Review by Sandra Molyneau of the Wagner Society of Northern California:

The Symposium (11-13 May) was a great success. This year’s theme was the search for, in Wagner’s terms, an “Art of the Future” and how that search developed as artists wandered the face of Europe throughout the Nineteenth Century.  A related, but far from subsidiary, subject investigated the idea of the traveler and the relationships that occur through those travels.  Lecture subjects included a trilogy presented by Jeffrey Buller on Wagner the wanderer and how his displacement is reflected in his operas as quest, pilgrimage, and homecoming narratives.  Laurie Lashbrook explored the relationship between Wagner (1813-1883) and Liszt (1811-1886) as contemporaries, colleagues, and relatives, while Harry Mallgrave demonstrated the relationship of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus to innovations in theater design – particularly those of Gottfried Semper, the designer of theaters in Dresden, Vienna, and Munich. 

It was particularly gratifying to hear unfamiliar compositions. Friday’s concert included Wagner’s rarely performed Kinder-Katechismus, and Saturday’s recital by Jerry Wong featured Liszt’s transcriptions of Wagner.  Lashbrook returned on Sunday with a lecture-recital regarding Wagner’s place in and contribution to German Lied and the French Art Song -- pairing Goethe’s and Wagner’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” and exploring selections from Wagner’s Trois Mélodie (1839) in relation to Berlioz’s earlier “Lille inconnue.”  To complete the program, Lashbrook then demonstrated the influence Wagner had on both Lieder and Mélodie in the works of Hugo Wolff and Henri Duparc.

The intellectual core of the symposium, however, was given over to Jeffrey Buller and Harry Mallgrave.  Buller’s  structural reading of Wagner’s operas, concentrating on the Ring,.explored how the idea of wandering – whether as quest, pilgrimage, or nostos --  permeates all of Wagner’s major operas just as it had consumed his life.  Of particular importance are the exchanges between two characters as they encounter each other on the journey – for example, Mime and the Wanderer, Siegfried and the Wanderer, Siegfried and the Dragon.  In folk narrative, these occasions are accompanied by a series of questions in which the traveler sets out to find something, gains insight, and returns enlightened.

In Pilgrimage, however, the traveler experiences a change through the journey itself and not always in the way he or she might have expected -- the going out ends in a return to interior space.  Buller explored this theme in both Tannhäuser and Parsifal, but then moved beyond the works themselves to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as a place of secular pilgrimage.  Buller’s third lecture, “Siegfried Wagner and the Epigoni,” carried the themes even farther by analyzing some of the multiple influences on the operas of Siegfried, specifically Banadi’etrich (1909) and Schwarzschwanenreich (1910), specifically using the symbol of the swan – both white and black – so prevalent in folk tales. 

Harry Mallgrave demonstrated the shift to a new sensibility in the design of Nineteenth Century opera houses, specifically through the work of Gottfried Semper (1803-1879).  Semper had both an intellectual and personal relationship with Wagner but was also an important mentor and influence in the design of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. 

Like Wagner, Semper wandered in search of an artistic base, and he also became involved with the 1849 May Uprising in Dresden, fleeing first to Zurich and then to London.  Also, like Wagner, Semper was interested in architecture as a Gesamtkunstwerk.  Semper’s ideas for a new opera house which, in his view, would better reflect a new theatrical art form can all be found at Bayreuth -- removal of loges in favor of arena seating, steeply raked auditorium, hidden orchestra, double proscenium arch, a darkened auditorium, limited ceremonial entrance but expansive public access.  Wagner was familiar with Semper’s theories as was Nietzsche who, with Wagner in 1869, read The Four Elements of Architecture (1851).

Semper’s greatest commission was to have been the new opera house in Munich (1865), a venture recommended to Ludwig II by Wagner.  The massive project was not built because Semper could never get a contract from Ludwig II, and his ministers essentially defeated the ambitious plan.  Semper gave his drawings to Wagner, thinking they would jointly build in Nuremberg, but Wagner took them to Bayreuth and used the architect’s plans as the basis of his own project.  Needless to say, the two men had a falling out that could never be repaired.