Opera Fact of the Moment! I could do a hundred facts on Wagner alone, but this is a fun one on the origins of Wagners theater, Bayreuth. When Wagner began writing operas, he wasnt particularly successful, like many young composers. It wasnt until he wrote Rienzi he had his first success, which propelled him into the public eye. His operas became successful and increasingly ambitious, catching the eye of incredibly wealthy and powerful Mad King Ludwig II, King of Bavaria and self-appointed Wagners Biggest Fan, but that is a story for another opera fact. Ludwigs money supported Wagner into increasingly massive and avant-garde works that would not have been too risky otherwise. Wagners music and works had changed so much, that Wagner himself rejected Rienzi and all other operas before it, starting a canonical line of operas (which he now called music-dramas) with Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman). He became so obsessive that he built a theater with Ludwigs money in Bayreuth deliberately to go against the conventions of opera houses at the time. There was little extra decoration, the orchestra pit was completely invisible to the audience (so they wouldnt be distracted from the action onstage), the seating area was relatively small (because many theaters in that day had superfluous seating for wealthy aristocrats who were there to be seen and not to see the performance, which infuriated Wagner), and the acoustics were--and are--legendarily good. Bayreuth would play canonical Wagner operas and nothing else. This still goes on today--the Bayreuth season begins when most opera seasons end, allowing them to get the best instrumentalists and singers from all over Europe (mostly Germany) to come play Wagner in the summer. Every year at Bayreuth, you have astoundingly good musicians playing Wagner operas in an acoustically near-perfect environment (and in the case of many of his late music-dramas, these operas were written specifically for the acoustics of this specific theater). BONUS FACT: With Wagners last opera, Parsifal, he took the Bayreuth-only-plays-Wagner tradition to its extreme--for 30 years, Parsifal was in fact ONLY performed at Bayreuth before the Metropolitan Opera in New York stole it, to much controversy. Even then, it was another decade before any other opera companies presumably safe enough from the wrath of Wagners ghost to perform it themselves.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 17:47:39 +0000
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