On July 25, 2024, the Bayreuth Festival opens with Tristan und Isolde.
Also on July 25, but in 1886, it was a significant date in the history of the Festival: Cosima Wagner staged Tristan und Isolde for the first time at Bayreuth under the musical direction of Felix Mottl.
In a letter dated September 27, 1885, Cosima thanked Ludwig II of Bavaria once again for accepting to take on the patronage of the Festival (would the king perhaps have financially supported the venture initiated years ago by his friend Wagner for the last time, or was it a symbolic patronage meant to add prestige to future Festivals?).
In the letter to Ludwig, Cosima proposes a philosophical reflection to the king, starting from the first draft of the third act of Tristan. Originally, Parsifal was supposed to visit the dying knight in his castle of Kareol to offer a profound reflection before his exit:
“The whole world is nothing but a single unappeased anxiety! And how can it ever be appeased?”
Thus, Cosima presents a possible answer to Ludwig:
“Parsifal therefore constitutes the answer to Tristan’s terrible question: the death of love brings blessed peace for the lovers but not for the world.”
(Dietrich Mack (Hg. von), Cosima Wagner. Das zweite Leben. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1883 - 1930, Piper, München 1980)
These were the thoughts that crossed Cosima’s mind during those months as she sought to uplift herself and the fortunes of the Festival after her husband’s death in 1883 by proposing titles that had never before been presented in the theater on the green hill.
And in Italy?
After the Bolognese premieres of Lohengrin (1871), Tannhäuser (1872), Der Fliegende Holländer (1877) and Rienzi (1876), on June 2, 1888, also at the Teatro Comunale, it was Tristan und Isolde’s turn.
We read from the voices of contemporary critics in articles from “Perseveranza” and “La Lombardia,” available in our Digital Wagner Library, how the reception of such a complex work had destabilized both audience and critics.
If Cosima proposed deep reflections to the King of Bavaria, thoughts born from her close relationship with her husband’s art and a different sensitivity gradually acquired by a part of intellectual Germany towards Wagner’s work, Italy was still deeply tied to the tradition of melodrama.
For the public and most critics of the time, dramaturgy was essentially reduced to the plot of the libretti. A philosophical text rich in metaphysical implications and reflections on love and the fate of the world jeopardized the tranquility and routine enjoyment of bourgeois theater of the time.
Unfortunately, the only critic who could have fully understood the artistic and intellectual significance of Wagner’s work, Filippo Filippi, had passed away prematurely on June 24, 1887. Thus, the same newspaper that had welcomed insightful reflections on the Meister’s work had to rely on the pen of Giovanni Battista Nappi, already a critic for the same paper but not as prepared and passionate about Wagner as his colleague.
The first Bolognese performance, sung in Italian in the translation by Arrigo Boito, was conducted by Giuseppe Martucci to warm success.
Nappi recalls in his article from June 3, 1888, that the artists were called to the stage five times to receive applause. The conductor Martucci managed to weave together a complex work far removed from Italian tradition.
In a long article in Perseveranza on June 11, 1888, Nappi tries to synthesize what he had seen and heard on June 2 in Bologna.
It quickly becomes apparent that the critic’s needs do not align with the composer’s: while Wagner seeks a philosophical reflection on the essence of love and the world starting from Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the Italian critic looks for a dramaturgy consisting of a plot of actions but does not find it.
The scenes presented by Wagner’s work are too long, too static, too verbose for Nappi, and therefore understandable only to a “specialized audience.”
In an article a few days earlier, Nappi indeed noted that even reading the immense score of Wagner’s work had led him to give up.
However, the critic does not want to present himself as either a Wagnerian or an anti-Wagnerian:
“Today, we have a lively contrast, a debate of judgments and impressions. On one side, fanatic admirers; on the other, vandalic detractors. No middle ground. How appropriate would Ovid’s motto be at such a moment: Medio tutissimus ibis! [“in the middle you will walk most safely!”] The phrase, perhaps too worn from overuse, is nevertheless always fitting, especially in matters of art, where it should serve as a watchword to guide one’s judgment to truly produce mature, concrete, just, and useful appreciations.”
Nappi continues the long article, presenting himself as the champion of the virtue of the middle ground.
“This work should be judged in its general lines, both as a dramatic poem and as a musical conception.”
But a few lines further down, after summarizing the action, Nappi comes out with this statement:
“To create a drama from this very simple plot, it took no one but Wagner. But it certainly cannot be said that despite his refined art and rare vivid imagination, he completely succeeded.”
Nappi even emphasizes that Wagner should not have accepted the mythical legend in its primitive simplicity, as it would not suffice to constitute a proper theatrical project. To make it such, Wagner should have given “greater variety and vividness to the episodes [in fact], except for the first act which is truly well-conceived, the action languishes and often lacks entirely in the other two.”
A bit further down, there is another really significant sentence:
“Pure Wagnerians, to mitigate this very weak aspect of the poem [i.e., the lack of action or the ridiculousness of Marke’s scene being humiliated by Tristan without batting an eye, Ed.], say that Tristan und Isolde is not a theatrical work. I am pleased to fully agree with them.”
Thus, Nappi repeatedly underlines that according to the Wagnerians’ own opinion, this drama lacks the requisites of theater, and similarly, the music often does not meet the scenic demands.
“Perhaps in trying to do too much, Wagner often succeeded to the contrary.”
For Wagner, the opera is not an exclusively musical creation but the complete union of poetry and music, which according to Nappi, should be equally divided, but in Tristan, music clearly prevails.
“This aggregate of concepts entrusted to the orchestra, easily recognizable in their developments by a well-trained ear, this continuous restlessness of ideas, of broken and tortured figures by various contrapuntal combinations, often results in such exuberant sonority that it drowns out the voices, which cannot always fulfill their task of sung declamation because they are forced to declaim… shouted!”
In the following lines, Nappi acknowledges, however, that perhaps all these weaknesses found in Wagner’s score are not attributable to Wagner himself but perhaps to Italian ears too accustomed to melodrama’s action and libretti often not as witty and knowledgeable as the texts of the genius from Leipzig.
Nappi’s conclusion of the musical review of June 11 is this:
“I would not be surprised if after this success, other Italian artistic centers would be encouraged to reproduce Tristan. But will it be possible to find such a homogeneous ensemble, an orchestra and a conductor as deeply versed in Wagner’s music, and an audience like this one in Bologna, of such fine taste and notable for the nobility and elevation of their artistic criteria?”
Indeed, Nappi’s question, read in hindsight, does not seem so far-fetched.
Suffice it to say that after the first Bolognese performance, Tristan had to wait until February 14, 1897, to return to Italian stages in Turin at the Teatro Regio.
Subsequently, the opera was staged in Trieste on Christmas Day in 1899, at La Scala in Milan on December 29, 1900, at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna on May 11, 1902, and in Rome at the Teatro Costanzi on December 26, 1903. In the following years, it was the turn of Brescia (1906), Naples (1907), Parma and Genoa (1908), Palermo and Cesena (!) (1909), and Verona (1911).
If you carefully read the dates and the sequence of the first performances in the major Italian cities, you can see that the long pause between the first Bolognese and the first Turin performance then led to a series of closely spaced performances in other centers of the peninsula.
What is certain is that the echo of Wagner’s great art reached Italy with an understandable chronological and cultural delay.
We must not think, however, that the theatrical life of Bayreuth reflected the theatrical life of all Germany, because reading the reflections and critiques of the first German Wagnerians at the end of the nineteenth century, the Reich itself was quite reluctant to accept and understand the lesson of its great master.
Cosima’s question was indeed a reflection that few at the time could grasp: perhaps the intellectuals of the Bayreuth Circle, engaged, however, in the ethnic and racial exaltation of German culture.
Certainly not the majority of the audience and critics of the time… And today?...
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