¹ This is an expanded version of a paper first presented at a conference on ‘Wagner and Cultural Practice’ held at Cornell University in April 1996. My thanks to Joe Compton, Ehren Fordyce, Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Michael P. Steinberg, Marc A. Weiner and Tamsen Wolff for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.Google Scholar

² See ‘Zensur der Inszenierungen’, in Abendblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung, vol. 73, no. 140 (21 02 1929).Google ScholarThe anecdote is recounted in Peusch, Vibeke's Opernregie/Regieoper: Avantgardistisches Musiktbeater in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, 1984), 24.Google ScholarProduction stills and several reviews of the Berlin production as well as articles concerning the storm of controversy that surrounded it can be found in Curjel, Hans, Experiment Krolloper: 1927–1931 (Munich, 1975), plates 47–52 as well as pp. 252–9 and 380–2.Google ScholarAdditional stills can be found in Das Theater des deutschen Regisseurs Jiirgen Fehling, ed. Ahrens, Gerhard (Berlin, 1985), 130–3.Google Scholar

³ On Klemperer's and Fehling's work at the Kroll Opera, see Curjel; Ashman, Mike, ‘Producing Wagner’, in Wagner in Performance, ed. Millington, Barry and Spencer, Stewart (New Haven, 1992), 29–47;Google ScholarCarnegy, Patrick, ‘Designing Wagner: Deeds of Music Made Visible?’ in Wagner in Performance, ed. Millington, and Spencer, , 48–74.Google Scholar For a general account of Fehling's stage productions in the context of theatrical innovations during the Weimar Republic, see Willett, John, Theatre of the Weimar Republic (New York, 1988), especially 156–7;Google Scholar a much more detailed account is offered in Ahrens, Das Theater des deutschen Regisseurs Jürgen Fehling.

⁴ An astonishing latter-day example of the outrage produced by Klemperer's and Fehling's production (and Ch´ereau's as well) is Nagler, A. M.'s Misdirection: Opera Production in the Twentieth Century, trans. Sahlin, Johanna (Hamden, CT, 1981).Google Scholar Nagler's vitriolic book contains a chapter excoriating the Kroll production as well as a predictable slag of Chéreau's ‘ridiculous’ Ring. For a detailed, lively (and much more sympathetic) discussion of Chéreau's production, see Nattiez, Jean-Jacques's Tétralogies: Wagner, Boulez Chéreau (Paris, 1983).Google ScholarAn abbreviated version of Nattiez's argument appeared in English translation as ‘Chéreau's Treachery’ in October, 14 (Fall 1980), 71–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also Foucault, Michel's ‘Nineteenth Century Imaginations’, a laudatio to Chéreau's production, in Semiotext(e): The German Issue, 4/2 (1982), 182–90.Google Scholar

⁵ We should not overlook the historical irony at stake here, since the sets at the work's première in Dresden in 1843 were borrowed from several other productions. As Walter Panofsky points out, Daland's house rather resembled a chalet since it was borrowed from Rossini's William Tell, the reefs had already appeared in Weber's Oberon, and the ocean waves and the tossing ship were familiar from a successful pirate ballet. See Panofsky, Walter, Protest in der Oper: Dasprovokative Musiktheater der zwanziger Jahre (Munich, 1966), 15.Google Scholar

⁶ On Meyerhold's production, see his ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in Meyerhold on Theatre, trans, and ed. Braun, Edward (London, 1969), 80–98.Google Scholar

⁷ For a lucid and sensitive discussion of the analogies between the problematics of textual and theatrical interpretation, see Rabkin, Gerald, ‘The Play of Misreading: Text/Theatre/Deconstruction’, Performing Arts Journal, 7/1 (1983), 44–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ I date the origins of the conflict in its Wagnerian incarnation to 1903, when Gustav Mahler hired Alfred Roller to design Tristan at the Vienna Hofoper. On this production, see Roth, Marc, ‘Staging “The Master's” Works: Wagner, Appia, and Theatrical Abuse’, Theatre Research International, 5 (1980), 138–57, especially 149–50; Ashman, ‘Producing Wagner’, 35; Carnegy; ‘Designing Wagner’, 57–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ On the history of stagings at Bayreuth, see Mack, Dietrich, Der Bayreutber Inszenierungsstil 1876–1976 (Munich, 1976);Google Scholaralso Bauer, Oswald Georg, Richard Wagner: The Stage Designs and Productions from the Premieres to the Present (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

¹⁰ In addition to the well-known translations of Appia's La Musique et la mise en scène and L'œeuvre d'art vivant published by the University of Miami Press in the early 1960s, there is also a lesser-known, excellent English translation of Appia's 1895 pamphlet La Mise en scene du drame wagnérien: see Staging Wagnerian Drama, trans. Loeffler, Peter (Basel, 1982).Google ScholarCosima's rejection of Appia's ideas is detailed in a letter to Count Hermann Keyserling of 11 April 1903. See Mack, Dietrich, ed., Cosima Wagner: Das zweite Leben—Brieje und Aufzeichnungen 1883–1930 (Munich, 1980), 629–32.Google ScholarFor an account of Appia's relationship to Wagner, see Roth, ‘Staging “The Master's” Works’; Skelton, Geoffrey, Wagner at Bayreuth: Experiment and Tradition (London, 1966), especially 129–36;Google Scholarand Volbach, Walther R., Adolphe Appia: Prophet of the Modern Theatre (Middletown, 1968), especially 70–2.Google Scholar

¹¹ The literalist position is most prominently articulated by Hans Pfitzner, the conservative nationalist German composer who spelled out the case for a programmatic literalism in his infamous tract Werk und Wiedergabe, first published in 1929, the very year of Klemperer's and Fehling's controversial production. See Werk und Wiedergabe, vol. 3 of Pfitzner's Cesammelte Schriften (Augsburg, 1929).Google ScholarSee also his ‘Der Schutz des künsderischen Schaffens’ (1927), in Reden, Schriften, Briefe (Berlin, 1955), 120–7.Google ScholarFor a brief and enthusiastic account of Pfitzner's position as it relates to the staging of operas, see Osthoff, Wolfgang, ‘Werk und Wiedergabe als aktuelles Problem’, in Werk und Wiedergabe: Musiktheater exemplarisch interpretiert, ed. Wiesmann, Sigrid (Bayreuth, 1981), 13–44.Google Scholar

¹² The critical position is most prominendy articulated by Wieland Wagner in a number of articles and interviews, including ‘Denkmalschutz für Wagner?’ (1958) and ‘Überlieferung und Neugestaltung’ (1951), both in Bauer, Oswald Georg, ed., Wieland Wagner: Sein Denken (Munich, 1991).Google ScholarBauer's volume contains many essays and interviews explicating Wieland Wagner's programme of innovation; it accompanied the 1991 exhibit ‘Denkmalschutz fur Wagner’ at the Bayreuth Festival. ‘Überlieferung und Neugestaltung’ has been translated into English as ‘Tradition and Innovation’; it appears in DiGaetani, John Louis, ed., Penetrating Wagner's ‘Ring’: An Anthology (1978; rpt. New York, 1983), 389–92.Google Scholar

¹³ The quote appears in Hanslick, Eduard, Die moderne Oper, 3: Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1885), 324.Google ScholarFor a detailed study of Wagner as stage director, see Srocke, Martina, Richard Wagner als Regisseur, Berliner Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, 35 (Munich, 1988);Google Scholarfor a contemporary account of Wagner's work as a stage director, see Porges, Heinrich, Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (Chemnitz and Leipzig, 1881–1896),Google Scholaras well as the somewhat more sober account of Wagner in rehearsals offered in diary, Richard Fricke's, 1876: Richard Wagner auf der Probe (Stuttgart, 1983)Google Scholartranslated into English as Bayreuth in 1876’, in Wagner, 11 (1990), 93–109 and 134–50; and Wagner, 12 (1991), 25–44.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Over the past century, Hanslick's claim has been reiterated by a variety of thinkers. Later on, I will discuss a very similar argument proposed by Wieland Wagner in an interview that followed upon his 1963 production of Die Meistersinger in Berlin. In his cultural history of modernity, Egon Friedell claims that ‘Wagner is always first and foremost a stage director’. See his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, 3 vols. (Munich, 1931), III, 370.Google ScholarTranslated as A Cultural History of the Modem Age: The Crisis of the European Soul From the Black Death to the World War, trans. Atkinson, Charles Francis, 3 vols. (1933; rpt. New York, 1954), III, 309; translation slighdy modified.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For a brief account of the rise of the modern theatre director, see Chapter 1 of Bradby, David and Williams, David, Directors' Theatre (London, 1988), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ See, for example, Green, Amy S., The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics (Cambridge, 1994), 146;Google ScholarBradby and Williams, Directors' Theatre, 224; Spotts, Frederic, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, 1994), 55 and 62; Vibeke Peusch, Opernregie/Regieoper (see n. 2), 22.Google Scholar

¹⁷ See Wagner, Richard, ‘Das Buhnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882’, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1888), X, 21;Google Scholartranslated as ‘The Stage Consecration Festival in Bayreuth in 1882’, in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. Ellis, William Ashton (1892–9; rpt. New York, 1966), VI, 310–12. Hereafter, references to these editions will be abbreviated GSD and PW respectively. For a wonderfully sarcastic account of the thrifty practice, common throughout Europe, of dressing the characters in one opera in the costumes of another, see Wagner's ‘“Le Freischütz”: Bericht nach Deutschland’, letter of 20 June 1841, GSD I 220–40; PW VII, 183–204.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Martina Srocke argues that Wagner's ‘Entwurf zur Organisation eines deutschen Nationaltheaters für das Königreich Sachsen’ of 1848 represents his first programmatic essay on theatre reform. See Srocke, Wagner als Regisseur (n. 13), 7.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See ‘Mittheilung’, GSD IV, 292.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Panofsky, Protest (see n. 5), 17. O n the duke's role in radicalising theatre, see Braun, Edward, ‘The Meiningen Theatre’, in The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski (London, 1982), 11–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ This is not to say that Wagner was an unequivocal revolutionary in the theatre. As Thomas Mann has famously argued, Wagner's theatrical instincts were fundamentally conservative; his works, however, and the theories that accompanied them, had radical implications. See Thomas Mann, ‘Versuch über das Theater’ (1908). Many of the relevant sections of the essay have been excerpted in English translation in ‘From “An Essay on the Theatre” ’, in Mann, Thomas, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Blunden, Allan (Chicago, 1985), 25–36.Google Scholar

²² Wieland Wagner makes a very similar claim in ‘Denkmalschutz für Wagner?’: ‘Cosima Wagner's ban on Appia's book made Bayreuth into an outpost for an artistic direction that had long since died and thus turned Wagner's original and revolutionary mission into its opposite'.Google ScholarSee Wagner, Wieland, ‘Denkmalschutz fur Wagner?’ in Wieland Wagner: Sein Denken, ed. Bauer, , 39.Google Scholar

²³ Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive—indeed, I would argue that some of the most provocative stagings are best described as critical literal readings, that is, stagings scrupulously attentive to the nuance and exigencies of the text.Google Scholar

²⁴ This does not hold true just for productions of Wagner at the Met. In the rare instance when a production at the Met does venture an unusual interpretation, it has tended to suffer. For example, in her modest 1992 production of Lucia di Lammermoor, Francesca Zambella had the audacity to take the gender politics in the piece quite seriously. In Zambella's reading, Lucia's madness did not merely result from a (familiar, expected) romantic sense of fidelity to her beloved, but derived from (and at the same time enacted) the extraordinary and sustained social constriction to which she had been subjected so relendessly. Not surprisingly, Zambella was hooted off the stage and excoriated in the press.Google Scholar

²⁵ Here, Wieland Wagner is clearly arguing from a European perspective (the quotation is taken from an interview he gave shortly after preparing a new production of Die Meistersinger in Berlin). As I have indicated above, opera houses in the U.S. have not come to accept the notion of innovation in Mozart or Beethoven any more than they have in Wagner. See in this regard the vehement attacks on Peter Sellars's production of the Mozart—da Ponte operas, including, for example, Henahan, Donal, ‘A Tale of Two Operas, or When Not to Interfere’, The New York Times, 25 10 1987, 27;Google ScholarLittlejohn, David, ‘What Peter Sellars Did to Mozart’, in The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera (Berkeley, 1992), 130–55.Google ScholarThe Wieland Wagner interview from the Berliner Abend was published in February 1963 in the Opern-Journal der Deutschen Oper Berlin; it is reprinted in Bauer, , ed., Wieland Wagner, 133–4, here 133.Google Scholar

²⁶ The extent to which Wieland Wagner is properly understood as the embodiment of a radical break with the past is coming under increasing scrutiny. In a recent paper on his stagings of Die Meistersinger, Nike Wagner has suggestively alerted us to the continuities between his early stage practice and the stage aesthetics of the National Socialists. (‘’Uns bliebe gleich die abendländ'sche Kunst”: Entsorgungsanlage Neubayreuth’, unpublished manuscript.)Google Scholar

²⁷ Here, I echo arguments presented at greater length in my Introduction to Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford, 1993), 1–18, here 2–3.Google Scholar

²⁸ The interview was aired in two parts as an intermission feature during the Metropolitan/Texaco Radio Network broadcasts of Carmen on 23 March 1996 (part one) and Andrea Chénier on 13 April 1996 (part two). Terrence McNally was the (astonishingly fawning) interviewer; the feature was produced by Michael Bronson. Quotations are taken from an unpublished transcript generously provided by the producer.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ironically, Levine's polemic against directoral innovation—a thinly veiled attack on the work of Peter Sellars—bears remarkable affinities to Wagner's critique of Meyerbeer. While it is tempting to explore the implications of this irony, that would take me too far afield. My thanks to Marc A. Weiner for bringing the point to my attention.Google Scholar

³⁰ The reference, of course, is to Lacan, Jacques, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ (lecture of 14 07 1949) in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1977), 1–7.Google Scholar

³¹ In the course of the interview, Levine suggests that the issue is familiarity: ‘If it's a performance of a work of art that I know very well, I always have a lot of trouble with that because I can't escape the fact that because the director has said, “Nothing's happening unless this person is screaming, running, jumping, doing cartwheels” —I—I feel it's a little bit as though the director was responding to over-familiarity’. Transcript, pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

³² There are, of course, some important exceptions. While, for a number of years, Donal Henahan used his position as opera critic for The New York Times as a staging ground for salvos fired at operatic innovators, a number of other critics, including Edward Said (in The Nation) and Leighton Kerner (in The Village Voice), have offered detailed, nuanced analyses of dramatic as well as musical matters on the operatic stage.Google Scholar

³³ GSD, IV, 291; PW, I, 273, trans, modified.Google Scholar

³⁴ There is an interesting analogy between the two positions outlined in Wagner's account here - the critic and the friend—and Wagner's sense of the identity of the virtuoso, who shares some qualities of each. For a suggestive discussion of Wagner's conception of the virtuoso, see Bernstein, Susan, ‘In Formel: Wagner und Liszt’, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ The following discussion is derived from—and developed in far greater detail in—my Reading Beckmesser Reading: Antisemitism and Aesthetic Practice in Die Meistersinger von Nümberg’, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 127–46.Google Scholar

³⁶ Rather than cite the verse translation published in the ENO/Royal Opera Opera Guide series (New York, 1983), I have chosen to cite a modern, literal, facing-page translation prepared for the Metropolitan Opera Guild. See Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Nümberg, trans. Webb, Susan (New York, 1992), 233.Google ScholarThe German text as it appears in the orchestra score - as opposed to the published version of 1862—is most readily available in Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Niimberg: Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Csampai, Attila and Holland, Dietmar (Reinbek, 1981), 130. Hereafter, references to these texts will be abbreviated ’ and ‘MS Eng’.Google Scholar

³⁷ Here is how Wagner describes Beckmesser's actions: ‘Beckmesser … hat schon wahrend des Einzuges, und dann fortwährend, eifrig das Blatt mit dem Gedicht herausgezogen, memoriert, genau zu lesen versucht und oft verzweiflungsvoll sich den Schweiß getrocknet’ (‘During the entrance and then continuously afterwards, Beckmesser has been zealously pulling out the paper with the poem, memorizing, attempting to read it exacdy, and often desperately drying his perspiration’) (MS Eng, 237, trans, modified; MS Ger, 131).Google Scholar

³⁸ MS Eng, 247; MS Get, 135.Google Scholar

³⁹ See, in this regard, Sachs's pronouncement on Beckmesser's failed performance: ‘Ich sag' euch Herrn, das Lied ist schön; nur ist's auf den ersten Blick zu ersehn, daß Freund Beckmesser es entstellt’ (‘I tell you gentlemen, the song is beautiful; it's only to be gathered from the first impression, that friend Beckmesser distorted it’) (MS Ger, 134, emphasis added; MS Eng, 245, trans, modified, emphasis added). Here is how Wagner describes the performance by the Beckmesser figure (still named Hanslich) in the second prose draft (1861): ‘E r trägt nun die zarten und feurigen Verse Konrads in einer durchaus entstellenden und lächerlich wirkenden Weise vor, sodaß, als die Meister zuerst über das Unzusammenhängende des Vortrags den Kopf schütteln, das Volk, anfangs verwundert, dann aber, als Hanslich mit immer mehr Affekt singt, in zunehmende Heiterkeit übergeht, und endlich mit lautem Unwillen und schallendem Gelächter den Sänger unterbricht’ (‘He performs Konrad's tender, passionate verses in a ridiculously distorted style. The Mastersingers shake their heads at the incoherence of the performance; the people are at first astonished, then, as Hanslich warms to his theme, their astonishment gives way to amusement, until finally they interrupt the performance, torn between pronounced indignation and shattering laughter’).Google ScholarThe three prose drafts appear in Wagner, Richard, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. von Wolzogen, H. and Sternfeld, R., 12 vols. (Leipzig, 1911–1916), XI, 344–55 (#1); 356–78 (#2); 379–94 (#3); here, 370, emphasis added; and 390. English translation—by Jane Ennis—appears in Wagner, 8/1 (01 1987), 13–22 for draft #1; draft #2 appears in Wagner 9/3 (July 1988), 106–15; here, 115, emphasis added, trans, slightly modified.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ MS Eng, 247; MS Get, 135.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1979), 69–70.Google Scholar

⁴² The work does not just stage the process of Utopian dissolution, but also a ghettoisation that enables it. According to that logic, the work inflects the problem of atomised, egotistical artistic production as a problem of reading, if only to fob off the practice of reading on to the bad object—as ‘critic’ (and, I would suggest, as Jew) - thus ghettoising him as its agent. In this way, the work figures its own aesthetic problematic, but disavows it as foreign in—and to—the work.Google Scholar

⁴³ The cast of the Australian Opera production features Donald McIntyre as Sachs, John Pringle as Beckmesser and Helena Doese as Eva.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ In this sense, Beckmesser's vain and deluded scene of musical performance recalls Mime's vain and deluded determination to control language in his exchange with Siegfried in Act II, scene 3 of Siegfried.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ MS Ger, 133; MS Eng, 241.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ The cast features Bernd Weikl as Sachs, Hermann Prey as Beckmesser and Mari Anne Haggander as Eva. Horst Stein conducted.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ The grand resolution occurs at the conclusion of the work, when the production notoriously deviates from the stage directions, allowing for a reconciliation between Beckmesser and Sachs.Google Scholar