"ORCHESTRA TUNING UP" "ORCHESTRA PLAYS" "They call this the Green Hill." "And at the summit sits a legendary theatre." "Well, for anyone who loves Wagner as I do, this place is" "Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca, Graceland, all rolled into one." "Bayreuth, the home of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre." "And I'm here for the first time in my life." "It's what I've always dreamed of doing." "Oh, look, ticket office!" "Eek!" "Every summer, they stage a festival here dedicated to the music of Richard Wagner." "I've received an invitation to go behind closed doors as the new season takes shape." "It's fabulous, you don't often get a chance to see this." "There's so much to look at." "But only one place to start." "And that's with the music." "Wow, this is amazing." "Lucky beggars!" "As always, the centrepiece of this year's festival is The Ring Cycle." "Four monumental music dramas inspired by ancient myth." "This is a rehearsal for the second of them." "Look." "Valkyrie, second act, just the second act." "My God, there it all is." "Every note of it." "Shouldn't really be looking, he's got his notes here." "It's cheating, whoops!" "Put that down." "Quick, I'll be in trouble!" "And there are the valkyries, look." "Guten tag." "Hello." "A valkyrie, if you've not had the pleasure of meeting one before, is a female goddess." "A daughter of Wotan, the king of the gods." "Three, four, five of them, we're three missing, plus Brunhilde." "Of course, you stand waiting for a valkyrie for hours and then they all come at once." "MUSIC: "The Ride of The Valkyries" by Wagner" "SHE SINGS IN GERMAN" "It must be the most famous Wagner tune of them all." "But music is only one element of his genius." "He was also an extraordinary dramatist." "And his revolutionary work demanded the creation of a unique theatre to stage it in." "It's just fabulous to see this." "I never imagined in all my life that I'd see a rehearsal of the beginning of act three of The Valkyrie." "The score sounds so funny on the piano, it almost sounds" "It took Wagner a lifetime to create this temple to his art." "It's still driven today by the ideals which inspired him." "Dedicated to excellence in performance and production." "Don't know which opera this is from, some mud made of rubber." "And real grass." "It's just amazing, the number of personnel that must be involved just in the stitching of costumes, let alone the designing and the finishing and the fitting." "It's an incredible thing." "Oh look, and more here." "That could be Loge, the god of fire." "I don't know, someone like that." "Excellent." "THEY SPEAK GERMAN" "An ocelot, my goodness me!" "But it wasn't killed for the production?" "No." "Not at all, it's a very old one." "A very old one." "Hi, I'm Stephen." "Hi." "You're playing a valkyrie, you're playing Rossweisse." "Oh, it's quite a costume, it's fantastic." "Wow!" "SHE SINGS IN GERMAN" "Yeah!" "Oh, I wish I were a valkyrie sometimes." "Fabric a-go-go." "These boxes, even the boxes are Wagnerian." "Parsifal women, Ring 2006 Siegfried." "It's just a..." "It's a treasure house, isn't it?" "Stoff." "Goodbye." "Not sure if I was allowed in." "You might be wondering why I'm so excited about being here." "I must have been 11 or 12 when I first heard Wagner's music on my father's gramophone." "It was the overture to Tannhauser, one of his earlier operas." "And it did something most extraordinary to me." "I've always loved music, I've always been hopeless at performing it." "Couldn't really play an instrument, certainly can't sing but it's made me do things inside, it's released forces within me." "And no music has done it like Wagner's." "To experience the music I love in the composer's own theatre is something I've dreamed of doing for as long as I can remember." "But it's no secret that my passion was also shared by him." "And, like me, he felt the magnetic pull of Bayreuth." "I'm Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust, so before I take my seat in the Festival House, I need to feel sure I'm doing the right thing." "To understand why this place exerts such a powerful hold on all of us who've loved Wagner's music, you need to understand what it meant to the composer himself." "It's a million miles away from the type of theatre where his career began." "Good lord!" "OPERA MUSIC" "This is everything Wagner detested about opera, a place to show off, to be seen." "A place to whisper and talk and stare across at your rivals and neighbours and social betters and social inferiors and all the snobbery and nonsense that still pertains in so much of opera, of course." "Wagner hated all that." "But it's funny, you've got to admit it's funny." "Good gracious." "By his early thirties," "Wagner had worked in a string of places like this." "He'd also written six operas, including Tannhauser, the piece which first ignited my passion for the music." "But his radical ideas weren't confined to the stage." "In 1848, he was working as musical director in Dresden's Royal Court." "This was a year of political revolutions in Europe and Wagner soon joined the struggle." "He sided with the left wing nationalists, who wanted to replace the princely German states with a unified nation." "When the uprising failed, he found himself a wanted man with a price on his head." "He fled here to Switzerland, where he lived for the next 12 years, and plotted the theatrical revolution which would change the face of opera forever." "Do you think this particular landscape has a connection with Wagner's music?" "Oh yes, it was the first time he'd seen the mountains at all in his life when he came to Switzerland in 1849 after the revolution, after he was thrown out and had to escape." "And he writes very enthusiastically about the scenery." "I mean, he didn't want his music or his opera to be artificial." "He keeps on saying "naturlich"." "He very often described stage directions which have to do with the mountains." "Mountains, clouds, cliffs, rocks and so on." "Yes." "They're all described and then of course they have the association with the Swiss landscape." "So it seems to be clear that Switzerland was more than just a little place to wait while the storm died down?" "Oh yes, I think Switzerland played a great role in his life." "Before he fled Germany, Wagner's career had started to take off." "Now, aged 36, he was homeless and virtually destitute." "But he wasn't defeated." "In Switzerland he began to dream of creating something new and extraordinary." "He believed the greatest art form that mankind ever had was Greek tragedy." "Not because of the nature of Greece or the nature of tragedy but because" "Greek tragedy encompassed all the arts." "Acting, verse, music, dance, costume, spectacle, chorus." "But more than that, it involved the whole community, all people." "It wasn't a snobbish, elitist thing." "It was a ceremony, a celebration, but more than that, it was a religious ceremony." "And on top of that too, its subject matter was myth." "And Wagner believed very passionately that the very nature of myth was universal, because it was outside time." "It wasn't about the bourgeois or the aristocracy." "It wasn't stories of love affairs in history." "It was outside time, almost like science fiction, but science fiction set in the past, if you like." "It could speak to everybody, whatever their condition." "So his revolutionary idea was to have what he called the total work of art, the "Gesamtkunstwerk", and that, therefore, the word "opera" was pointless." "He hated grand opera, with its flounces and its absurd trills and ornaments." "Obviously at its greatest, like Mozart, he venerated it, but he wanted to cleanse the theatre and cleanse art, of all this nonsense, and to get back to these elementals and to make a theatre for the people which was music and dance and drama and everything." "And he was going to be the one to create it and he was going to be responsible for all aspects of it." "And he put this together in an essay he wrote here in Switzerland, which was about the future work of art." "And it was a future work of art that he was to make into a present work of art, the Wagnerian music-drama." "To bring to life his Utopian ideas, Wagner conceived an opera about the mythical dragon-slaying hero, Siegfried." "Over time his ambitions grew." "Instead of one opera, he would write four, an epic exploration of the conflict between our appetite for power and our hunger for love." "It begins with the struggle for control of a magical ring, which grants its owner unimaginable power, but only if they swear to renounce love." "HE SINGS IN GERMAN" "It would take more than 20 years for Wagner to realise his vision, with the first performances of The Ring Cycle at his purpose-built theatre in Bayreuth." "In the meantime, exiled and penniless, he had more prosaic concerns to deal with." "In Zurich, he was fortunate to meet a couple whose fabulous wealth was matched by their enthusiasm for his talent." "There was Otto, who was a silk merchant, with a big interest in America, and his wife, Mathilde." "Yes, and Wesendonck was quite a patron of the arts and a fan of Wagner, is that right?" "That's right." "It was his writings, really, that caught Mathilde's eye at first." "Oh, more than his music?" "At first." "She began reading his writings and he took a shine to Mathilde immediately and took an even bigger shine to Otto's money." "Yes." "He was writing to friends about it within just a few weeks." "Really?" "He'd met this rather nice woman with this very, very wealthy husband." "Wagner was a married man, although his relationship with his wife Minna was tempestuous." "He had enjoyed his share of affairs over the years, but his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck had a special intensity." "No-one knows exactly what went on behind closed doors here, but it's clear that the relationship fired Wagner's creativity." "He wrote music inspired by her poetry, including a piece which later evolved into one of his greatest operas." "On the 23rd December, 1857, Wagner performed a song of" "Mathilde Wesendonck's that he dedicated to her, called Traume, Dreams." "He orchestrated it and we're about to hear it in exactly the room it was first performed, here at the villa Wesendonck." "Maestro." "MUSIC: "Traume" by Wagner" "Wagner's Swiss exile was a period of intense creativity." "But here, as elsewhere in the story, a shadow falls across his sublime music." "In Switzerland, he wrote an article called Jewishness In Music, which stains his reputation to this day." "It is ornamented, if you like, or anti-ornamented, with some genuinely revolting pieces of anti-Semitism." "He talks constantly about a kind of..." "A physical, visceral level of repulsion, instinctive repulsion, that "we" feel towards the Jews." "So there is a real anti-Semitism in that sense, of, literally, as people to be in a room with, they are revolting, is suggested." "And that is, to us, so horrible as to be, you know, just slappable and ghastly." "We put out of consideration people who can talk like that, especially these days, especially after the Holocaust." "Anti-Semitism back then, of course, wasn't associated with the Holocaust." "It was socially acceptable in a way that we couldn't imagine today, thankfully." "But Wagner was by no means alone." "Anti-Semitism was widespread in 19th-century Germany, even amongst political liberals like Wagner." "But his outburst had a personal dimension too, fuelled by his jealousy of the celebrated Jewish composers Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer." "Yes, Mendelssohn is a well-known composer to this day." "People love his Violin Concerto and much of his...octets, A Midsummer Night's Dream..." "He's a very popular composer." "Meyerbeer's less well-known." "In his day he was Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber all rolled into one." "Yes." "He was the most successful composer there was in the 1840s, 1850s." "Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, they had money, they had success, they had nice lives." "Wagner was small, ugly, virtually destitute, and had tried to make a success in Paris and had failed miserably." "Yes." "And he wanted to vent his anger on someone, and the two most natural people happened to be the two most successful people he'd ever known." "There are some people that believe, and I tend to agree with them, that" "Wagner needed to create some kind of a major disturbance in his life." "He needed some kind of weird kick..." "Yeah. ..to get him going." "He needed an enemy, perhaps." "An enemy, something or other, or an enemy within himself." "He needed to disturb..." "He needed to muddy the waters around him." "Yeah." "In order to write the music that he did." "I have this fantasy." "It's typically pathetic and typically a fantasy, so very me, in which I go back in time as an Englishman and I write letters to Wagner." "I keep writing, saying, I have to talk to you, and I say to him, listen, you're on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century and future generations will forget that, simply because of" "this nasty little essay that you're writing, and because of the effect it'll have, unless, you know..." "And I think, what would he say to that?" "If he had known that the person who was most hurt by his anti-Semitism was himself." "It isn't easy to confront Wagner, is it?" "No, it's not." "It's often very unpleasant." "Yeah." "But just because he may have been a nasty little man and a nasty anti-Semite doesn't mean that his music is not as supreme as it is." "If this sounds familiar, that's because it grew out of Traume, the piece we've just heard." "It's the love duet from Act II of Wagner's opera Tristan Und Isolde." "In 1857 he abandoned work on The Ring to focus on this new piece, the story of a forbidden love affair between the knight Tristan and Isolde, who's betrothed to another man." "It's based on ancient legend but the music was strikingly avant-garde, pushing at the boundaries of conventional harmony." "HE SINGS IN GERMAN" "And it all starts with this." "The so-called Tristan chord." "It may not look revolutionary but it must have astonished the first audiences who heard it." "Rather than progressing to a harmonious resolution, as musical convention expected, it evolves into another unresolved discord instead." "I've come to the house where Wagner once lived, to explore that cluster of notes which opened the door to modern music." "PIANO PLAYS" "Stefan, have you got a spare right hand?" "Hi." "You're playing on Wagner's piano." "This was given to him, I can see, as a..." "This is a pretty good piano, a gift from the Steinway factory to Richard Wagner in 1876." "Ah, to celebrate the beginning..." "The beginning of the festival." "Yeah." "Will you let me just try and play the..." "Of course." "The famous chord." "I'm not going to do any more than that, but this chord, here, I want you to explain why it's..." "It's the first chord of Tristan in the Prelude." "Yes." "I'm playing the Tristan chord on Wagner's own piano." "I have to pinch myself to see that I'm not dreaming!" "Yes, very important." "There it is." "The famous Tristan chord." "Yeah." "Will I come up with the other two notes so that...?" "Then you get this." "That is it." "The E and the A-flat." "That's it." "Yes." "This chord, if someone was to look it up on Wikipedia, they'd find a huge entry, just on this chord." "What is it about this chord?" "It's a chord of tension, of longing." "Yeah." "The first voice goes up, like you played, right?" "Longing, yeah." "And the other voices go down." "So this is a depression." "And this at the same time." "'This is where Wagner's genius as 'a composer merges with his brilliance as a dramatist." "'His music keeps you on the edge of your seat, longing for 'the unbearable tension of those opening chords to be resolved." "'It almost happens in Act Two, when the lovers meet in secret to consummate their passion.'" "It sounds vulgar but it really is a coitus interruptus, in the Liebesnacht, the great duet where..." "You think it is going to arrive then, don't you?" "Yes." "And then in comes..." "It's very erotic." "In comes..." "Yeah." ""Rette dich, Tristan!" happens and it's..." "STEPHEN SNAPS FINGERS" "It's as if people are literally in bed with each other and they are actually making love and just as the climax is about to arrive... bang, someone comes in and..." "HE BEGINS TO PLAY" "MUSIC CONTINUES" "And then..." ""Rette dich, Tristan!" Exactly, yeah." "It's fantastic." "Interrupted." "Such a moment, isn't it?" "Now I show you... the non-interruption, the transformation." "'Finally, after four hours of the most glorious, gut-wrenching music, 'the psychological drama launched by that famous opening chord 'reaches its tragic climax.'" "The word is "lust", isn't it?" "Now, for the last time, the longing motif comes back." "Chromatic scale, going upwards." "Leading." "That E is going to come..." "Transitional." "To transcendence." "Just a moment, now." "Oh, I played the wrong note!" "It's not so easy!" "It's not." "The piano-playing." "I get terribly excited." "Yes." "But, my goodness, to have been even a small part of it." "You've made me the happiest man in Germany today." "There's nothing to say." "No, there is nothing to say." "That's exactly the point." "Extremely good music." "In 1860, Wagner's Swiss exile finally ended." "He was 47 and his music had made him internationally famous." "But he still had enormous debts, thanks to his itinerant lifestyle and legendary extravagance." "To raise cash, he toured Europe as a conductor." "Ooh." "Ooh, look." "I'm pretty sure" " I don't have any Russian - but that must be the Russian for Ring, there, beginning with "Ko."" "So there it is, Richard Wagner's Tetralogy of the Ring of the Nibelung." "And then the top right, Mariinsky Theatre." "Looks gorgeous." "Let's go in and see what it's like." "The Mariinsky Theatre has always been a landmark building in Russian cultural life, famous for its opera and ballet." "You might be more familiar with the name given to it during the Soviet period, when it was known as the Kirov." "They're preparing a new staging of The Ring, masterminded by this man, conductor Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky's artistic director." "There are no horned helmets or Aryan ice-maidens on show here." "This production is inspired by the myths and legends of Gergiev's homeland, North Ossetia, a reminder that Wagner's work is open to endless re-interpretation." "Wagner actually came to Russia and conducted some orchestral passages from his works which were in progress and had been produced elsewhere, but some of them, for the first time, here." "The Ride Of The Valkyries, for example, was first heard in Russia." "He was paid a princely sum to come and conduct in Russia, and whatever people thought of the music - and many people were affronted and astounded and simply uncomprehending." "It was very revolutionary." "No one had ever heard anything like it " "But whatever people thought of that, they were really impressed by his conducting." "He faced, with his back to the audience, the orchestra." "That may seem normal to us but in its day that was considered very revolutionary." "I think it will be totally impossible to imagine the history of conducting without a figure like Richard Wagner." "Not only because he was the one who decided to turn his back to the audience, which was a revolution, but also to control the orchestra this way, and to get so much result from direct eye-contact with the musicians." "Which is a thing you do, as well." "Isn't it?" "'Yes.'" "'It is very difficult to describe into words what is conducting, 'or what is conducting Wagner operas, but the tempo is very important.'" "There is a moment when you have to release all the power of orchestra." "Then there is a moment when you have to support, totally, the voice." "Yes." "Or some of the voices on stage, and then there is a moment when you have to create a mysterious atmosphere." "Without this mystery Wagner is not Wagner." "'I wondered if it was important for you...' to take the German out of Wagner, because, to me, he's an international composer and he doesn't belong to a country any more than Shakespeare or Beethoven do," "and I wondered if that's important to you." "I think it is a very interesting question, especially if we talk about The Ring." "There is not once... a mentioning of Germany or Deutschland, so I think it's a story of the world, and I think Wagner himself, being quite a smart man, and because he also was not only composing music" "but famously he was also writing, preparing libretto, and he understood that The Ring is about greed, hatred, love..." "It's about nature, it's about power, it's about domination." "Yes, betrayal, treachery..." "Betrayal..." "And then nature being kept in peace and harmony." "It's not German, German, German." "I think it's a world and it shouldn't be associated with the Nazis..." "No, that's really important..." "..Really, because if we are able to do it after the Second World War, where this city was so, so destroyed, you know." "Incredible, yes." "That means any country can do it." "APPLAUSE" "Wagner's Russian adventure was a triumph." "He was even sounded out about taking over as artistic director of the Mariinsky." "Had he accepted, there might never have been a Bayreuth Festival House." "He might never have completed The Ring Cycle." "His story would have had a very different, and probably less controversial, ending." "But despite the adulation, the pull of home was too strong for Wagner to resist." "He returned to Germany instead, where the money he'd made on tour was soon swallowed up by his huge debts." "By 1864, Wagner's life had reached its lowest ebb." "He was no longer a young firebrand, in danger of being imprisoned for his revolutionary politics." "He was a 50-year-old in danger of being imprisoned for his simply astonishing debt." "He'd written Tristan but that had been declared unproduceable by most people who had seen it or tried to rehearse it." "His relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck was over." "His marriage was over." "It seemed his career was over." "All that bright promise." "And how could he possibly give the world these preposterously ambitious music-dramas?" "If he were to write a wish-list, I suppose he'd come up with one thing." "He would need someone so powerful, so extraordinarily rich, that they could write off his debts, they could build him the theatre he wanted, they could guarantee him the posterity that he knew his genius merited." "But that would be asking for a miracle." "On March 10th, 1864, a miracle happened." "Quite unexpectedly, Maximilian II, King of Bavaria, died." "He left his opulent kingdom to his son Ludwig, a handsome, eccentric 18-year-old, and one of Ludwig's first actions on acceding to the throne was to send for his hero, the artist he most adored in all the world, Richard Wagner." "Wagner was so used to fleeing the debt collector that it took Ludwig's messenger some time to track him down with the good news." "The king was offering to pay off all his debts and bankroll his future work." "And if that wasn't proof enough of his passion, Ludwig went on to build what must surely be the world's most extravagant fan letter." "Schloss Neuschwanstein wasn't completed until 1886, three years after Wagner's death." "So he never had a chance to wander through these extraordinary spaces, all inspired by his work." "But he had something better, the King's blank cheque." "After years of struggle and disappointment," "Wagner's dreams of artistic freedom must finally have seemed attainable." "What a patron to have." "No-one ever built something like this for Mozart or Beethoven." "So what is it about Wagner's music which inspires some men to seize on his stories and ideas, things which belong in the theatre and seek to give them substance in the real world instead?" "In the middle ages, Nuremberg was capital of the German cultural renaissance, a backdrop to Wagner's opera, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg." "Later of course, Hitler chose it as the stage for his infamous propaganda rallies." "Well, the thing is," "Joachim, I'm familiar with the idea that whenever there's a, you know, footage of the Nuremberg rallies with Hitler standing on that podium over there, usually someone has decided to play Wagner in the background." "But you have theories that actually Wagner is more deeply embedded in the modern Nazi Nuremberg." "Yes, I think so." "First of all, when you take all these party rallies that we had here, in the evening then, there was a celebration of the Meistersingers of Nuremberg..." "Right, one of Wagner's truly great operas." "Yes, yes." "And they played that and then came here, didn't they?" "To this enormous, what was then, how many soldiers would be here?" "I'm sure more than 100,000." "More than 100,000." "From all over Germany, they gathered here." "And the party faithful would've listened to The Meistersingers first." "In the evening, they listened to The Meistersingers...." "And then they come here..." "Yes." "And they played it themselves." "Hitler loved The Meistersingers." "He loved to whistle the tunes to his guests." "He could whistle all the tunes of The Meistersingers." "God." "Yes, he liked that." "There's a certain scene that's triggered in him, I think, that whole rally idea." "Yes." "It was the third act." "There you have all the guilds of Nuremburg marching onto the stage and you have the costume masses carrying flags and their guild signs and symbols they're singing together and this is on the small stage of the opera and then transferred or even translated into reality in this huge field here in Nuremberg." "So they perverted the style of Wagner, if you like." "The emotional impact of the music and the grandeur and the spectacle, which does have an enormous effect on audiences who love Wagner." "You do get turned into a jelly by the end of the evening, it's so extreme." "Yes, that was the first step." "The second was that he thought one could teach the Germans to see the world in a way which you find in Wagner operas, in a dialectic way." "That you have a protagonist and an antagonist." "A good and an evil." "That you have an Iago and a Desdemona or in the Wagner case, it is Siegfried and the Dragon." "Now, if you have this in the opera, it is perfectly all right because the opera needs the tension of drama, between the good and evil." "But as soon as you turn it into reality, it becomes a devastating political fantasy and ideology." "Of course, a defender of Wagner like me, although I'm not a complete defender of Wagner, would say Hitler saw one side of Wagner and we tend to see Hitler's side of Wagner because Hitler was such a huge figure in the 20th century" "and because his taste for Wagner was so enormous, we tend to say, "What did Hitler see in Wagner?"" "And we look through Hitler's viewfinder of this enormous man and see one little area like that, instead of seeing the whole, the whole thing." "If Joachim's right, that makes Nuremberg the sinister descendant of Ludwig's castle, Neuschwanstein." "A monstrous example of the way Wagner's music inspires some men to tear down the boundary which ought to separate fantasy from fact." "The railing there surrounds on three sides the area known as the Fuhrer's Kanzel." "The Fuhrer's podium and that's where Hitler stood." "That's where tourists to this day stand." "Others, like me, can't actually bring themselves to go there." "I'm not being over-sensitive, I don't think." "I just don't like, in the same way I'm not very good at picking up guns." "I can do it occasionally, but I don't think I want to put myself in that position." "I don't want to..." "I don't want to hedge around here." "I am deeply uncomfortable in Nuremberg talking about Wagner." "I realise how close to the Nazi fantasy world Wagner was and how deeply stitched into Hitler's vision of the world." "It's very difficult." "I have to keep reminding myself, and I do it best by simply listening to the music, how unbelievably complicated, ambiguous, emotionally honest, raw, revolutionary, anti-fascist Wagner truly is." "I, I suppose I think of it like this." "Imagine a great, beautiful silk tapestry of infinite colour and complexity, that has been stained indelibly." "It's still a beautiful tapestry of miraculous workmanship and gorgeous colour and silk and texture." "But that stain is real and I'm afraid Hitler and Nazism have stained Wagner." "For some people, that stain ruins the whole work." "For others, it is just something that you have to, have to face up to." "And here's a place, as storm clouds gather in Nuremberg, here's a place to think about such things, I suppose." "By the time he finished work on The Mastersingers, there was a new woman in Wagner's life..." "..Cosima, the daughter of his friend, Franz Liszt." "They married in 1870, after a scandalous affair which almost cost him Ludwig's patronage." "This was the bait that brought Wagner to Bayreuth." "Do you remember it?" "The Baroque rococo extravagance, which is the Margravial Opera House?" "Wagner had resumed work on The Ring Cycle and was searching for a suitable theatre to stage it in." "A helpful friend suggested this place might fit the bill." "Some friend!" "But Wagner liked Bayreuth, conveniently situated at the heart of his royal patron's Bavarian kingdom." "So, if the perfect theatre didn't already exist here, why not build one instead?" "These are the original plans for the Festspeilhaus, constructed by Otto Bruckwald." "And someone's written here..." "That's very nice." ""Die ornamente fort"?" "Yes." "That's Wagner's hand?" "Yes, this is original Wagner's hand." "He got the plans from the architect and you can see he had the idea to make some ornaments." "Typical late 19th century kind of thing." "Yes." "And Wagner wrote "die ornamente fort"." "Yes. "Away with the ornaments", yes." "Some of the cash came from Ludwig, the rest from private donations." "And the city of Bayreuth gifted him the Green Hill to build on." "But there was another grand design for Wagner to complete before the festival could happen." "The final instalment of his four-opera Ring Cycle." "Just, we'll open it." "It's been rebound." "It is rebound, yes." "But it's not a facsimile, actually." "That is the real thing." ""Gotterdammerung"." "There it is, he just takes it and writes it across, quite simple..." "To remind what he's writing." "Yes." "This is the very famous beginning of the prelude." "Yes." "Of the Norns." "And he writes in all the parts, one, two, three, four." "All of these horns, the first violins, the second violins..." "It's written very clearly." "It's beautiful." "Very beautiful." "It's so clear." "You can't make a single mistake here, can you?" "Wow..." "It's like you could conduct from this score." "Yes, I couldn't but someone with musical talent could!" "Me too!" "I'm sure some people will think it's preposterous to get so excited about bits of paper and black notes on lines, but I see and hear worlds come out of these pages." "Dum, dum!" "Dur-dur-dur-dur." "Dum, dum!" "Whole worlds, great worlds that have influenced me and moved me and done things to me that no other art has." "And here, under the last notes, he writes..." ""Achieved..." Finished." "Finished, achieved. "..in Wahnfried on 21st of November, I'll say no more."" "That's fantastic, with a little exclamation mark." "It was more than 20 years since Wagner, penniless and in exile, had first conceived of his masterwork." "Now, at last, the mountain was scaled and The Ring Cycle completed." "And, finally, he had the theatre of his dreams in which to stage it." "Well, here we are. "Memorialising the first ever performance of" ""The Ring Cycle, in the year 1876."" "I wish I'd been there." "Wow." "Here it is." "My hand is on the door." "I know you'll think I'm very over-excited but if this is the temple, this is the sancto sanctorum, the holy of holies." "This is the theatre itself and I've waited all my life really, to enter." "I'm going to do it now." "Ah." "They're at work here, I think they're doing a technical rehearsal of The Mastersingers." "My goodness." "Whatever you think of Wagner's music, no-one can deny this is one of the most revolutionary theatres ever built." "For, I would suggest, the most revolutionary music ever written." "It's fabulous, isn't it?" "Much more classical than I expected because it's quite outside, it is quite staid, it's sort of like a, like an Italian basilica in some ways, isn't it?" "And inside, like an Italian basilica, it's quite gold, I mean not mad by opera house standards, but there's Corinthian composite columns and the gold leaf and everything, it's wonderful." "I'm so excited." "These are quite famous because they're not known for their comfort." "The Ring Cycle is about 18 hours, well it depends, 17 or 18 hours of solid seating." "Most people bring a cushion, I believe." "I must remember to do that when it's my turn." "Everything about this theatre exists to serve the onstage drama." "Every seat has an uninterrupted view." "And the acoustic is legendary." "That's partly by design, partly by happy accident." "The simple wooden floors are original." "Wagner couldn't afford to put in anything more fancy." "But they make a wonderfully resonant sounding board, so they've never been replaced." "But there's another aspect of the design, which makes this auditorium truly unique." "And if you don't immediately spot it, that's exactly the point." "This is where the orchestra is." "The audience can't see a single one of them." "They're all hidden." "It's a unique system, the whole idea is that there's this balance, because the music is just one element of the whole drama." "To Wagner, the drama was a compendium of all the arts together." "The music shouldn't drown the action." "Incredible." "Nowhere else like it in the world." "I never imagined I'd stand centre stage at Bayreuth." "But it's about to get even better." "Look." "The Holy Chair." "It's hard not to talk in terms of relics and religiosity when you're in Bayreuth, but this chair has hosted the bottoms of, well the greatest conductors in the history of music." "Just imagine this." "Oh!" "This is terrible!" "I just feel like such a child, in a sweetshop." "I'm trying to think of an equivalent," "I suppose Lord's Cricket Ground on a Thursday of an Ashes Test." "Maybe the Cavern in Liverpool if you're a Beatles Fan." "But this does it for me." "The 1876 festival was the artistic event of the century." "Wagner's boundless appetite for innovation set a new standard in opera production, which still inspires Bayreuth today." "This is a technical rehearsal for The Mastersingers, directed by his great grand-daughter, Katharina." "That is a unique piece of stage machinery." "It's firmly embedded into the concrete because it's capable of shifting 23 tonnes in a very particular direction." "As we saw, it was built and installed precisely for that one moment in this one opera." "Isn't it amazing?" "Doesn't it show the willpower behind Bayreuth?" "It still exists as it did in Wagner's day." "Wagner, ever the perfectionist, wasn't entirely happy with the performances or the staging of the first productions." "Hardly surprising when you remember he had to make do with the rudimentary technology of a 19th century theatre to bring to life his mythical world of vast underground caverns, mighty rivers and castles in the sky." "We're very high up here." "It's about 75 to 80 feet up and this is the stage below me." "It's making me a bit weird." "There's something slightly surreal about walking around a place so full of such incredible high-tech hydraulic machinery." "It's all beautifully kept and so modern and hearing over it some of the most profoundly beautiful operatic chorus ever." "It's a marvellous mixture and it sums up Wagner as much as anything can." "The demands of the stage and the demands of art coming together." "This is a rehearsal for Siegfried, the third opera of the Ring." "It's an opportunity for the soloists to go through their paces, backed by a full scale Wagnerian orchestra of more than 120 musicians." "ORCHESTRA PRACTICES" "It's wonderful, I don't think I've ever been so close." "It's like being inside a painting." "You're actually inside the texture of the music in a way you could never imagine." "I wish you could believe how happy I was." "You wouldn't." "You'd think I was insane." "You probably do anyway." "Mmm." "Here's the boss." "One of them, anyway." "Eva Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter." "She's recently taken charge of the Festival alongside her sister, Katharina." "This is your first month here, almost, isn't it?" "You're a new girl." "It's... well." "I lived here before, but now I'm a new person here, yes." "In a new position." "It must be a very strange feeling." "I'm back home." "Do you think of Bayreuth as your home?" "I don't know." "I can't answer that." "I was a long time away, but I like it." "You ever get a chance to relax and think yet?" "Not really yet." "I think that will be probably after the festival, when I'm on my holiday." "This is June, when the whole thing starts building to an enormous climax." "Exactly." "I suppose a very pathetic and vulgar question, but do you think he would be surprised that the Bayreuth is still going strong?" "It's seven years, the waiting list for a ticket." "He would be surprised." "Would he expect that?" "He knew he was going to live forever." "Of course." "He did, didn't he?" "I am sure, otherwise why should he have built it here?" "It's true." "It's still astonishing, isn't it?" "That is the very special thing about here, about him, about the music." "The person." "You know also, that means, it's a bit like being an aristocrat." "You know that you are borrowing, as it were, your time from your children, do you know what I mean?" "I don't mean literally your children, but the next generation, and the generation after that, will do new things." "I think you create something in your mind, which is perhaps not..." "No, you don't feel that?" "No, I don't feel!" "You don't feel the idea of posterity, as we would say in England?" "The future?" "Not at the moment." "That's probably good, get on with the present." "I live now, I do my things now, and I hope to do it like people want it and expect it." "With Katharina, with my sister." "I think we are..." "hopefully, we are a good team." "I'm sure." "OK, is that OK?" "Really nice talking to you." "I appreciate it, you are very busy." "Thank you, bye-bye." "Thank you so much." "Greatly appreciate it." "Thank you." "You stay still, or not?" "Yeah, we'll be here for the next three days." "Thanks." "Bye-bye." "(Wagner.)" "Flesh on flesh, I touched a Wagner." "It's pathetic of me, but it's rather wonderful." "Running Bayreuth has always been a family affair." "But I'm not sure I envy the Wagner sisters." "They're under intense scrutiny, as they try to strike the balance between tradition and innovation." "A challenge faced by the family ever since 1883, the year Wagner died." "He's buried here in the garden of his former home, Villa Wahnfried." "You don't get much simpler than that do you?" "Just polished granite in grey." "There he lies." "I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in Bayreuth." "SINGERS PRACTISE" "CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN" "All I want to do now is give myself over to the music and count down the days to opening night." "SINGING STOPS" "CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN" "SINGERS PRACTISE" "CONDUCTOR SPEAKS IN GERMAN" "SINGING PRACTISE" "But there's another character who refuses to leave the story." "This is Hitler in September 1923 on his very first visit to Bayreuth." "He'd come to pay his respects at the master's tomb, and to meet the British-born writer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain." "Chamberlain was a racist, who championed Aryan supremacy and vilified the Jews." "He was also an influential member of the Wagner household, through marriage to the composer's daughter." "Long before he became Chancellor, Hitler was embraced by some in Bayreuth with open arms." "It wasn't a question of the Wagner family and Bayreuth welcoming Hitler because, in a cowardy-custard fashion, he was the great leader of Germany and they didn't dare offend him." "Quite the opposite." "They actually pushed him forward, they supported him from a very early age." "1923 was just a few years after the First World War, when Hitler was a nobody." "He was a corporal who had left the front and came to join the turmoil of post-war Germany." "But in fact, they saw in him - Houston Stewart Chamberlain," "Wagner's son-in-law - they saw in Hitler a kind of Parsifal who had become the shining knight to liberate Germany and lead it forward into a grand new age, as many people, much later, also saw Hitler." "After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he became a patron of the festival." "Performances continued here even during the Second World War." "It's impossible to come to Bayreuth without having to confront the issue of that window, really." "Because out of that window appeared one Adolf Hitler, some years ago." "He came to Bayreuth to enjoy the performances of his favourite dramatist composer - my favourite dramatist composer" " Richard Wagner." "Wagner's music and reputation has suffered, partly because the Nazis loved and perverted that music - certainly in my opinion, they perverted it to their hideous ideology." "But also, Wagner has suffered because his descendants, his family, seemed to welcome Hitler." "In the case of his daughter-in-law, Winifred, who was British, actually to revere Hitler." "This is one of the reasons that Wagner's music and Bayreuth itself are tainted, stained in some people's opinion." "There are many who shun the Green Hill because of what happened here in the 1930s and '40s." "But now, after years of fudging the issue, it looks as if Bayreuth is starting to square up to its past." "SINGERS PRACTISE" "The Wagner sisters want an independent investigation into their family's links with Hitler." "And the Nazi period is even being addressed on the Bayreuth stage itself." "OPERATIC SINGING" "Parsifal is Wagner's final opera, based on the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail." "Norwegian director Stefan Herheim has updated the action, which now plays out against the backdrop of recent events in German history." "For the first time in a generation, there will be Swastikas on show at Bayreuth." "OPERATIC SINGING" "Hi, what a pleasure." "And you too." "Nice to meet you." "Thank you." "It's wonderful to be here." "It's very exciting." "This is where we have the Swastikas and the Nazis." "It's pretty brave, isn't it?" "It's fantastic." "These refugees are an addition to last year." "Right." "That's why we're spending time on it." "Ah, right." "It's all new." "We somehow got permission to add this idea." "It's brilliant." "I know Katharina is wanting to confront the history more full on, which I think is a really good idea." "There might be an exhibition in Wahnfried, I believe." "Yeah." "Imagine." "OPERATIC SINGING" "PIANO MUSIC PLAYS" "OPERATIC SINGING" "It will take more than one daring production to make amends for the past." "But what better way of healing the wound than through the music itself?" "My head tells me I'm ready to take my seat for the opening night of the Festival, but my heart still has some catching up to do." "And there's one more person I need to hear from." "In London, I'm meeting Anita Lasker-Wallfisch." "When she was 18 years old, she became a prisoner at Auschwitz, where some of my own relatives were also held and killed." "She's a cellist, whose talent for music probably saved her life, when she was recruited into the inmates' orchestra at the camp." "There was nobody there who played the cello." "There had been somebody there, who had died." "I don't know what would have happened." "If they still had had a cello, then I wouldn't have been so important." "And, you know, I had typhus, like everybody." "I was half dead in the revier, as it was called, a sort of sick bay." "I remember two Germans standing in front of my bed." "We had to all get up, and march naked in front of the people who would say yes or no in the revier." "Meaning that you're too sick to live?" "Too sick to live, so you go, or you survive." "And that is something that is engraved in my memory." ""This is the cellist."" "And they walked on." "There was one particular piece you played under extraordinary circumstances." "Well, I mean, that this is sort of worth mentioning, that actually" "Doctor Mengele, the famous doctor who was interested in experiments on twins, after he's probably done a selection, or God knows what he's done, came into the block and he wanted to hear the Schumann-Traumerei." "And that was on my repertoire so Anita, go on, play the Traumerei, which I did." "One big thing was always, never get eye contact with the Germans." "Oh, really." "If possible." "Because the moment you get eye contact, you feel you're being seen." "Have you played it since then?" "This grandson plays it with pleasure." "Really?" "Yes." "And you don't mind?" "No, I don't mind." "I find, music is not sullied for me, by anything." "Absolutely." "I mean, how much do we grant the Germans in their quest of destroying everything?" "I mean, music is holy for me." "Yes." "That's above everything." "Yes, they didn't destroy the music, did they?" "No." "No." "People have this idea that in the death camps, that Wagner was playing in the background all the time, as it were." "I'm here talking to you as a survivor of one of one of the death camps, the most famous of them all, the dreaded and horrific Auschwitz." "Well, we certainly didn't play Wagner." "You did not?" "No, we didn't." "First of all, you must realise what this band, or capella as we used to call it, consisted of." "You couldn't have played Wagner if you'd tried." "Right, Wagner does demand a big orchestra." "Yeah, and you know, blowing instruments, I can't speak for the other camps but I don't think Wagner was particularly played." "When I was a boy, and if I played Wagner at the top of the house loudly, for a Jewish family, Wagner..." "Must I play that?" "If your children played Wagner in the attic here and loudly, would you think they were somehow..." "Am I betraying my Jewishness by playing Wagner and then liking him?" "I think everybody has to come to terms by themselves." "I would never forbid anybody to listen to Wagner." "If it was the music without the drama, one wouldn't probably argue with it but apart from the fact, I would never have the patience to sit through five hours and listen to so much noise." "You know, I know you love it but..." "I do." "What happens to you when you sit there for five hours?" "HE LAUGHS" "I'm taken into a world of heightened emotion and psychological depth." "It's..." "It's really extraordinary, I find that every time I see a Wagner piece, a music drama as he'd call it, an opera is the easiest way to call it, it's as if it's absolutely new so although they're very long, and I understand, why five hours?" "It seems like a long time with people singing and standing in one place." "Screaming!" "Or screaming sometimes." "And yet, because of what the music does underneath with the drama, it's as if it's an enormous conversation." "Your mind goes on a journey of connecting all kinds of emotional states and all kinds of philosophical thoughts." "I mean, I know it sounds so pretentious, I'm fully aware of how embarrassing it can be to try and explain." "Why do you have to listen to Wagner in Bayreuth, which is so somehow symbolic for everything terrible that has happened?" "Yes." "Why can't you just sit at home and listen to a record?" "It's a very good question." "I think I've spent my life listening to the records and loving it, I've never been to Bayreuth, Wagner built the theatre specifically for it and I suppose it's a way of completing a part of my life with Wagner as it's been." "Maybe I'll be disappointed." "Well, you tell me when you come back, what you felt like in there on the shrine." "Yeah, yeah." "I mean, it's..." "Gosh, you've got me worried now!" "I'm sorry." "No, no, it's right that you should." "I embarked on this whole project," "I was kidding myself, with an open mind but I kind of thought, really, I'll just cruise through this and I know people will put contrary points of view to me and say well, yes, but think I've already got the" "answers and I know why Wagner is the greatest genius who ever lived and I don't need anyone to tell me, to give any more pause to that than I already have." "But there is much in what you say." "So do you think I shouldn't go to Bayreuth?" "I'm sorry, I'm not going to give you any advice, Stephen." "You have to do that." "You're quite right." "And I can't..." "No, why not?" "Maybe you'll decide never again, but you'll have experienced it." "This remarkable plot of ground will never be a neutral place, of course." "For some, it's a shrine to one of the world's great geniuses." "For others, it's a tainted reminder of dark days in Germany's past." "Even this memorial bust was created by Hitler's favourite sculptor." "But Wagner's music is bigger, and better, than Hitler ever imagined it to be." "And Bayreuth, the theatre Wagner dreamed of creating for so long, is also redeemed by that fact." "Which is why I'm not prepared to surrender either of them to him." "Well, here it is." "In my hand, one of the most valuable pieces of paper in the world of culture." "One thing I'd leave with is this thought." "If you've never heard the music of Richard Wagner, if you've never encountered his dramas," "I would urge you, because we're only on this planet once, to give it a try." "I still believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that his work is important and is on the side of the angels." "It is, fundamentally, good." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"