Erkki Toivanen
FLYING WAGNER,
Flying Wagnerians
 The operas of Wagner have, as the 20th century gives way to the 21st, made a comeback as spectacular as that a hundred years earlier, when the world was swept by a wave of Wagnerism. The Finnish National Opera's Ring has been a record box-office hit, and the two London opera houses have staged it simultaneously for the first time ever in their history. English National Opera took The Valkyrie to Glastonbury rock festival, where 30,000 youngsters listened to it with bated breath. Covent Garden brought it to the Proms, where a young audience of 6,000 gave it a standing ovation that lasted 15 minutes. The staging of The Flying Dutchman on the bank of the River Aura could not, therefore, be more in keeping with the times.
Richard Wagner would have been delighted. He always wanted his works to find as broad an audience as possible. In liberating operatic art from the patronage of crowned heads and aristocrats, and in severing the ties with the bourgeois elite that had taken the place of the nobility, he had also hoped to free opera from the bridle of commercialism. He never ceased hoping that opera might one day be espoused by the nation at large, and with this in mind planned the enlargement of the opera house at Bayreuth; it would then be able to seat an audience twice the size, permitting cheaper tickets affordable even to those of lesser means. This dream never came true.
Why is the magic of the Wagner operas once again casting a spell over the present generation? In the opinion of Vladimir Jurowski, Music Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera, they fill a spiritual gap in our lives. We long for something massive and magnificent as an antidote to a way of life that seems to have been reduced to microchips and bytes. Our instinct tells us we need access to intense emotions and an otherworld existence that has vanished from our everyday lives.
Wagner was the very personification of the spiritual giant or Übermensch placed on a pedestal by the 19th century. He towered over the music of the closing years of the century, just as Beethoven had the early decades. Like Beethoven, he had tried to give music a universal and cosmic dimension. It was why he wanted to create the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art embracing whole universes.
The craze for Wagner among young people today and the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in recent years have certain things in common. Both make a narrative impact so strong that it wrests young people from their humdrum everyday existence to a world of fantasy. It also expresses a human need to join in that fantasy, to enjoy the heroism and the excitement of a grand adventure.
It has nevertheless come as a surprise to many that the people now queuing for Wagner tickets are young. The young are easily bored, it is thought; they tire of anything lasting more than thirty seconds. Yet the five-hour operas which, as Mark Twain put it, “contain delightful moments and oases of beauty among 20 dreary minutes, surely offer a welcome contrast to the fragmentary 'thrills' flashed across a screen”.
The new generation is also ridding itself of the associations that linked the name of Wagner with Nazi Germany and its theories on racial superiority. Night after night, Hitler said he had been to listen to the operas of Wagner in his home town of Linz like thousands of young people. "I have totally fallen under the spell of the Wizard of Bayreuth," he exclaimed. Hitler had been a fan of Wagner's since the age of twelve, and they had inspired in him a vision of a united German empire in all its former glory.
Wagner had looked upon himself as the personification of German nationalism and his music as its purest manifestation. We can understand why those who suffered the Nazi atrocities could not bear to hear the music of a wizard hailed by Hitler as his protégé. Wagner's anti-Semitic sympathies and his descendants' commitment to the Nazi regime left a stain on the image passed on to posterity. For many this image became an insuperable obstacle to listening to his music. But now, at the start of a new millennium, any such mental blocks are vanishing.
Some music lovers have always felt closer to Wagner than to any other composer. One of the first was the French poet Charles Baudelaire. After hearing music by Wagner in Paris in 1860, he wrote to tell him he had experienced the greatest musical pleasure of his life. "I felt it was mine the moment I heard it," he said. "Just as anyone immediately embraces that he has been born to love... Your music represents all that is noble, it transports the listener to the heights. .. I allow it to lead me to another life, where all of a sudden I feel omnipotent. .. As I open myself to your music, it penetrates my innermost being, taking possession and producing an ecstatic gratification of the senses."
The words of the poet may well describe the Wagnerian's sentiments and experiences better than any psychologist could do.
Dozens of Wagner societies have been formed on every continent. Each time one of his operas is to be performed, they mark it on their "Wagner maps". Among the audience here in Turku there may well be Wagner fans who have flown far to be here. Some have set themselves the life-long task of charting the various interpretations. These are the Wagner experts whom directors try to impress either by staging striking and sometimes way-out productions or by keeping faithfully to the instructions issued by the composer.
Legend has it that Wagner could have become the greatest actor in Germany, had his voice but been more carrying. Like his wife, Cosima, he was in the habit of acting out all the parts at rehearsals, so that the singers would get some idea of the overall work of art being staged. Nothing was to be left to chance. He also issued precise directions, running to three pages for the opening monologue of The Flying Dutchman alone! Every nuance and gesture is prescribed. Wagner also reminds stage directors what not to do with his operas. Hence Senta is no scatterbrain, or indeed any poor girl a little soft in the head; she is a sensible Maid of the North hardened from within by the salt of the sea. Her belief in the legend of the Flying Dutchman is the obsession of a simple woman. Nor is Erik, her betrothed, any mawkish love-sick youth, but rather a strong, wild and moody man. His cavatina in Act three must not be sweetly sentimental; it must exude a feeling of manly sorrow and suffering. Daland is a sturdy seafarer, an ambitious father accustomed to hard work who has no qualms about selling his daughter to a rich man in the hope of a better life.
Would Wagner have kept to his own instructions? Who knows? "Children, create something new, and new again," was his dictum to posterity.
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