Opera DVD is a relatively recent type of musical artifact. By definition a public art form targeted for bourgeois and upper-class audiences, opera enters, through DVD, the private domain. It brings the nineteenth-century spectacle to a modern (small) living room. This, one could well argue, happens for the first time in the history of music's technological mediation – that is, first time with no limitations posed by the medium itself: easily repeated listening, interruptions, stills, Blu-ray standard high quality imaging, and surround sound are all features of the opera experience at home. It is definitely easier to push the buttons of a DVD-player than to read a piano transcription, which would be the historically correct, old style of making opera possible at home. Technology, in short, makes listening to opera more comfortable than ever. For instance, the theatre performance of the work discussed below, Wagner's Die Walküre, takes more than four hours; and for me (and for many others, at least for those with some age-related back, leg or hip problems) that is simply too much music to take in one sitting under theatre conditions (Bayreuth being one of the worst in this respect). The dissembling through modern technology can therefore serve to unify the work for the listener, to provide a possibility to experience it as one meaningful whole under comfortable circumstances. For those embracing the live performance, DVD allows a ‘take-home’ of the musical experience, even something to return to at will. DVD thus functions as an ‘extension’ of the live performance in a surprisingly McLuhanesque way; its function is not only to replace the old live-patterns of music's reception but also extend the life of the musical experience itself. And thirdly, DVD has obviously something in common with the musical scores in the nineteenth-century: the audience gets to know the musical work through its intimate mediation at home.
This emancipatory view of sound technology was actually anticipated as early as 1969 by Theodor W. Adorno, who saw the implications of technology for the reproduction and live performance of music. Even though Adorno is usually cited as someone vehemently against music technology, because it is just another means of commodifying music, making it into a purchasable ‘thing’, he actually has a number of good things to say about LPs, the hi-fi technology of the day, and opera. Adorno takes opera's status as an anachronistic form of music as a given: by definition a form of theatrical entertainment for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeois audiences, any stage production of opera becomes ultimately a parody of itself, a signifier to the cultural and historical signified that no longer exists.Footnote 1 Opera, according to Adorno, simply does not make sense anymore in the modern world.
Reproduction offers a way out of this dilemma. As Adorno puts it, ‘the LP simultaneously frees itself from the capriciousness of fake opera festivals. It allows for the optimal presentation of music, enabling it to recapture some of the force and intensity that had been worn threadbare in the opera houses’. ‘The ability to repeat long-playing records’, Adorno continues, ‘fosters a familiarity which is hardly afforded by the ritual of performance’. The repeatability of LPs serves also an unexpected purpose of providing the possibility of recreating without disturbance the ‘temporal dimension essential to operas’. Adorno got it quite right four decades ago.
If we look at ‘technology’ just a bit more historically, though, as something that affects not only the reproducibility of the music but also the musical texture itself, we can see that Wagner's opera reform itself was built on a new kind of ‘technology’. This is a view recently proposed by Alain Badiou.Footnote 2 Paraphrasing Lacoue-Labarthe's ideas, Badiou argues that ‘musical amplification’ and ‘aesthetic accumulation’, in themselves musical devices that increased the music's ‘presence’ and individuality, reached unforeseen heights in Wagner's music, particularly through the new dramatic ‘techniques’ – ‘leitmotivs’, harnessing musical space into expressive use, new kinds of harmonic patterns, and so on – that Wagner introduced to the audience in his mature works.
Technological repeatability takes away this kind of ‘event’ character of music, and in Wagner's case, ultimately the very idea that authenticity in his music can only happen in Bayreuth, in performance settings established, instructed and regulated by the composer himself. This idea of authenticity, of course, reflects the same nineteenth-century nationalism that permeates Wagner's musical thought on so many levels. Technology, in fact, does away with what Walter Benjamin famously called the ‘aura’ – the ‘here and now’ status of works of art – of a musical drama as something to be experienced within a ritualistic space, the opera house. However, surrounded by all our hi-fi technology, one could well argue that even if we lose the ‘aura’ of Wagner's operas, we gain something else equally important and authentic for Wagner: the intertwining of music and picture, myth and technology, real world and phantasmagoria.
The topic of my discussion here, the Opus Arte release of the 2010 Bayreuth production of Die Walküre is a first-class production of this well-known musico-dramatic monument. The cast, under Christian Thielemann's baton, is outstanding: Johan Botha's Siegmund is a truly remarkable, heroic figure, complemented by Edith Haller's vulnerable Sieglinde. Albert Dohmen as Wotan has an exceptionally deep resonant bass-baritone, well capable of expressing the emotional torment of the last two acts. Linda Watson's Brünnhilde has a lot of stamina: her singing is characterized by sheer energy, also well suited to her science fiction-styled costume in the production. Mihoko Fujimura as Fricka did not leave a strong impression on me. Even though her singing is highly competent and expressive, she lacks real presence on stage. Musically there are no weak spots. Bayreuth Festival Orchestra brings to the fore a homogenous, well-balanced interpretation.
A lot has been written about Tankred Dorst's controversial, to say the very least, direction of the production of the Ring cycle for Bayreuth, begun in 2006. His concept of the gods as living in a parallel universe alongside humanity has been mentioned in every review I have come across, as also the relatively minimalistic stage action that Dorst has elicited from his cast. On DVD some of the features of his direction come into their own more than they do in live performance. For instance, the Ride of the Valkyries at the beginning of the third act gets a high-class audiovisual representation through the close-ups and slow cuts counterpointing the brisk energy of Wagner's musical texture. The scene, indeed, brings forth an expressive double-talk of gestures: the dynamic power of Wagner's music is effectively juxtaposed with the Valkyries’ slow walk among the dead heroes. This technologically reproduced rich layer of different modes of expression, of course, speaks of Dorst's genius as the director of the whole. The fades and close-ups, the technologically enhanced non-liveness on the DVD, no doubt add to the experience of the whole when compared to the live performance.
The DVD also includes a fine extra ‘The Making of Die Walküre’. While the main objective of the twenty-minute documentary is to introduce the soloists, director Tankred Dorst and the unique opera house in Bayreuth, for me the most fascinating feature is the technical description of the filming of the whole. Director Michael Beyer gives a vivid and detailed account of how the live performance on the festival turns into an audiovisual representation of the work through the means of the film production. The whole variety of close-ups, shooting angles, fades and approaches used in the work makes it clear that we are not face-to-face with a document but rather a sort of re-creation of the work.
Die Walküre is a work about human passion, bigotry and intrigues perhaps more than any other opera in the Ring cycle. Albert Dohmen and Johan Botha do a splendid job in displaying the extreme heroism necessary for portraying the dramatic mythical narrative of the opera. In Wagner's case, any intention to fully immerse in the act of contemplating his music takes great effort – after all, this is the same opera that was often used in the background of Wochenschau reports during the war. And that's why innocent listening (and watching) is no longer possible. Slavoj ŽižekFootnote 3 has gone as far as to question the possibility of enjoying Wagner's music after the holocaust: The problem is that it is ‘not possible to oppose what is good in Wagner … and what is bad in him.’ Žižek's answer to the dilemma is dialectical and paradoxical: the sublime effect of Wagner's music is only realized against the backdrop of its ideologically suspect message. The greatness of Wagner's music, Žižek argues, is ‘only possible against the background of, on the basis of, his darker side, so that there is no way to throw out the dirty water and retain only the baby.’
There are very few major composers – in fact, only Carl Orff and Percy Grainger come to mind – who have aroused controversy through their music and person to any extent equal to Wagner. Of these three Wagner is singular in his international reputation. By many accounts an openly, anti-Semitic composer (like many others in his time), Wagner continues to raise issues – hot in Israel, lukewarm in the rest of the world – about music's relationship to racial prejudice and nationalism. Neither is the mythical world of Wagner's operas easy to understand in the twenty-first-century: I was at pains to explain to my seven-year old daughter why Siegmund and Sieglinde, sister and brother, could go about having an erotic relationship in spite of their kinship. Furthermore, a visitor from Mars would perhaps wonder why incestuous relationship is possible in opera but not elsewhere outside the adult film industry. At the centre of the Wagner controversy, one could well argue, is the position of the nationalistic myth expressed in and through his music, which is deeply rooted in the era he lived in. Nationalism in general and German nationalism in particular (far beyond the middle-European bourgeois-romanticism), functions almost as a metaphysical point of reference for Wagner's mature operas in a late-nineteenth-century fashion. Richard TaruskinFootnote 4 writes about ‘a new paganism born of ethnic rather than political nation-worship’ expressed in Wagner's words and music. Consequently, few of us ever listen to the sheer sound of Wagner – there is too much aesthetic, ideological and historical context available to us for such innocent listening. There is no music pure and simple here.
In this sense, Jeremy TamblingFootnote 5 discusses opera from the representation's point of view: since audiovisual technological mediation makes opera a simulacrum of stage ‘reality’, a reality that does not even ‘really’ exist, there are ultimately no grounds to make a fundamental distinction between the contemplation of a film musical and an opera. Both are audiovisual media texts, experienced in a constant alternation between contemplation and distraction. This is the perspective from which I watched Die Walküre on DVD. I was not looking at Opus Arte's production of Die Walküre as ‘documenting’ the 2010 performance at the Bayreuth Festival but rather as an independent instance, potentially one of countless others, of the music's mediation. Thus the opera became in my eyes and ears, in effect, a music film, a film about an opera. It is beyond my competence to evaluate to what extent Dorst's production is ‘authentic’ – does it even aim at being so? – in its necessarily self-reflexive relationship to previous twenty-some recorded productions of the opera. However, as an audiovisual reproduction of a well-known masterpiece of nineteenth-century opera, I can fully recommend this Opus Arte's tour de force for anyone fascinated with Wagner's musical drama.
