Watched Stephen Fry's documentary "Wagner and Me" on Sky+ this Sunday morning (while ironing...it's all go here!).
www.wagnerandme.com
Stephen Fry is a lifelong Wagner lover, and I can totally sympathise. I was that man myself through my teens and early twenties. Watching Stephen in the Holy of Holies at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre suddenly brought it all back. Somehow it's more than music - there's a deep wonder and a longing to be part of something that seems so magnificent. In one scene, Stephen joins in playing the Tristan chord on Wagner's own piano, and is clearly beside himself with joy (particularly when a real musician plays him the last few bars of the
liebestod and Stephen himself tries to play the final note).
The film has two sides.
Firstly, and joyously, it is a diary of Stephen experiencing a lifelong dream come true - and his awestruck enthusiasm is infectious. All my old Wagner days came rushing back to me, I can tell you. Right now I can imagine nothing more perfect than
Der Ring Des Nibelungen at Bayreuth. There's a six year waiting list for tickets, apparently, and I bet they're priced just a smidgen out of my reach.
Secondly, and the film absolutely does not shy away from this, it looks at the tainted image of Wagner and his works. Here the film becomes uncomfortable, and so does Mr. Fry. There's a potted biography of Wagner, including references to his ridiculous anti-semitic writings. Of course, there's no avoiding it - the Nazis loved Wagner, most especially Hitler. There are ironies everywhere, and it is difficult to reconcile the wonderful music with the history surrounding it.
We've always had this trouble with Wagner. Maybe we can separate the art from the artist (and can we blame Wagner, or even the music, for the fact that nasty people liked it years after it was written?). But there's more to it than that. In Nuremberg, Stephen spoke to a scholar who theorised that the Nazi Nuremberg rallies were inspired directly by scenes from
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg itself. Again, you can't blame Wagner for that, but it's all a bit uncomfortable. At one memorable point, Stephen sits on the steps leading to the podium from which Hitler surveyed his rallying storm-troopers - but, unlike the tourists in the background of the shot, he cannot bring himself to stand on that podium himself. Back at the Bayreuth Festival Theater, we see the window where Hitler famously waved to the crowd while they (all of them) returned the
Heil Hitler salute.
Ultimately, Stephen visits a lady who survived Auschwitz by playing cello in the prison orchestra. She recounts a small part of the horrors and how the whims of the Nazis saved her while others were brutally destroyed. She assured us that Wagner was
not played at Auschwitz, but, it turns out, she doesn't like Wagner's music in any case. When Stephen asks if she thinks he is wrong to go to Bayreuth, she suggests he should stay at home and listen to records. She clearly does not approve of telling people what they should and should not do - but there was a distinct impression that there was something distasteful about Bayreuth for her.
So, in the end, what does Stephen do?
He does what I would do. He puts on his dinner jacket, grasps his gold-dust festival ticket in his hand, and heads into the theatre for the chance of a lifetime, and no doubt some simply astonishing music. But he looks sheepish and quite uncomfortable as he mounts the steps to the theatre.
Sometimes we can't do anything about our heroes. I spent my youth desperately loving Wagner's music, and trying very hard to excuse the man himself and the more modern associations with Nazism. The fact is though, and we can see Stephen trying his hardest to be completely open minded, if you/I/he love the music, it is oh so tempting to try and see round the problems. But maybe we don't need to like Wagner the man. In fact, racist or not, he seems for all the world to have been a pretty loathsome character. He was a man totally obsessed with his own importance (maybe that's a common thing in showbiz!). His music is simply transcendent (in my opinion), but even in the art we see glimpses of the selfish git - his star cross'd lovers in
Tristan und Isolde are not separated by warring, bigoted elders, like Shakespeare's love-struck kids, but are kept apart by the fact that Isolde is already married to a jolly nice man who happens to be the king. In fact, the whole thing ends up sounding like wish-fulfilment for Wagner who was, at the time, lusting after the wife of the man who bankrolled Wagner's lifestyle and artistic productions. If you spend too much time looking at the problems and controversy around the man and the use of his music (and indeed the use that was made of the Bayreuth Festival in the Nazi years), it's all too easy to just give up on it all as a bad deal.
After finishing the ironing, my Sunday then moved on to another chapter of delights, and I spent an hour in Tesco doing the family weekly shopping. I couldn't get Wagner out of my head, though - after all these years. So, sheepishly, but not in a dinner jacket, I dialled up highlights of
Tristan... on Spotify and listened my way round the aisles.
I got to
"...Unbewußst, höchste Lust" in the toiletries aisle at the end.
Big mistake.
It's no joke blubbing in Tesco.
