the costume design of Adriana Braga Peretzki makes to integrate the production concept and further enrich audience associations and promote new interpretations of characters and events. Specifically, consider how the costuming of Brünnhilde changes as her role evolves. She first appears as a tomboy figure in unisex-style black and grey costume for Walküre, signifying her bond to her father and to the prevailing oil wealth culture of her ruling oil baron ‘class’ for most of that opera. Upon her awakening in Siegfried, her costume incorporates flecks of gold, reflecting the vibrancy of emerging daylight and her own sexual dawning, transitioning to a spotted gold and black leopard-pattern housecoat signifying her domesticity by Act I of Götterdämmerung, and she appears in predominantly gold-coloured dress only from Act II of Götterdämmerung onward.

 

Brünnhilde and Waltraute in Act I of Götterdämmerung

 

It is as if she is only fully awake when betrayed. Gutrune’s leopard dress at the end of Act III of Götterdämmerung is patterned after Brünnhilde’s earlier Hausfrau robe, and forces us to draw an association between the two women who, ultimately, have become very similar with respect to their traditional objectives for home, hearth and marital stability. This domestic sensibility of the two women is in stark contrast to the seductive costuming of the Rhinemaidens or showgirl Forest Bird, who are so much more to the taste of Siegfried, or the fur-and-jewel glamour-girl garb of Wotan’s mistress, Erda.

 

Erda and Wotan in Act III of Siegfried

 

Contrast all of this with the vaguely reptilian costuming of Waltraute as she appears in Act I of Götterdämmerung – a woman whose demands are threatening to Brünnhilde, much as the crocodiles in Siegfried should have inspired fear in her husband. All of this, and more, can be seen encoded in the costuming alone of these interconnected characters. Against all of the complexity of the sets and costumes is the constant reminder of the simple unifying truth of this production: that the world of the Ring is a precarious oil-soaked tinderbox primed to explode. Oil is everywhere; it stains nearly every costume and it is mixed with the red of blood in much of the makeup of characters – note especially the oily black and gory red besmirched faces of the three Norns, their costumes reminiscent of ethnic Sinti and Roma peoples, the half oil-black face of Fafner, and the black streaks covering the body of the proletariat serf–bear.

2. Are Cherished Symbols Missing?

Ring audiences have become accustomed to expecting certain objects referred to in the libretto, and often accompanied by thematic material in the score, to be visible in the staging. In their efforts to open up interpretation of a work, post-dramatic presentations are often accused of neglecting such ties to traditional storytelling. Is this the case in the present production?

At first glance, certain familiar physical props seem to be missing, and this has caused consternation in some quarters. On closer inspection, this can be shown not to be the case if, indeed, one examines the essence of those expected properties. What Castorf gives us is a distillation of that essence, if not the physical object itself specified in Wagner’s text. There are many striking examples of this. Fricka’s rams in Walküre are muscle-men labourers under her whip, in keeping with the Russian Revolution period of this staging. Likewise, the fallen heroes collected by the Valkyries are victims of the workers’ sabotage explosion of the oil drilling platforms of their masters. Hagen’s spear becomes the club which he uses to enforce order and bludgeon Siegfried to death – the effect is the same even if the weapon’s point (Spitze) is not as sharp as specified. Death is meted out in particularly brutal fashion in this production – nothing is rose-tinted in our messy modern era either in the East or the West, and consequently this staging presents that griminess. Oil is highly flammable, and this, of course, is convenient for the multiple fire effects needed in any Ring – less so a controlled ‘magic’ fire set by Wotan than the dynamite blaze indiscriminately lit by Loge’s pyromania from liquid explosives prepared by Brünnhilde in Act II of Walküre. During the Magic Fire sequence in Walküre, the audience’s recollections of more recent history from their own lifetimes, and its parallel to the earlier 20th-century destruction shown onstage, are further enhanced by background silent films of the Nazi invasion of Baku in an attempt to possess the ‘gold’ beneath that ground. (This is but one of multiple references to the abuses of mankind and nature during the more recent Nazi era at telling junctures throughout this production, as especially well documented in Tash Siddiqui’s 2014 review, already cited.) The wood of Hunding’s hut and the tree that grows within it may not be literally shown, but, again, in keeping with man’s increasing perversion of nature, trees are now represented by the wood of workers’ sheds and oil-drilling structures.

Finally, Wotan’s spear of authority and Freia’s life-giving apples are not missing; instead, they are incorporated in the very anatomies of their characters: the phallus of Wotan is the manifestation of his potency as expressed by his incessant sexual activity, and the breasts of a nubile Freia amplified by her costuming. (In this regard, Wotan’s initial ‘entrance’ into the drama in Rheingold is truly memorable in that he is engaged at the time in ‘entering’ both Fricka and Freia on a motel bed.) The music accompanying such symbols, if anything, gains in power since it is now freed to underline the essence of these characters and not just the objects more vaguely tied to their natures.

3. Allusions to the Culture of our Times and Homage to Rings of the Past 

An additional important way the production team creates resonances uniquely meaningful to modern audiences is to provide images that trigger recollections of relevant popular culture, and, for the experienced Wagnerian (such as one finds generally in Bayreuth), images that recall and pay homage to past Ring productions of note. We call out several of these, first, with reference to popular non-Wagnerian art. The Norns are portrayed as truly Macbeth-like ‘weird sisters’, and their colourful, unusual costuming marks them as ‘others’, potentially Sinti and Roma, and if seen as members of that ethnic group, then it conjures up recollections of the xenophobia of Germany during National Socialism and the persecution of these people at that time. Seen this way, these Norns not only foretell the future, they are like ghosts that haunt the memory of contemporary Europe in that they represent the atrocities of the recent past. While Siegmund makes honest, passionate overtures toward Sieglinde in the recognition scene that closes Act I of Walküre, a film projected behind them shows the womanising oil baron, Wotan, ‘phoning in’ his affections to his mistress, Erda, as she unwraps his gift to her of a party dress. It is impossible for an American not to see this as a reference to former President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the little blue dress so much in the US news two decades ago. Irreverent, perhaps, but it is a part of history and it does fit with the characterisation of Wotan in this production. During the interlude of the Rhine Journey between the Siegfried–Brünnhilde duet of the Prologue and the first act proper of Götterdämmerung, Siegfried assumes the foetal position – it is the birth of the new hero into a new world, but it is also the posture of a deeply troubled and immature man. It can be seen as a symbol of the ennui-rampant depression of the ‘lost generation’, a term coined by Ernest Hemingway to portray the generation that came of age during the Great War, or to reflect the lost children of our own more recent time of economic recession. Finally, the prominent staircase leading up into the darkness seen at the conclusion of Act II of Götterdämmerung, and again at the end of that opera, is a reference to the Odessa Steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic silent film of the 1905 Russian sailors’ revolt, Battleship Potemkin.

 

 

As in that film’s climactic Odessa Steps sequence, all order is broken once this moment is past; Brünnhilde’s fury at her betrayal unleashes the final cataclysm in much the same way that the charge of the Cossack imperial guard at the crowd on the steps ignites the general rebellion of the Russian people. In all cases, new associations that are uniquely powerful for modern audiences, and all in the service of making the eternal Ring myth palpably real once again.

With respect to allusion to admired Rings of the past, we briefly note some examples. We have already discussed earlier how the revolving sets of the Castorf production, especially in the latter stages of the cycle, create the same impression of parallel universes so remarkable in the immediately prior Ring at Bayreuth staged by Tankred Dorst. Likewise, reminiscences of the swinging clock pendulum behind Wotan during his Act II monologue in Walküre, in the iconic centenary production at Bayreuth in 1976 directed by Chéreau, are evoked by the incessant movement of the oil drill machinery at the same moment in the Castorf production. Keith Warner is also a director much admired by this production team, and he underscores the conflicted, overtly sexual tension in Wotan’s relationship with Brünnhilde with the father’s passionate final kiss of the daughter, and her consequent recoil in confusion, in Act III of Walküre in his Covent Garden production of the Ring, first seen in 2007. In the Castorf production, the drunken Wotan engages in the same behaviour. Finally, Harry Kupfer‘s trademark set in his Bayreuth Ring of the early 1990s was an evocative, vast ‘highway of history’ or endless road stretching out into the far back-reaches of the stage. In Castorf’s production, this is mirrored in his Route 66 backdrop for Rheingold and by the railroad tracks stretching out into the unknown in the second and last acts of Walküre. The bond between this band of brother directors is thus acknowledged and celebrated.

4. One Final Thought 

We have already established that the Castorf Ring is an inherently musical achievement in the way that the drama internalises the music. To recap in brief, the leitmotif system is mirrored in the fluidity of the stage imagery and the sound of the piece is integrated, often in an ironic but always systematically purposeful manner, with how it is acted and seen. Even so, the charge has been levelled against this production in some quarters that it does not respect the score. It is true that the production is not Wagner hagiography – like all post-structuralist work it does not accept any ur-explanations, either Wagnerian or otherwise, and instead thrives on presenting alternatives. It may not tie word and sound and image together along traditionally accepted lines, but, as we have attempted to show, this does not mean that these elements are not in relationship to each other. The criticism sometimes heard that the Castorf staging ‘fights’ the music is rooted in the belief that the author–composer is the authority on what any given moment in the work ‘means’, and, consequently, that the traditionally accepted associations, originating from the time of the author, are the only ones possible. This critical stance accepts no alternatives other than relatively cosmetic variances that do no violence to the traditionally accepted meanings. However, if we accept that Wagner was a forerunner of Derrida, and therefore that he would have acknowledged intentional fallacy and appreciated Barthes’ principle that ‘the author is dead’, then the potentials, even the requirement, for a post-dramatic approach to the Ring become apparent. If Wagner could not have been the authority on what his work meant, and given that he realised that all myth had to be recreated for and by each new audience member in the context of their unique time and place, then how could a theatrical tradition which honours those principles be unmusical? It could only be so if it divorced Wagner’s score from his text, but the Castorf production in Bayreuth does not diverge in the slightest from the published score or the text. Was it not Wagner who set these words to that music? If so, then was perhaps Wagner unmusical? One sees the impossible dilemma resulting from the natural extension of this logic. Castorf takes the work exactly as it was bequeathed to us by Wagner, and he then presents the audience with possible alternatives for what it might mean to them given their own time and place in history. Nothing could honour both us and the legacy of Richard Wagner more.