It
began with a scandal, became the object of heated discussions,
turned into a sensational success and finally blossomed into
a legendary, standard-setting production: Patrice Chéreau's
epoch-making Ring cycle in Bayreuth, the "Centennial Ring".
When
the production was premiered in 1976, there were brawls in the venerable
Festspielhaus, with the audience divided into one mob roaring in
favour and one screaming against. In his "Bayreuth, A History of
the Wagner Festival", Frederic Spotts relates what happened: "On
opening night there were bloody brawls, Wolfgang Wagner's new wife
had her dress ripped and another woman had her earring torn off
- and the earlobe with it. There were death threats and bomb threats;
friendships and marriages were said to have been broken."
The
main reason for the protests was Chéreau, who set the
work in the time in which it was written and focused on the
all-too-human passions that motivate gods and men alike. The
grimy industrial era with its robber barons and suffering
masses supplied the ideological underpinnings of Chéreau's
concept.
Patrice
Chéreau not only wrote a major new chapter in Wagner interpretation
with his Ring, but also carried out a revolution that affected all
of musical theatre. The Chéreau Ring set the standards by
which every subsequent production was to be measured.
Wolfgang
Wagner's choice of Pierre Boulez as the musical director of
the new Ring production was greeted by many with disbelief.
Hadn't Boulez once suggested blowing up the world's opera
houses? Opposition began to mount when Boulez suggested Patrice
Chéreau as director. How could a musically inexperienced
young film and theatre director do justice to the intricacies
of Wagner's dramas? No one, however, could have imagined the
outrage that was to greet the production during the summer
of 1976.
Whereas
in 1976 the New York Times had dismissed Chéreau as
"a director going amok" and his production as having "very
little to do with the Ring cycle", in 1983, on the occasion
of the first telecast of the cycle on PBS, its critic wrote:
"Productions of Wagner will never again be quite the same
as we had come to expect...". Newsweek raved: "Chéreau's
vision, which has been adapted to TV's small screen with remarkable
skill by television director Brian Large, is a theatrical
triumph. This Ring is the perfect example of how television,
when used imaginatively, can bring even the biggest of operas
to life."