The Schubert in Wagner

Judit Rácz in Conversation with Adam Fischer

 

 

Adam Fischer studied composition in Budapest and conducting in Vienna. In 1987 he was appointed Music Director of the Kassel Opera. In the same year he set up the Haydn Festival in Eisenstadt and founded the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Philharmonic whose artistic director he remains. Between 2001 and 2005 he was Music Director in Mannheim. He is Music Director of the Danish Radio Sinfonietta (since 1998), of the Magyar Radio Symphonic Orchestra (since 2006) and the Hungarian State Opera (since June 2007).
From 1980 he has been a guest conductor at the Staatsoper Vienna, conducting the Ring Cycle amongst others. He has been guest conductor in many major opera houses including the Paris Opera, La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London and the Metropolitan in New York. As a symphonic conductor he has worked with the Vienna Philharmonic, the London and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras as well as the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras. He was awarded the Grand Prix de Disque for his recordings of Goldmark's Queen of Sheba (Hungaroton) and Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle (CBS/Sony).
He made his Bayreuth debut in 2001 and was named Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt. For several seasons, he conducted Parsifal on the Green Hill, and his account of this opera at the "Wagner in Budapest" Opera Festival in 2006 was an enormous success.

 

In 2007 the first two parts of the Ring Cycle—Das Rheingold and Die Walküre— were put on at the Budapest Palace of Arts as part of the 2007 "Wagner in Budapest" Opera Festival (see HQ 187). This year, between June 19th and 22nd, the entire cycle was mounted on four successive days, under conductor and artistic director Adam Fischer and Hartmut Schörghofer as director, and featuring an international cast. The production is described as semi-staged—something between a straight concert and a full-blown opera-house production. Dominating the stage was an enormous segmented screen which opened and closed and was projected onto; it provided a backdrop, at times transparent, at times a gloomy shadow, through which the cast could come and go. In front of it the singers in evening clothes acted out their parts; behind them, on an elevated stage, dancers would sometimes underscore or supplement the action beneath them. And finally this wall acted as a mirror or had real or computer-generated video images projected onto it. The staging incorporated various layers of realism along with stylisation, photorealism and video: a free interplay of devices that, although diverse, were interrelated. And why would that not be appropriate, given that Wagner's operas are largely built up of musical special effects? Video-art finds it easy to present the miraculous creatures and the visionary spectacle of the Wagnerian world. This was a production that, for once, did not strive to push a point didactically but set up and presented associations in modes that were both serious and playful.

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Judit Rácz: How do you feel about this Wagner marathon? For me this production made the Ring Cycle approachable.

Adam Fischer: Mounting a Ring is such a complex enterprise that we can only be grateful that there were no major organisational glitches, like one of the cast not being able to make it, or falling ill, or something going missing, or the lighting not working. The Ring Cycle is by far the most demanding work in the entire operatic literature. I was utterly convinced that this was how Wagner himself wanted it: to perform the whole cycle within the space of just four days. I am also convinced that the Ring is conceived as a unity, not four operas but one, and has to be performed with this in mind. Some incredible risks are entailed in doing it this way. The fact that everything worked with virtually split-second timing was a huge stroke of luck. But I don't want to kid ourselves, because problems will no doubt crop up in the future. Someone will go hoarse, we'll have to improvise. Wagner singers are a good deal more vulnerable than other singers: the slightest snuffle or sign of hoarseness and they are simply unable to go on stage.

Did all the main roles have proper covers?

The thing is that they didn't. Each opera house has its own way of handling such eventualities. The Americans always provide covers because of the sheer physical distance between opera houses there. That's not always the case in Europe, however. In our cycle we use two Siegfrieds, but they cannot substitute for one another as it is simply not possible for anyone to take on such a demanding role on successive evenings. Zurich Opera takes the line that it's best not to cover, because you can be sure that if you do, someone will become indisposed; if there is no cover, then people just do not fall ill. Well, of course people sometimes do fall ill, and they have had occasions when a makeshift arrangement had to be set up half an hour beforehand, with someone singing from the orchestra pit, or the side of the stage and the ill-disposed singer acting out the role on stage. That sort of thing has happened at Bayreuth as well. Evelyn Herlitzius lost her voice on the afternoon she was due to sing Brünnhilde in Walküre, and Judit Németh was not able to step into the role in that production, so she sang it from the edge of the stage, using the vocal score.

You had a terribly short rehearsal period, just to add to the risk.

We had no chance to plan for safety measures of any sort, we did not have the money to pay for them, and anyway the singers did not have the time. We had to be very professional. We could not have taken it on at all had we not been able to base ourselves on earlier productions. I had conducted the Ring Cycle for years with Evelyn Herlitzius and Christian Franz, I had previously worked with them both through every bar of the love duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried, so that passage, musically speaking, was fully fledged and there was no real need to rehearse it. Here we used Herlitzius for Sieglinde, too, with Stig Anderson singing Siegmund's part.

That's two of the cast. You also had two Wotans and two Brünnhildes.

Alan Titus was the Wotan of the Bayreuth production I conducted there, so there was no need for me to run through how we would work together. I had previously

 

 

conducted Juha Uusitalo as the Dutchman, so his voice was well-known to me. So the whole thing could only be brought together by lining up the work I had done in the past. That meant that I didn't have to spend so much rehearsal time on Act 3 of Siegfried.

Many of the singers you did know, but there were many you didn't.

I had not worked before with Susan Bullock, who was one of our Brünnhildes, and I had very little rehearsal time with her. But then she had already sung with the others. The fact that I have conducted many operas in the standard repertoire helped a lot. I have a good sense, for instance, of where singers need to breathe. I can sense how long they can hold their breath, because if a singer wishes to take a breath in the middle of a phrase, then I have to hold back just a little immediately beforehand to allow them to do so. If, on the other hand, they don't wish to do so, then I need to speed up to allow them to reach the end of the phrase. Or if I sense that the passion is rising a touch, then I will pick up the tempo just a fraction. When Susan Bullock took a step down the stairs towards the dead Siegfried it was crystal clear to me that she understood my thinking here, so I shaped the transitional passage with that feeling in mind: everything up till that point had been addressed by her to the world at large, and now the world had fallen away and she wanted to be left alone with her dead husband. Not a word had passed between us beforehand about any of this, still she immediately picked up that that was what I wanted and responded.

All the singers say that they were hanging on to your every beat.

It would have been interesting if they hadn't! After all, nothing was arranged beforehand. It's one of the basic dilemmas for any conductor: Should I explain or should I show? If I had had to talk the singers beforehand through every one of the, let's say, forty thousand bars of the almost 16 hours of music in the Ring, we would have been at it for years. Feeling in tune with each other had to be a given. It's just not possible to rehearse for months on end. I don't say it with any malice, but I know there are some conductors who claim to be sticklers for perfection, which means they rehearse things to death! Ninety per cent of the reason for that is their inability to demonstrate what they want. Whether to show or tell was an argument that raged a long while ago within my family. There are two different approaches. I have no trouble in saying what I'm looking for in the case of, say, Haydn's 'Clock' Symphony, but you just can't do that in the Ring.

So am I to take it that you are happy now?

I felt that it was a great success. I've heard some talk about how one singer was better than another or a third, and how I was supposed to have had a good reason for deciding who sang and when, but the simple truth is that availability of singers depends on their contractual obligations. It is my job to let everybody know that, like it or not, mistakes are going to be made willy nilly. We would be foolish to think otherwise.

Was this year's Festival too successful your own good? I'm thinking of the future.

This time it was a success—and success means that 60–80 per cent of it came off well. It's rather like taking a penalty in football: there is no way I can guarantee that I'll slot home every penalty kick. What state of nerves a horn player will be in when he plays that particular solo passage? He did it well this time, but if he fluffs a note on some future occasion does that mean that the "Wagner in Budapest" Opera Festival should be abandoned? My dream is that a day will come when our own press will look on this in the same way as the local press in Salzburg or Vienna treat the Salzburg Festival, or the New York media treat performances at the Met, because for them even the best is not good enough. What I would like is

for them to feel it natural, the most normal thing, that the best musicians in the world are active here in Hungary. And of course the Hungarian media are not the only factor in having international attention being paid to Hungary. I am working towards establishing something that will induce foreign singers and a foreign audience to come here. And foreign music critics, too.

The audience did come, by the busload.

Just as performances in Aix-en-Provence or Salzburg are not only attended by locals. Apparently, 40 per cent of audiences at some of the Budapest performances were visitors. We need to know what is being said abroad about the performances here. It's not the press that I work for, but we have to satisfy the expectations of both the press and the public.

Now that you have proved that the Ring Cycle can be played on four consecutive days, would it be fair to say that this production is fully set and a four-day event is possible? Or is it always going to be risky?

To some extent, always. Bayreuth has been doing it for 120 years and it is still always risky.

But there it is not done in four days.

Doing it in six days is no joke either. We are currently arguing over whether it should always be done in four days in Budapest, or whether to switch to six days. I don't wish to push either one or the other—they both have their advantages and their drawbacks. Four days is good for Germans, because the Lord's Day becomes a long weekend, and next year, as it happens, that falls right at the end of the scheduled dates, so visitors will have no trouble fitting in four days of Wagner, and therefore the foreign-tour operators say: "Let's do it that way!" That is how we will

do it in the next two years, they have already fixed their schedule. These things have to be planned ahead.

Quite a few of us had bones to pick with Götterdämmerung. I am thinking of the scene which had a projection onto a white background of people in evening dress looking menacingly bored, furniture being pushed around and, finally, their redhaired hostess taking a vacuum cleaner to it all. It stuck out like a sore thumb and at the interval there were comments about how it couldn't have been the same director! The standard set by the first three parts was so high and the approach so different that there was a sense of disappointment at this incongruence.

I intend to talk that over with the director, Hartmut Schörghofer. But bear in mind that most directors these days do transpose Götterdämmerung to the present day. What Schörghofer does, though, is small beer compared with some productions I have seen. There is a generation gap at work here too. I've already said as much in connection with the Parsifal we put on in 2006. There are things that I instinctively reject, but I just have to accept that my son finds them dead cool.

Isn't this a passé modernity? The problem is not that it's ugly, that is a matter of taste, but that we are being forced to take a step back...

... to the German Regietheater, yes. But the poor director had just six months to prepare a completely new production. That everywhere normally takes three or four years.

For many the dancing was also fairly borderline.

At the outset I agreed that it was necessary. I didn't place enough trust in the music, and that was a big mistake, because it turned out that the music was at the

very heart of it after all. My hope was that if there was a dancer or a puppet on the stage, then that would distract the audience's attention and give me more freedom to slip in a new singer, for example, without upsetting the production. But with singers as good as this, who needs such props?

You were originally thinking of doing it with puppets.

Yes. Not that it's something I have any expertise in; I was more like a child who wants a bit of this and a bit of that too...

Why was the production referred to as being semi-staged? What was "semi" about it?

Nothing. There's no such thing as being half-pregnant. The sworn enemies of our attempt are most likely directors who are piqued because they see it as a direct threat. Ours is a twenty-first century production, with "disposable" elements that can be changed, allowing us to tailor the parts to specific individuals.

Do you expect this approach to refresh the way Wagner is performed?

I'm not looking to refresh the way Wagner is performed. I just want to show that it is possible to do it—with these theatrical devices and rehearsal time at our disposal and still serving the music. Our Ring was built on the acoustics and the visual opportunities offered by the Palace of Arts. The auditorium is a treasure acoustically speaking. It won't be easy to put on Wagner in the Budapest Opera House after this.

Presumably you are aiming your performances at the young.

Of course. Indeed, it was them we had in mind in the first place. If I scare them off the first time they come, they are not going to come back in a hurry!

You said in an interview that you had given the cycle "a totally different interpretation". In what sense?

I was able to place human relationships and passions at its centre.

What lies at the centre of traditional performances?

The story has usually a bigger role to play. The acting space in the Palace of Arts is smaller, thus the characters on the stage appear larger. Here it is more important for two figures to show their love for each other than it is on a huge stage, in front of the prompter's box, with all sorts of other things going on all around. The proportions, the wonderfully intimate acoustics here allow a greater focus on the subtleties of the human drama. To be able to enter so intensely into the love scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde—I can't imagine that being possible on a bigger stage.

And the mythological is not lost either.

I agree, but one thing that many performances of Wagner operas lack is the Wagnerian chamber music. The vast orchestral sound is all you hear most of the time, but in fact the music is actually packed with Schubertian moments. It is much easier to bring that out in this auditorium and within this approach. I was looking to bring out the Schubert in Wagner.

Some people scorn the spectacle; they reckon that one should only listen to opera from a recording, or if it's in a theatre, with their eyes shut. How much of the spectacle can be done without?

Precious little except of course for someone who knows the music very well and feels it very deeply. I personally don't need the spectacle any longer, but one of my worst experiences ever was of a live broadcast from Bayreuth when I was eight years old. I would like a performance to be such that it also gives great pleasure to those who choose not to look at the stage, where the staging is not needed to rescue the music. The music and staging should not be set against each other. What the staging has to do is present the music in a fuller, rounder light.

Composers never gave concert performances of their operas.

No, of course not. An opera is not conceived for performance on a concert platform. But I don't want to take away the pleasure from those who listen to opera in concert performances. They just should not suppose that it works for everyone.

To what degree are you affected by what is happening on the stage?

A great deal. And in this particular case I told Hartmut Schörghofer how I see what is happening emotionally in the Ring, and nothing he did clashed with that. If the spectacle, on the other hand is greatly at odds with the emotion I feel, there is a huge problem, because I cannot dissociate myself from the spectacle, on the other hand, I have to serve it. If I sense, for example, that Gutrune should be whimpering in fear because she suspects something has happened to her husband, but dares not ask aloud and simply whispers, whereas I see her rushing about in panic on stage, because that's how the director senses it, then I find it impossible to do my job as a conductor. There was nothing like that in the Budapest Ring. In a production of The Flying Dutchman that I conducted in Munich, there was an issue over whether the chorus were afraid of the Dutchman's ship or they were goading him, trying to provoke a reaction. My sense was that it was fear, the director took the opposite view, and one could justify either because the passage is marked pianissimo. Both he and I felt that it was not working, so we talked it over and managed to find an acceptable resolution in a few places.

Are such conflicts between director and conductor inevitable?

They needn't be. It's much the same sort of thing as in chamber music. A member of a string quartet should be able to make his will prevail but it may not mean that this will work as he intended. I need a partner, and it may be that one is continually arguing with that partner until something emerges. It's wrong to take up the position that I'm the conductor and I'll decide what should be happening. Well, one can try, but it's far from certain that the outcome will be any good. There were many times when I had to step into pre-existing productions, and I felt I had gained something by being able to assimilate just a bit of what the director had visualised. There are times when that can be very difficult though. As a rule, one instinctively says no to a great many things, but it's better to make an effort to understand the view taken by someone else. If I conduct against the spirit of the direction, nothing good will come of it.

It could also be a question of stature and authority. Sometimes the conductor hardly gets a mention because the director's is just about the only name that comes up in connection with a production. Sometimes it is the other way round.

A director has to innovate; a conductor is reading a score. It's true that a score can be read in many different ways, but the audience is less likely to notice that. The press is always preoccupied with the production. We'll have to wait and see what happens with the Budapest Opera House's new Fidelio [Adam Fischer is scheduled to conduct, with Balázs Kovalik as director].

Will the success of the Ring have an effect on how the Budapest Opera House will continue to function?

I don't know. My hope is that we shall manage to turn Fidelio too into a success that makes it an event. This is another work where preconceived ideas have to be dismantled. For instance, what voices some parts are written for. There are two kinds of critics: you might call them the Beckmessers and the Hans Sachses. A Beckmesser just itemises all the specific mistakes, whereas a Sachs looks at whether the aim of a work was accomplished. Fidelio is one of the greatest musical masterpieces ever written, but Beethoven was congenitally unable to come to terms with hard realities, and he pays no heed to things like the capabilities of the human voice, acoustics—nothing! What I mean is that he does not compose as slickly for the singing voice as a Puccini or a Verdi does. But then that's not what the piece is about! Fidelio is an excruciatingly difficult symphony. To listen to it in the way one does to Verdi—that is the sort of Beckmesserism and preconception that I want to cut through. Fidelio is the most popular of all operas in the German-speaking world, whereas in Hungary it is seldom performed. Well, now it's time for everyone involved to learn! Beethoven is musically good enough for us to sing it well. Fidelio has an elemental force that no other piece in the repertoire has. That's what I want to demonstrate.

What part of the Budapest Ring did you like best?

The final pages of Siegfried definitely came off pretty well. Apart from that, there are two other scenes that always raise the hairs on my scalp: the one between Brünnhilde and Siegmund in Walküre and the one between Waltraute and Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung. Time just has to stand still for them.

 

Judit Rácz,
a translator and journalist, was the Hungarian translator of Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years
and Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years by Alan Walker.