MUSIC REVIEW : Old and New in Festive Bayreuth

The summer began at the festive Richard Wagner shrine with business as usual. Then came the wonted shock.

It was a balmy, reasonably exciting Tuesday for the first-afternooners. By 3 o’clock, the grounds of the old festival theater were mobbed by the overdressed elite--politicos, movie stars, royalty--as well as by the loyal local citizens who always come up the hill just to gawk and applaud.

The most agitated, most affectionate applause was reserved, as usual, for a perfect Wagnerite of the old school--the Begum Aga Khan. At 82, she is still very grand, very gracious and very glamorous.

The ugly and uncomfortable but acoustically wondrous, 2,000-seat house that Wagner built for himself offered an inaugural vehicle that proved conservative by current standards. Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s 69-year-old grandson and official guardian of the Holy Grail, had scheduled a final summer outing for Gotz Friedrich’s essentially surrealistic, ultimately poignant production of “Parsifal.”

It has been around for six years now, and will by replaced next season by a presumably more conventional version to be staged by Wolfgang Wagner himself. Although he will name no names, the amiable impresario-director promises “a youthful, dramatically plausible” Heldentenor in the title role.

Siegfried Jerusalem, this year’s quasi-Heldentenor, looked manly, acted sensitively and sang with sturdy tone until he succumbed to customary strain in the last act. The triumph of the performance belonged to mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier, dramatically eloquent and vocally spectacular as Kundry. Donald McIntyre offered a fervent Amfortas, Hans Sotin a prosaic Gurnemanz.

In the invisible, sunken pit--populated by some of the best orchestra players from West and East German opera houses--James Levine produced waves and waves of luminous, finely tuned Wagnerian sonority. Not incidentally, he produced those waves very, very slowly.

Andreas Reinhardt’s set--a puzzling network of symmetrical arches, boldly askew in false perspective--is still ornamented with amazing science-fiction gimmickry for Klingsor’s tower. Vegas-worthy showgirls still masquerade blithely as his Flower Maidens. At this juncture, however, even the most conservative element in Bayreuth isn’t shocked by gentle experiments in alienation.

Predictably, however, the die-hard traditionalists were shocked the next day, when a cool and rainy Bayreuth witnessed the initiation of the Big Event of 1988: Harry Kupfer’s new production of the mighty, mightily daunting “Ring des Nibelungen” tetralogy.

Kupfer, a celebrated enfant terrible from the Komische Oper in East Berlin, had been given the dubious honor of staging the 10th “Ring” at the mecca since 1876. He also was given the awkward challenge of making everyone forget the “Ring” of 1983, a lazy, mock-romantic fiasco misconceived by the director Peter Hall and the conductor Georg Solti.

It is unfair even to attempt an evaluation of so complex and massive an undertaking on the basis of “Das Rheingold” alone. Still, it was quickly apparent on Wednesday that Kupfer was working with a wealth of original ideas, many of which actually complemented the music.

Like many modernists, he and his designers (the sets are by Hans Schavernoch, the costumes by Reinhard Heinrish) have done away with the ancient, lofty gods, the pretty, romantic emotions and the majestic, mythological vistas. Bayreuth’s “Ring” finds itself, once again, in a world of political upheaval and social satire.

Even before the music begins, the curtain rises to reveal the corpse of Alberich on a bleak stage. Obviously, the inferno has already occurred. In pre-performance interviews, Kupfer had invoked the shadow of Chernobyl.

When the music begins, time, space and water are visually orchestrated by laser beams. Alberich comes back to life--some strange cycle seems to be resuming here--to pursue a trio of shadowy nymphets, a.k.a. Rhinemaidens.

The ensemble of gods resembles a young, rowdy, possibly shady gang of tourists, all of whom carry transparent plastic suitcases and sport gray leather trench coats. Wotan, the nominal chief, gets to wear a fur collar and sunglasses with one dark lens.

The dwarf Mime has become a mad scientist. Loge, the god of fire, resembles a particularly wily David Bowie embarking on a punk adventure.

The eminently harmless giants--a singular miscalculation--are 18-feet dolls bearing tiny human heads. The mechanical figures roll around the stage with the assistance of stagehands who man bicycle-like contraptions hidden within their massive skirts.

And so it goes. Nibelheim is represented by a moving platform of high-tech cranes. The rainbow bridge employs neon strips and a glitzy show-biz elevator.

The images are cool, clever, sometimes startling. The action is swift, sometimes nearly hysterical. How all this serves Wagner remains to be seen, and heard.

The premiere audience bestowed cheers upon the generally inexperienced cast, most deservedly upon John Tomlinson’s gutsy Wotan, Gunter von Kannen’s heroically nasty Alberich and Graham Clark’s dangerously bemused Loge.

Kupfer had to endure some inevitable boos along with a counter-ovation. So, for that matter, did Daniel Barenboim, whose conducting tended toward the ponderous and the pallid.