"The Ring."
July 28, 1904.
This year's festival includes two complete presentations of the "Ring" tetralogy, of which the first began on Monday. It seems to be generally admitted here that the performance of the Prologue ("Rheingold") given on that day was the best that has yet been achieved. Dr. Richter was at the helm for the first time this year, and the generalship that has been one great factor in Bayreuth's reputation ever since the opening of the Wagner Theatre in 1876 soon became perceptible in the plastic force of the orchestral rendering and the consummate knowledge with which everything was disposed in such a manner as to give each performer the best possible chance of doing justice to himself and his part. Moreover, "Rheingold" is, of all the Wagnerian dramas, the one best adapted to display the art of Bayreuth advantageously. The staging is of the most extraordinary kind. All the action takes place up in the clouds, down in the waters, or where the forges resound in the fiery caverns of Nibelheim, and not one of the characters is a plain human being. Gods, goddesses, giants, dwarfs, and water nymphs make up the dramatis personæ, and the whole drama is more completely outside the range of ordinary operatic art than any other musical and dramatic work. It is therefore natural that Bayreuth, which alone among theatres devoted to musical drama is not hampered by the operatic traditions, should establish pre-eminence in the staging and dramatic presentation of "Rheingold." There is no part for a prima donna or leading tenor, and everything depends on a kind of extraordinary character-acting created by Wagner, along with those richly animated figures from Norse mythology which so effectively represent the natural forces and psychic impulses of his greatest and most characteristic poem. The most important person is Loge, the tricksy Fire God, who is far from sure that he did wisely in joining the firm of Wotan and Company.
In the great revival of the "Ring" here in 1896 the impersonation of Loge by the late Vogel of Munich was a brilliant feature. Vogel was at the time recognised as the best Loge, and his mantle has now fallen on Dr. Otto Briesemeister, who, with a much less effective costume than his predecessor's, dances very cleverly through his long and important part. But among the stage performers it was Mr. Hans Breuer, the representative of the dwarf Mime, to whom the principal honours of Monday's performance fell. Already in 1896 Mr. Breuer was the Bayreuth Mime, and he seems to have been steadily improving his presentation ever since. It is now beyond all expression brilliant. Mime (or Mimmy, as the name has been well Anglicised) is perhaps the best invented of Wagner's purely grotesque figures—better individualised than his master, the sinister Alberich, representing gold as a world-power, for whom Mimmy is compelled to do smith's work. From beginning to end the part presents unfamiliar problems to the actor, for never before was the attempt made to give a musical vehicle to such whining and cringing and snarling. But those problems have all now been solved by Mr. Breuer in a manner suggesting finality. He has penetrated to the very marrow of the composer's conception, and he gives us a figure that glows with imaginative power at every moment. Almost equally good in its very different way is the mighty elemental brutality of Mr. Johannes Elmblad's Fafner—another case of an actor completely identified with the particular part,—and the second giant (Mr. Hans Keller) fairly matched his colleague and Messrs. Breuer and Briesemeister in expressive pantomimic interpretation of the music. The enchanting "Rhine Daughter" trio of the first and last scenes was beautifully rendered, the swimming manœuvre of the former scene being done probably better than ever before. Besides doing justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of life in the light of certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance was a specially good revelation of its amusing and naïvely entertaining qualities. Regarding the show simply as an enacted fairy-tale, one could not but call it a mighty good one, and that aspect of the matter was almost certainly never before brought out so well.