subscribeThe Ring Festival Los Angeles April 15 -June 30, 2010
by Nancy Cantwell
For ten weeks this spring more than 115 cultural partners and Institutions have gathered round the Los Angeles Opera’a first complete Ring Cycle and mounted in support an amazing array of events, symposia, art exhibitions, lectures, theatrical performances and film presentation. This is a great time to experience the depth, breath and enthusiasm of this city’s artistic community. Not only are all committed to the cooperative ideal of festival, but they are wholeheartedly embracing the labyrinth of material that The Ring poses for critical study: Political Allegory, Epic mythological archetypes, philosophical inquiry ranging from classical Greek to contemporary French, in depth Psychological debate and most of all the musical explorations into influences preceding Wagner and those on whose Wagner’s musical genius left its indelible mark.
Two such exemplary venues I was privileged to attend were the Prussian Blues program staged at Jacaranda and the Myth, Wagner and the Human Brain, lecture featuring Antonio Damasio, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola, hosted at REDCAT. While Prussian Blues tackled, through the music of Hindemith, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler, histories including Hitler’s Entartete Kunst (degenerate art), the origins Wagner’s anti-semetic predisposition and the emergence, after the 18th century era of Enlightenment, of “Romanticism” embedded with “hero seeking authenticity”*, Myth, Wagner and the Human Brain concentrated on the story behind the Ring, examining the nature of Myth, memory and sentience.
The concept behind Jacaranda’s Prussian Blues was to explore the musical and historical context of the Wagnerian experience. The first selection, Paul Hindemith’s (1895-1963) Septet for Wind (1948) was a backwards look at the composer’s struggles to find an artist home in the Third Reich and the aftermath of “the grim consequences of a re-imagined Twilight of the Gods, a final conflagration conceived by the biggest German ego to follow Richard Wagner.”* Second on the bill was a selection of Franz Schubert (1797-1828) songs, a Wagnerian prelude that explored the Romantic Zeitgeist and it’s contribution “to creating the language of German music drama.”* After intermission Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) own Siegfried Idle (1870) was performed and gave cause to examine the personal and tumultuous life Wagner shared with the then Cosima von Bulow. Well known for her Anti-Semetic leanings Cosima’s views on “racial purity” was said to influence Adolph Hitler who conscripted Wagner’s music in service of the ideals National Socialist Germany. Coming full circle, the final performance of the evening was Gustav Mahler’s (1860-1911) Adagio from Symphony No. 10 (arr. Hans Stadlmair 1911/1970). Mahler had adopted Wagner’s love of Carl Maria von Weber as his own, completing Weber’s unfinished opera The Three Pintos whose premiere established Mahler as both a critical and financial success. And not unlike Wager he shared a profound, but far more tortured relationship with the femme fatale Alma Schindler who was twenty-three, pregnant, and two decades younger than Mahler when they married in 1902.
There is quite a difference between hearing certain pieces in concert settings and experiencing them in environments devoted to other worldly concerns. Jacaranda resides at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica where the acoustics allow the music to ascend. Certainly there were no religious intentions behind in the programming of Prussian Blues, but listening to the Schubert performed by an all male choir with accompaniment, and sitting in the balcony, where the voices scaled perfectly, I was taken back to the St. Augustin Church in Vienna, hearing Anton Bruckner’s Grosse Messe in F-Moll, to the Eglise Saint Germain des Pres hearing Charles Gound’s Messe Solennelle en l’honneur de Sainte-Cecile and to the Eglise de La Madeline hearing Puccini’s Messa de Gloria. Divine.
Across town at REDCAT where the atmosphere couldn’t be more secular Wagner was getting the thrice over. Antonio Damasio from USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute acted as an emcee of sorts and started the discussions by setting the ground work with his understanding of what myths are and how they behave in the culture. His ability to distill and relate the basic precepts was professorial and put me in a mood to learn. He began by quoting Paul Ricouer, whose anthropological inquiries and philosophies, lead Ricouer to conclude “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.” Wagnerian indeed. To which Mr. Damasio added a few more simple tenets such as “[myths] are about Beings, Events and have no verification, substantiation nor proof” or “[myths] are Brain ingredients” and “[myths] are autobiographical, personal histories.” These prompted our gray matter to commence synapsing and acted as guides for the “Pictorial” and “Theatrical” contributors to follow.
Three Women
Bill Viola, representing the Pictorial, was next at the microphone and seemed a bit uncomfortable at the table. Adding to the basics concepts of Mr. Damasio, Viola spoke of “root systems”, “events outside of time” and taking up the technical baton (clearly a comfort zone), “[myths] function like a computer’s operating system – below the horizon, as infrastructure.” Another metaphor Viola explored was that of myth functioning as an intake form; a tablet where life’s primary informations are stored. He advanced his thought process further by stating that within the context of form vs content – the last century’s art being preoccupied with form, his hope for the 21st century was to lead us to a new content driven humanism. A welcome postulate.
By now the audience was pretty pumped for some substantive Wagnerian insight, and although Peter Sellars’ delivery was hyper-emotional and divaesque, he did eventually wipe his tears and bear down on the subject at hand. Bottomline, the story line of Der Ring Des Nibelungen is a cure for Optimism, where, in worlds of conflagration, transcendence equivocates to inaction. Characters, charged with great questions to answer and dauntless tasks preform, dramatically fail, unable to bridge the gap between their beliefs and actions. Gods and man alike require superior talents, impeccable moral fortitude, pure ambitions and heroic determination to police, not just world order, but inner rectitude. And while, the dialog and plot lines of the Ring are infused with character flaws, greed, avarice and delusions that ultimately undermine Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” the music that Wagner creates is seminal, valorous, and the consummate force that infuses the Ring with its preternatural power.
Still with Mr. Sellars, but now returning to myth and memory. If myths are a repository for explanations of origination, good and evil, power, governance catastrophe, love, war and death, and as each new generation experiences new encounters with these old informations, they in turn re-inhabit the collective memory pool to create a their own future. Wagner’s generous use of leitmotif throughout the Ring is a powerful memory tenant, a musical manifestation of each occupant. Each leitmotif is replayed, woven in and out of every opera, expanded upon over and over. Every leitmotif becomes its own language that builds and sustains the collective mythologies of the Ring.
When the discussion opened to the floor, Mr. Damasio seized the chance to comment on the science of how the brain actually functions with memory’s recall. He states that memories are repeated constructions, images are rebuilt and used to re-connect within the current syntax. Memories can degrade and/or the brain can introduce novelty into the process thus the memory can be re-modeled. The brain can make real, that which has not occurred; a persistent impediment for establishing the veracity of forensic testimony.
For a discourse on Wagner, the evening was oddly bereft of music. However the finale, Bill Viola’s Three Women, supplied visuals worthy of the Wagner mantle. An exquisite film, Three Women is a meditation on the states of being, unborn (inert), living, the dead or infinite. Viola has been collecting video cameras since 1970 and one of his prized possessions is an early B&W surveillance camera that creates a barely recognizable image somewhat akin to listening to a scratched up 78. Three Women juxtaposes this technology, with which Viola identifies preconsciousness, with the hyper-real quality of HD. Soundless and moving three women, representing the three stages of life slowly come into view. As they materialize they cross over emerging through a curtain of water, become colorized, highly defined and “born” only to return from where they came. For this attendee, the Three Women was an fitting conclusion to this mosaic of an evening. It’s investigation of origin, archetypes, the prolonged, deliberate tempo and grand scale touched on many a Wagnerian moment.
*Patrick Scott, Artistic Director, Jacaranda – Program notes for Prussian Blues
