From Bayreuth to Salzburg

by HERBERT KUBLY

1

LIKE the Minnesingers of medieval Europe my companion, an amiable English barrister named Ransom, and I had been hitting the musical trail — hitting it hard and handsomely in his Humber Hawk, named Wolfgang to honor the composer we both like best. Our pursuit had taken us over 9000 miles, fourteen borders, eleven mountain passes, and some forty musical performances. We had heard Strauss operas in Zurich, Mozart operas in Aix-en-Provence, where DDT was sprayed from planes to eliminate competing crickets, and Carmen, with time off for a real bullfight, at Arles. We had listened to Schubert and Brahms chamber music in Prados and, on a hot July night, to Bach‘s Christmas Oratorio sung by the Vienna Choir Boys at Ansbach. At Bregenz we had endured Johann Strauss‘s One Night in venice floated on a pavilion in Lake Constance; and in the Swiss town of Fribourg, three thousand male and female yodelers.

Let me say at once in defense of what may seem a maniacal pursuit by a pair of music-crazy fools that what we were doing was not extraordinary. We were meeting familiar faces at every stop, and by midsummer strangers were greeting us like old Friends. The most heavily traveled section of the Orpheus trail is a 250-mile stretch of Hitler’s Autobahn known as “the music run.” At opposite ends of this easy drive through green and rolling Bavaria lie Bayreuth and Salzburg, the Giants and the Dodgers of the music league. There is no reason at all for rivalry between the two, since their products are not competitive and neither can begin to meet its demand for tickets. But both are proud and jealous for glory, and the musical war between them is as intense as any fought out on Ebbets Field.

No medieval lute-plucking wanderers-on-foot were so weary and sore as we, rolling over the Autobahn toward Bayreuth on an August afternoon. Fortunately we didn‘t have to search for a room; one was already reserved in the small apartment of a pair of honeymooners who slept on cots in their kitchen during the festival. Within an hour we were in dinner jackets driving to the Festspielhaus over sweeping chestnut-shaded Siegfried Wagner Alice. This was the boulevard over which in old days the queenly Cosima Wagner, daughter of Franz Liszt, led the procession to the opera in her four-horse carriage, and over which Kaiser Wilhelm rode to the theater while Tchaikovsky watched from the window of a neighboring house.

Now riding in the car with us was our friend Friedelind Wagner, granddaughter of the mighty Cosima and daughter of Siegfried, the man for whom the boulevard was named. Her presence made us Familie Wagner. The police bowed and trooped alongside, escorting us through the droves of Zaungäste, the “fence guests” who were there to watch the parade and not to hear music.

For Wagners are held in awe if not quite in reverence by their fellow citizens. Streets are named for members of the family and for operas. The people know Bayreuth would have no distinction at all if Richard Wagner hadn‘t settled there in 1870 because his patron, King Ludwig, wanted him in Bavaria.

Many of the ticket holders were studying librettos and carrying inflated rubber cushions. No lady can do these things and be chic; but she can be elegant, and the fence guests had a good show. The lavish finery was not necessarily of the most recent mode. Old women blinking through cloisonné lorgnettes, their vintage lace covered with sequins, had a Victorian grandeur. A thick-necked industrialist was wearing a white tuxedo with white satin lapels, and his wife had a purple hair rinse and wore a gold brocaded gown. Celebrities included film and music stars and former Nazi big wheels still alive and out of jail. Royalty was meager — there were reports of visits by the young Duke of Kent and former Queen Marie José of Italy, but the real royalty at Bayreuth was named Wagner.

The afternoon sun still high in the heavens made the evening-clad crowd seem more than ever like a curious tribal gathering. As outside a church, there was no laughter and few raised voices. Germans were terribly conscious that they were about to embark on the four-day sacrament of Der Ring.

Wotan’s theme rang out over the plaza. The fanfare, played on a balcony of the theater by a brass octet, was the signal for the congregation to enter the temple. We entered through Wagner’s door into a funereal white marble foyer, where a bust of the composer peered out of a potted laurel jungle. The box upstairs was large, with more than twenty chairs. A Junoesque dowager in black satin was seating guests like an imperious dinner hostess. I recognized her from photographs. This was Winifred, the English-born daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, one of the enigmatic women of the twentieth century.

In the handsome photograph-filled brochure published by the Wagners we read: The festivals were called into being by Richard Wagner in 1876; after his death (in 1883) Cosima Wagner, the daughter of Franz Liszt, assumed control. In 1908 Siegfried Wagner succeeded his mother. In 1930 after her husband’s death it passed into the hands of Winifred Wagner and she in turn entrusted it to her two sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, in 1951.”

This does not quite tell the whole story.

Way back in 1921, at the home of a Munich piano manufacturer, Winifred Wagner met and was dazzled by the then unknown politician, Adolf Hitler. Through the twenties their friendship grew along with the politician’s influence. After the death of both her husband and her mother-in-law in 1930, Winifred Wagner opened the doors of Bayreuth to her friend. Conductor Arturo Toscanini left the festival and never returned.

Bayreuth became a cultural activity of Nazi princes, and Winifred was the reigning queen of Nazi society. Hitler was a guest at Wagner’s chateau, Wahnfried, and Winifred‘s four children called him “Uncle Wolf.”In July, 1934, while Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss was being assassinated in Vienna, Hitler was in Bayreuth listening to Das Rheingold from the Wagner family box.

One of Winifred’s children matured to disenchantment. Her older daughter, Friedelind, the only Wagner political nonconformist, left Europe before the war and under the sponsorship of Toscanini became an American citizen. In Germany &38220;Uncle Wolf” ordered Winifred’s older son, Wieland, deferred from military service so that the Wagner blood would not be lost to Germany. Winland‘s first child, a girl born in 1942, was Hitler’s godchild; his second, a boy, was called Wolf.

After the war the Bonn Government and the American Occupation Forces refused to return Bayreuth to Winifred. Instead they offered it in 1951 to her four children. Wieland and his brother Wolfgang had no money to build lavish naturalistic productions; so Wieland, a part-time painter who had studied the Greek drama, the theories of Freud and Jung, and the lighting principles of Gordon Craig, staged Grandfather’s operas with lighting effects on a bare stage. The immediate result was a whooping controversy with traditionalists.

The press was on Wieland’s side. When the sound and fury had subsided he was definitely Grandpa‘s boy. The New York Times said of Bayreuth, “Timelessness and spacelessness ... a stunning achievement.” The London Daily Express went all out: “Bayreuth has become the matchless untouchable opera house of the world.”

Though officially banished from the Bayreuth realm, Winifred Wagner retains her hold over the festival’s social protocol. She also keeps her family in turmoil. She does not like her son’s productions and she cannot forget that her daughter fled Germany and adopted the enemy during the war.

2

WE WAITED in silence more reverential than in any cathedral in Europe. I was apprehensive of what lay ahead. Perhaps I should say at once that I am not unreservedly Wagnerian in my musical tastes. My enthusiasm covers only the wondrously human Die Meistersinger the lyrical Tannhäuser, and parts of the passionate Tristan. I had never been able to sit comfortably through even one evening of the Ring.

Now Conductor Joseph Keilbreth raised his stick, the double basses struck their E-flat pedal note. The curtains parted and we were plunged into Wagner’s thirteen-hour apocalypse.

The stage was dark and beams of light came up to spot singers. By the use of ramps and platforms Wieland Wagner had turned the proscenium arch into a sort of monumental Cinemascope screen. Lighting tricks turned water into clouds and clouds into a steaming earth. We toured river beds, mountaintops, and subterranean channels.

Grandfather Wagner’s elaborate paraphernalia — the winged helmets and breastplates, the stuffed animals and birds — were nowhere to be seen. Giants in Boris Karloff make-up loped across the stage like close relations of the Peking man. Rhine Maidens were not tightly corseted dames in evening gowns and loops of pearls, but sleek sirens in strapless flesh-colored bathing suits.

What was obvious at once was that the music we were hearing was the most perfectly performed on the entire summer festival circuit. Also that the audience was the most deeply absorbed.

In Bayreuth there is only one opera a day, and performances have two one-hour intermissions. In 1900, Romain Rolland observed that during intermissions “French flirt, Germans drink beer, English read librettos.” Today nearly everyone eats in one of the three Wagner-owned restaurants. In the grand Festspielgäste a meal and wine with celebrities may cost well over five dollars; in the more modest cafeteria one can lunch for a dollar, but the crush is murder. We usually went to the Canteen, an outdoor establishment for students and festival artists, where we had superb Franconian Bratwurst and beer for under fifty cents. All restaurants sell glucose pellets to energize anyone bogging down midway in the evening.

In the outdoor promenade the babel of tongues included Italian, Dutch, Scandinavian, as much English as German, and surprisingly a great deal of French. Europe’s prettiest music critic, Nicole Hirsch of France Soir, explained why French pilgrims came to a shrine of German nationalism. “We are a very romantic people and we love romantic legends,” she said. “Do not forget — Tristan and Isolde was originally our story.”

When the electrified gas globes light up at ten or eleven o’clock — depending on the length of the opera — and the ovation has clapped itself out, it is time to go to the Eule or Owl. This dingy grotto of several rooms is the only restaurant or night club that remains open in an otherwise curfewed town. Like everything else in Bayreuth it is a Wagner shrine. Its walls are papered with Wagner pictures and mementos. Conversation is about music; and in the presence of so many Wagners, corporeal and spiritual, it is heresy to say anything not wildly flattering.

Anyone lucky enough to get in is happy to endure the Owl‘s numerous indignities. The service is abominable; the popular drink is a sweetish Moselle wine; the popular dish is raw chopped beef lubricated with raw eggs and garnished with raw onion. No doubt Sieglinde and Brunnhilde dined like this in their caves, but just watch a German blonde gulp this cannibal delicacy, and you will be permanently disenchanted.

The week moved ponderously on like an exhausting novena. As we progressed through Die Walkure and Siegfried into Götterdammerung, I forgot which day it was or what opera I was in. Physically exhausted, emotionally drained, we would swear we could bear no more, and still we could not stay away. The tensions were mounting and we were trapped, like all other members of the congregation, to await the climax.

At Göttcrdammerung it came, more violently than anyone expected. During the last intermission a storm rolled swiftly over the Czechoslovakian mountains on the eastern horizon. Lightning flashed in the night; nature was competing with the Wagner show inside. A curious nervous tension held the people outdoors watching the tempest rolling over the broad Bavarian plains. Not until the third trumpet fanfare were they drawn in.

As the act of demolition progressed inside, thunder shook the world outdoors. The funeral pyre lit up and a crash of hail blitzed the roof, so the music could hardly be heard. It continued through the immolation; and then, at the moment of the closing of the cycle, the storm stopped and the theme of tranquil nature purged of evil rose sweetly and gently from the orchestra as the curtain fell.

In my hauntings of the theaters of the world I have seldom had an experience to match it. Around me people were weeping. For an hour they stomped and shouted. There were twenty-one curtain calls.

After that I could not go with my companions to the Owl. Instead I walked the wild night, exhausting myself on the wet pavements of Niebelungen Strasse, Parsifal Strasse, Meistersinger Strasse, asking myself why they had wept, trying to understand the tears. Was it for the immolation in a bunker under the chancellory that they mourned? Was it their own death as gods? Was this the mystery of the rites of Bayreuth?

3

JAN SIBELIUS when he visited Bayreuth did not like the music, but he was enraptured by the landscape. Unfortunately if one goes to operas there is time only for small excursions in and around the town. We went to Wahnfried, where we played Wagner‘s piano, saw Franz von Lenbach’s lovely portrait of the young Cosima, and in the back yard visited Wagner’s grave, a plain marble slab raised under weeping willows like the Göttärdammerung pyre. Nearby are the graves of Wagner‘s two Newfoundland dogs, Russ and Maussi, and his parrot, Kochel.

Another day we saw the jewel-like rococo family theater of the Bayreuth margraves and lunched at their hermitage in a garden as enchanting as Klingsor’s in Parsifal. One day when there was no opera we took Nicole Hirsch and Friedclind Wagner on a roundabout of the Franconian countryside, past gabbling geese, oxen pulling hay, and tourist buses named Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, to Bamberg, one of the most captivating old towns in Germany, then through a series of pretty German Tudor villages to the gloomy gray castle of Coburg from which came Victoria’s Albert.

At the Festspielhaus more music followed the Ring. There was a turgid Flying Dutchman and a pious Parsifal for which the program notes included Wieland Wagner’s psychoanalysis of the characters (Parsifal had a mother complex, Klingsor a castration complex). Most memorable of all, both musically and visually, was Wieland Wagner’s Tannhäuser. This time the lights were bright, the costumes dazzling. The pictures on the stage were a stunning review of Italian art. The pilgrim’s chorus was a Fra Angelico, the Wartburg castle a Giotto, Elizabeth’s prayer an Annunciation by Botticelli.

If there had been nothing but Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, it would still have been the most dazzling reward of the summer’s pilgrimage.

But it was enough, perhaps too much. With relief we steered Wolfgang over the music run to Salzburg. The Autobahn, an important occupation thoroughfare, was marked in English signs with German below. We rolled through dark sun-dappled conifer forests in which the young Siegfried must have hunted. The rich farmlands and soft hills reminded me of Ohio. Fields of wheat and rye were golden ripe, and crops of hops on stakes, faced westward by the prevailing winds, looked like Helds of Jack‘s beanstalks.

We stopped at the Munich festival to hear, above all things, a performance of Die Meistersinger. Compared with Bayreuth’s perfection it left much to be desired, but it was Wagner‘s own antidote to Wagner, richly human and gaudy, and bawdy as a Breughel fair.

Then on through the Alps of Bavaria and Austria to Salzburg. As we approached the most beautiful little town in central Europe our spirits soared. It is easy to understand why. Salzburg is a euphoric town! If you’ve ever been there its ingratiating personality has taken root in jour soul and every return is a homecoming.

Laughter! A Ländler played in a restaurant called Till Eulenspiegel! Music that is a part of geography, along with the scenery and the architecture, the eating and drinking, the gorgeous girls smiling everywhere, the baroque air of playful venery and lechery that Mozart put into the Marriage of Figaro and Così fan Tutte.

For Salzburg is Mozart’s town, more than Bayreuth is Wagner’s. Wagner adopted Bayreuth in the last years of his life. Mozart was born in Salzburg and grew out of it. But where Wagner is a cult in Bayreuth, Mozart is business in Salzburg. In the Mozart industry everytlung is identified with the composer: even the famous marzipan balls arc called Mozart Kugel. In their prosperous devotion to their composer, most Salzburgers are not even aware that Mozart, aged twenty-four, repudiated his home town in protest against the meanness of its Archbishop Hieronymus, and never returned.

Our first opera was The Magic Flute, staged in the outdoor Felsenreilschule, or “rocky riding school,”an arena curved Out of a cliff in which horses were taught to dance for the amusement of seventeenth-century Archbishop Johann Ernst. Salzburg’s most elaborate productions are put on in the horse academy, and the Flute was as magical as any in the fantasy’s brilliant, history. Its star was t he designer, the famous Aust rian painter Oskar Kokoschka, who exploded the whole thing in a burst of turquoise, pink, violet, cobalt, orange, yellow, and brick red. The excitement of the decor stirred the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the singers to a shimmering brilliance, and the show soared like a rocket to glory.

There are few days in Salzburg without three or four festival events. We had tickets for eleven performances in seven days, and established our record on Sunday with an orchestral concert conducted by George Szell in the morning, the traditional Max Reinhardt production of Jedermann in the afternoon, and in the evening a disarmingly racy Seraglio. The laughter during this gay lark was so loud and continuous that we could hardly hear the singers.

Performances in Salzburg begin at seven-thirty. You snack lightly either before you go or on Wurstli in the foyer during intervals. After the music you wine and dine yourself properly in one of the town‘s several fine restaurants. Our favorite was the White Cross with its exotic Yugoslav menu, but others more popular are St. Peter‘s Keller, Stieglkeller, and the Powandra. For spectacular dining and dancing to a famous band, Salzburg has the Cafe Wintler, the most expensive night club in Austria. It overlooks the town from the Monchsberg, and you ride to it in a funicular. On sunny days the most rewarding lunching place is on the ramparts of the Hohensalzburg fortress, where the dark beer and the view of the Salzkammergut mountains are remarkable even if the food is not.

The fortress is also where you go to watch natives dance Tyrolean style. Here one evening I negotiated a deal with a husky farmer named Rudi, wherein he would teach me the men’s vigorous Schuhplattler if I would teach bis wife a tango, the mastering of which was her heart’s desire. After being pummeled about by Rudi and his Lederhosened pals, I did what I could with the dirndled Mrs. Rudi and apparently she was pleased. As we swooped over the floor she shouted happily to her husband, “Guck mal, Rudi! Ich tanze modern!”

On days when we were not bound by our packet of tickets to some music, wo swam in the cold waters of the glittering little Salzkammergut lakes at Bad Ischl, St. Gilgen (Mozart‘s mother’s home town), and St. Wolfgang, where we lunched at the famous White Horse Inn on Bauernschmaus, an assortment of farmer sausages and smoked meats, and Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with butter cream filling and the inevitable Schlay of whipped cream.

The difference between Bayreuth and Salzburg is the difference between Germans and Austrians; the difference between church and carnival; the difference, indeed, between the music of Wagner, who wrote of gods, and the music of Mozart, who wrote of men. In Bayreuth, Wagner, worrying about his fame, built his own memorial. The Salzburg festival, disorderly and sparkling as a spring, bubbled into existence by itself. Mozart, lost in an unmarked grave, left only his memorial of music.