Modern in any era

A plot about the connections between power, money and human nature. Sensitive music about the innermost emotions and psychological relationships. A celebration that has been drawing Wagnerites to Budapest from every corner of the world for more than fifteen years. A four-day series when the audience will get to immerse itself in the music of Wagner. Anna Belinszky discussed the Budapest Wagner Days festival’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen with Ádám Fischer, artistic director of the festival and conductor of the Ring, prior to the 2019 performances.

– This year, audiences at the Budapest Wagner Days festival will get to encounter Der Ring des Nibelungen once again, but in a refreshed version. How are the productions being updated?

– We had not originally intended for this production of the Ring to last for such a long time. We thought that, after three or four years, we would take a break from it and then stage a new production. But it was too successful. More and more people wanted to see this particular version, and we were more than happy to accommodate the audience’s wishes. So we ended up keeping this staging on the programme after all. The modernisation was necessary because ten years is a long time: people’s associations change and those devices that gave it the power of novelty at the première might be dated today. We are talking chiefly about technical updates: the original concept remains unchanged. The musical ideas, for their part, are constantly evolving: we know each other and have more and more experience performing the works together. One important change for me is that I would like for us to become the second in the world, after Bayreuth, to realise Wagner’s dream of closing out Das Rheingold with six harps. This seemed impossible previously, since orchestra pits do not have enough space for six harps, which is why it is reduced versions that are performed everywhere. Müpa Budapest, however, offers the opportunity to position additional musicians partly on the stage and partly on the balcony, and this is how the six harps can be played for the first time.

How do the directing and Müpa Budapest, as a venue, affect your musical interpretation?

– Everything that happens on the stage affects the performance and affects my conducting. I believe that this is true for everyone, including for those who deny it. The most important thing is to exploit the unique possibilities of the singers and the orchestra members and not to change them. If somebody plays nicely at a piano volume, then I need to ask for more piano. If someone has an extremely big voice or sound, then I have to repeatedly ask them to sing or play at full blast. In practical terms, I change minute details in the performances based on who our current collaborators are. In our production, the acoustics at Müpa Budapest continue to be a key factor. They provide an opportunity to perform chamber music, enabling us to show various nuances in the quieter passages, and this must be exploited. At the Metropolitan Opera, the differences between piano and pianissimo vanish; one has to concentrate on other things there.

– Wagner has many different faces. How would you describe the Wagner whom you are able to show in the current production of the Ring at Müpa Budapest?

– The Ring has many different faces. The Ring is an entire world that contains everything. Most of all, the psychological relationships between the characters, which I can bring into the foreground better at Müpa Budapest than I can anywhere else. I have more opportunities to convey the germinating feelings between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of Die

Walküre and to shape the Forest Murmurs in the second act of Siegfried, when Siegfried pours out his heart talking with a little bird and daydreams about who his mother could have been. These are the kind of psychologically interesting and philosophical aspects that are lost on a big stage, but come through in their totality here.

– You have stated several times that one of the important aims of the Budapest Wagner Days is to convince as many people as possible, across as wide-ranging an audience as possible, of the intensity of Wagner’s music. How does this current concept serve this aim?

– I have never believed that Wagner does not speak to everyone. The widespread opinion about Wagner is that his music is excessively slow, lengthy and boring. This is simply not true. If a performance of one of Wagner’s works is boring, then it is the conductor who is at fault, not Wagner. I have declared war on this view and wish to persuade young people not to believe these prejudices. The plot of the Ring is a permanently relevant story, just like The Lord of the Rings. The legend of how much power and money are cursed and how much one can yearn for something that will destroy them are present in every genre, and it is always a very timely one. It is a timeless human idea that is modern in every era. I believe that the Ring is highly modern even today, and this is what I have to show to the audience.

– By what musical means can this effect be conveyed?

– Wagner was a product of his era and can only be approached as such. In the second half of the 19th century, orchestras started to grow larger and larger. This is when it first became possible to perform works with an orchestra not of 40 members, but with 80 or 120 musicians. The fact that someone makes extensive use of new elements of his own era does not necessarily entail that these elements constitute the essence of the work. The emotions that Sieglinde feels when she gazes at Siegmund in Die Walküre was also expressed by Schubert and Mozart, although they only needed three or four instruments to do it, not 25. But it was not the important thing for Wagner, either, that he was expressing it with 25 instruments or more or fewer. When it comes to an orchestra’s sound, I don’t believe that there is any difference between a full symphonic orchestra and a string quartet. I have to achieve the same level of subtlety with a symphonic orchestra that a string quartet achieves, and a string quartet has to play with the same drama and fire that a symphony orchestra plays an opera.

– It is a unique aspect that at the Budapest Wagner Days festival, the entire Ring will be played over the course of four consecutive nights. What is it that made you decide on this concept more than ten years ago and stick with it ever since?

– Wagner was emphatic that the audience should get to hear the Ring on four successive nights. I am not in the habit of making wholesale transplants of a composer’s wishes if I do not understand exactly what they wanted and why. My task is to make Wagner’s conviction my own conviction and to be able to explain why I followed what he described rather than just doing it because that is how he described it. It would not work that way. This is the kind of intense journey that cannot really be interrupted. The Ring has an entirely different effect when it is performed in four days than it does over the course of ten or 15 days, as it is staged in other venues. Naturally, it is much easier in technical terms to split up the tetralogy, and it is certainly simpler to plan the rehearsals too. I have conducted the dismantled Ring elsewhere, and I have always felt that the four-day staging is an absolutely special thing. I understood precisely why Wagner wanted it this way, and I would like for the audience to experience this as well.

– How would you express the impact that comes through differently this way, when it is performed over four days? What might have been the purpose of Wagner’s thinking?

– In the Ring, it is extremely important to remember that the melodies evoke what has happened previously. This is the reason for the leitmotifs, which exercise their true impact when the scene to which they refer was performed immediately beforehand. Interruptions make it like going to see a play or an opera an act at a time, with its magic fading during the intervals. One has to immerse oneself in Wagner’s music: it is impossible to come out, go back in and then come out again. Naturally, there has to be a little bit of a break, as people have to eat and sleep, but this pause must not last for too long. This is the only way that the impact of the technique of using motifs can be truly intense.

– How does the Ring work on you during the rest of the year? How does it change from year to year?

I cannot step in the same river twice. As one grows older, one acquires new experiences and sees the world differently. That is how I see the Ring differently. I do not see it the same way as I did when I was 30 or when I was 40. I always realise more and more new truths. For me, the Ring is always the same and, at the same time, entirely different – just like Heraclitus’s river. Art is always about creating associations, about making the beholder realise that the same thing that they are seeing also happens to them and to help them experience their own emotions and thoughts.

Of the 2019 updates, perhaps the most extensive was reconceiving and reshooting the film used as the set, along with the comprehensive task of getting it ready for the stage. Endre Tóth asked producer László Bederna and film director Péter Fazakas from the Szupermodern Filmstúdió Budapest about this work.

– As I understand it, this is your first time working on an opera production. What challenges did you face in the course of the work?

Péter Fazakas: Before discussing the challenges and the unique aspects arising from the genre, I think it is worth pointing out that we are talking about a background projection serving as a stage set. We are not interacting directly with the opera, but with the directing, or rather, the directing of the different productions. In any case, our task is thus to create something that fits into a larger and broader directorial concept and the performances themselves, meaning that, as part of a larger system, we have to think, in effect, like applied artists. First of all, we have to transpose the vision, concept, message and metaphors in the director’s head so that they will be as exciting as possible in a visual, cinematic format – all while taking into account the technical and financial resources at our disposal and the time constraints. Naturally, hearing the opera, we also approach the work as creative artists, and draw sources from it in order to complement the production and colour it with other ideas. We can speak about a joint creative process interspersed with an exchange of ideas, in which the opera director is the chief.

László Bederna: In a production of a work of total art like this one, the opera singing is the leading artistic branch, but there is also ballet on the stage and, as a third layer, the film as well. These elements, however, are continuously communicating with each other. The task of the film is highly multi-layered: in some places it projects symbols on the backdrop and provides atmosphere, while in others it functions as a set element. There are times when it gets a specific dramaturgical role, but there are also examples of when it creates illusions, or depicts a spectacular projection of one character or another. The length of the operas expands our task into a marathon, which is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. The humility shown toward the music is essential: we are constantly listening to Wagner’s music and create the background projection based on subtle timings in the music. This really is a genre of the applied arts, but certain parts of it are very important for understanding the opera.

– Have you developed a fondness for opera as a genre? Wagner could be described as a fairly strong start…

PF: I had not previously really been absorbed by opera. I listen to quite a bit more – relatively speaking – classical music, but specifically mostly contemporary works. I was deeply struck by the recognition of how much it all accords – and now I’m thinking primarily of popular American films and television series and comic books – with the mainstream culture of today: the dramaturgy, how the characters are constructed, the drama of the music, the motifs linked to the different characters, the subtle and short-range rhetorical structure of the music. All of this allows one to conclude that mainstream popular culture drew a tremendous amount from Wagner, and at the same time, it also indicates that Wagner was extraordinarily modern in his own era.

LB: I attended the opera quite often as a child, but only because I was forced to by my parents, I was not particularly keen on going. And then later on, at university, I listened to a little bit. In my career so far, I’ve primarily been engaged with advertisements – a 30-second genre, so it was quite a major shift to work in the world of a 14-hour opera tetralogy. But I very much enjoy the intellectual challenges, and ever since receiving the commission, I’ve listened to and watched all four operas around five times, so I believe I’m starting to get to know them: Wagner is incredibly rich and inventive. Every week I find a new interesting part and discover new motifs or symbols in the music. The different appearances of the characters, the storytelling and the richness of the symbols also all make Wagner unique. We, for our part, are attempting to translate all this into a modern visual language.

– What kind of tasks and ideas came to mind when you first accepted the work, and how did the reality differ from your expectations?

PF: Naturally, our cinematic imaginations took off, incorporating the visual worlds of Game of Thrones, Vikings, and similar series. Then Hartmut Schörghofer kept pointing out that the music is the most important part, and that our job is to support it: the film cannot take over the leading role in the production. In addition, we also have to contend with the time and budgetary restraints. The amount of data to be processed and the scale of the set of equipment required might be unprecedented in Hungary. For all this, a production process had to be set up, and this was Laci’s task. The technical limitations and the need for rationality both meant that we had to rethink the execution.

– Fundamentally, this new film builds on the concept of the previous one, and the changes are primarily technical. What is being changed? Could you give a few examples of what this technical modernisation is all about?

BL: Essentially everything is changing; visually we have manufactured a completely new projection. The previous material was in SD. We, however, are skipping HD altogether in order to work in 4K technology. All of this across an 11x3 metre screen for 14 hours: this is a quantity of data that can be measured in terabytes. Many, many pixels have to be positioned very precisely in both time and space, as many parts of the film, as live video clips, have to start at certain musical cues. It’s not just a matter of having to film and edit the content: it also has to be synchronised with the performances. With Wagner, nothing is accidental, and so everything in the video has to be depicted with great precision. In one scene, for example, we have to show the meeting of – and conflict between – fire and water in a composite system, based on an imagined visual design, by positioning several graphic layers over each other. Known as composite art, this technique often employs three or four sources for a single image: we layer different filmed images and computer generated elements one over the other. It’s the same as if we were creating an image in Photoshop, except in this case it is animated video we are talking about, and everything has to be put together frame by frame. This technique is not widely used in Hungary, least of all in theatrical productions. A third of the video material is computer generated and we have eight animators working just on the CGI details alone. We reconceived and reshot every single scene: nothing will be exactly as it was previously. With Péter and artistic director Zsuzsa Koszti, we attempted to look through all of the previous film and figure out how we could make it better, more beautiful, more clever and more enjoyable. Apart from the film, the choreography for the dancers is also changing. I believe that what we are creating now is the projection that Hartmut Schörghofer conceived of more than ten years ago, except the technical limitations of the time made it impossible to realise then.

– In terms of concept, what changes are there in the new version?

PF: As far as the plot goes, there have only been minor changes in one or two places; for example, the depiction of the home of the Gibichungs. Previously, it was presented as an empty managerial world. There was clearly a bit of a critical edge to this, but we are doing away with it, in part because that world is no longer the same as it was ten years ago, and also because it might not even be that interesting. Here, for example, we are going to use mountains as the background. While in the previous projection, all kinds of things might have been a bit more “earthbound”, our version will be visually somewhat more elaborate and larger in scale, and in terms of atmosphere will fit into Wagner’s original ideas better. At the same time, the director’s ideas have remained untouched.

LB: Nature plays a bigger role in this projection, with such images leading the viewers through various changes of mood. There will be a great many Alpine landscapes to see, as well as clouds and storms. The characters in the background have been removed, and we are replacing them with much more abstract images.

– How do you collaborate with the opera’s director, Hartmut Schörghofer?

LB: He is very much in demand as an artist, and this is not his only project. In an ideal world, we would be working together with him here throughout, but since this is not possible, we do our work continuously and send him the finished materials. He looks at them and responds in writing.

PF: The humility that Harmut exhibits toward Wagner’s music is incredible: he won’t even try to force any concept that isn’t there in the opera just in order to dazzle the audience with his own idea. Regardless of this, a great many modern elements appear in the production, with the visual world of a large city and the era from when the opera originates both coming to life.

It is important for him that the intellectual, emotional and sensual unity of the opera remain throughout the course of the entire story. We prepared for the first meeting jointly with the creative staff. We had a two-day discussion during which we coordinated our ideas scene by scene. By the end of the second day, we were completely exhausted, but it was a very positive experience, as Hartmut got a sense of our views and saw that we wanted to do more than simply get the task over with, but had no wish to change his ideas. He is a very open person, one who respects the other branches of the arts, including our own abilities and the energy and creativity that we add.

– How do the producer and the director split the work?

LB: I first have to mention that we have an entire team working with us. For my part, however, I can say that I’m probably more deeply immersed in the entire work process than a producer generally is, since in the traditional scenario, my only job would be to hire people, divide up the tasks and then lean back and watch. In this case, that is not what is happening. I went on the shoots and I’m also the production manager on the post-production work, in daily contact with the director. I think that Péter and I work together well; what I do, essentially, is try to create the conditions he needs to do his work.

PF: For a producer, Laci has indeed taken on a great many additional tasks, but this probably could not be otherwise. I had no time available when we had to dive into the Danube with a camera and film a few scenes there. So he went and led the group, meaning that in that instance he was performing the tasks of a director. If a metaphor is required, he is like a minister of war who, if needed, can go out to the battlefield as the commander; in fact, if somebody in the front rank is missing a sword, he’ll grab one and cut down the enemy himself.

– To conclude, do you have any behind-the-scenes secrets or interesting or exciting stories about the filming to share with the audience?

LB: We had seven shooting days at extremely varied sites. In Austria, we had to film on a glacier, and we immersed ourselves in the Danube, which stands in for the Rhine, and worked for an entire night in a pool, with divers, in the Rhine-maidens’ scenes. In the underwater filming, three divers were submerged for 12 hours, without coming out or changing clothes, and only eating a single sandwich – without leaving the water to do that, either. The dedication of the Hungarian staff, to withstand any conditions for 12 hours, is incredible, in my opinion. Another exciting thing was how worried I was that our older Rhine-maidens would cope with 12 hours of all-night filming. But it turned out that they could handle it better than the young ones. Then it was hard to find snow, as we missed the early-January snowfall, so we had to go to Austria. There are also some interesting behind-the-scenes stories relating to the animation work: when the curse is shown, the runes are engraved on a leather surface – really a taut pig hide –and when the knife cuts into it, blood drips out. This cannot be filmed live, so the compositors had to place 16 layers on top of each other: each letter had to be animated individually.