The Bard Music Festival, an intense two-weekend immersion into the world of a major composer, operates on the principal that if you put forth enough information and play enough unfamiliar music, demystification might occur. Perhaps that works for Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and other explicable artists that Bard has explored in past years. But not that old wizard, Richard Wagner.
Everyone knows Wagner didn’t necessarily improve the world, although he is often given far too much credit for inspiring the Nazi cause (Hitler appeared to like the idea of Wagner more than the composer's long music dramas themselves). What the final three days of the festival, which ended Sunday, did show, however, is that the world of music was, indeed, better for Wagner’s influence.
Leon Botstein, Bard’s ambitious president and venturesome music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York City, invited his usual raft of experts, his orchestra and quite a few soloists to the verdant campus along the Hudson River. The overstuffed second weekend this past Friday to Sunday included a daylong symposium looking at Wagner’s effect on European culture, a panel on the inevitable Jewish question and talks before each of the weekend’s six marathon concerts. Days began first thing in the morning and extended until late at night, leaving little time to read the 542-page companion book to the festival.
Wagner has, to understate, been investigated before. Since his death in 1883, this uniquely visionary creator of music theater -- who also happened to be a womanizer, scheming careerist and obnoxious bigot -- has provided employment for philosophers, psychologists, visual artists, cultural historians, musicologists, political scientists, biographers, novelists, poets, critics and university Jewish studies departments. For a century and a half, Wagnerites have fought anti-Wagnerites.
What cannot be disputed is that, as a musician and a man, Wagner cast a spell, and that was as palpable at Bard, if sometimes as oppressive, as the heavy rain clouds overhead. And however much the festival was designed to dispel the Wagnerian clouds and show you how he did it, revealing the mechanism was never enough. The better you know this master musician, the more mysterious he seems.
