In 1882, Richard Wagner organized his second Bayreuth Festival. It featured a sole work, the composer’s final opera, Parsifal, which ran for a total of 16 performances. Parsifal was, in fact, the third of Wagner’s music dramas to premiere in the provincial Bavarian town. Whereas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung made their way to other opera houses following the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, the composer insisted that Parsifal be reserved for Bayreuth alone.Footnote 1 After his death on 13 February 1883, his widow Cosima zealously upheld this position. Consequently, until copyright protection for his entire oeuvre expired at the end of 1913, Parsifal was an operatic anomaly: a major composition that did not know the bright lights of the big cities. Then, in 1914, a veritable Parsifal ‘mania’ erupted, with a slew of new Parsifal productions premiering on urban stages, especially in German-speaking Europe.Footnote 2 When the outbreak of World War I that August forced the Bayreuth Festival’s early closure, Parsifal became fully dependent on the urban theatres until the Wagner family finally succeeded in reopening the Festival in July 1924. Thereafter, performance of the opera was split between big city theatres and Bayreuth, at least until 1940, when Parsifal was summarily dropped from the programmes of the wartime festivals.Footnote 3
Parsifal’s early performance history raises important questions about the assumption that opera is a particularly ‘urban’ cultural product, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 4 Indeed, what does it mean to think about opera as ‘urban’? Did operas and similar works of musical theatre somehow reflect changing urban conditions in their choice of subject matter, characters or even sonorities? Or is it more that the practice of opera became more dependent on conditions that only cities could assure? If the latter, then how do we situate opera (and music more generally) in the cultural spaces and systems that developed in Europe’s big cities between roughly 1850 and 1930? Moreover, how was the relationship between opera and cities affected by the constant changes to urban conditions themselves, especially those that shaped the making and reception of opera?
Scholars of medieval and early modern Europe have provided valuable insights into opera and music as elements of an urban cultural and social system for the period prior to 1800,Footnote 5 but studies of how opera evolved in the big cities that developed in the wake of nineteenth-century urbanization, which created not just larger urban centres but also ones shaped by new political, social, economic and cultural systems, remain limited in number and scope. And this even in the wake of the cultural turn in urban history that began in the 1990s.Footnote 6 As Markian Prokopovych observed in 2013, whereas urban historians largely ignored how nineteenth-century urbanization affected audiences and cultural production, musicologists and cultural historians tended to overlook the obvious urban dimension of their analyses.Footnote 7
Recent writing on musical theatre in Europe’s big cities has certainly added to our knowledge about musical-cultural practices in the modern urban environment.Footnote 8 However, these works are less successful as contributions to a modern urban history of opera and music. In part, the problem is that this scholarship cleaves to an overly narrow understanding of the urban, defining these musical practices as ‘urban’ primarily because they occurred in cities.Footnote 9 This is what Theodore Hershberg meant when, in a seminal essay, he criticized the notion of ‘urban as place’.Footnote 10 In other words, these studies say little about urban as ‘process’. How did the concentration of cultural power in cities during the nineteenth century, for example, affect conditions for performing or attending opera?Footnote 11 Alternatively, how did shifting definitions of municipal government’s responsibilities (and its ability to finance them) influence the types and range of metropolitan theatrical offerings?Footnote 12
Useful examples of how we might pursue opera and music from the perspective of ‘urban as process’ are beginning to appear, namely research that explores how the urbanization of Paris shaped the emergence of grand opéra after 1830 (both as music and spectacle)Footnote 13 and investigations of the rise of popular musical theatre in Berlin, London and New York, which both link the genre’s popularity to specific changes in the urban environment and show how music theatre’s growing status helped fashion new cultural identities.Footnote 14 Other recent attempts to think about music in the city from the vantage of ‘urban as process’, however, have been less successful. While they evoke ‘music’ – for example, notions of urban musical geography and the social composition of opera audiences and dance-hall publics – the focus of this research is not really on music but rather on changing notions of urban public space, social life and the built environment.Footnote 15
Meeting the challenge of examining music in the big city from the perspective of ‘urban as process’ requires paying attention to text and context, to both elements of musical life, more narrowly conceived, and their relations to the big city’s systems and structures. Essential too is a broad definition of music. Useful in that regard is Christopher Small’s proposition to make ‘musicking’ the object of analysis rather than ‘music’, with the consequence that ‘music’ becomes not an object but an activity.Footnote 16 Accordingly, a study of urban musicking would concern itself not only with musical performances, but also with the actors involved (whether performers or audience members, composers or critics), the venues in which performance occurs and the types of value judgments made about performing. In short, it encourages us to keep our eyes on the music(king) while also attending to its urban context.
To develop further these ideas about musicking and the modern big city, this article focuses on the history of Wagner’s Parsifal from 1876 to 1932, with an emphasis on developments in German-speaking Europe. It frames the narrative as a story of the opera’s urbanization or, to use a different metaphor, it is an account of Parsifal’s migration from the province to the big city. Specialists may rankle at this tack, since, strictly speaking, only towns or rural regions undergo urbanization, whereas migration studies normally focus on people and not cultural products.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, I use ‘urbanization’ here largely as a synonym for ‘becoming urban’, thereby focusing attention on processes as well as the impact of urban conditions and systems on city and countryside alike. The metaphor of migration is also pertinent because Parsifal was not just restricted to provincial Bayreuth between 1882 and 1913; it was also conceived as an ‘anti-urban’ opera. The article’s first section explores the early years of Parsifal’s performance history, revealing also that even small-town Bayreuth was not fully immune to the pull of the metropolis. The second section explores Parsifal’s experiences in the big city during 1914 and the first indications that it was ‘becoming urban’, especially in the sense of its direct implication in urban-based cultural systems.Footnote 18 As the final section shows, Parsifal’s ‘definitive’ urbanization was achieved only after 1914. In part, this stemmed from a window of opportunity created by the Bayreuth Festival’s closure between 1914 and 1924. But it was also the result of important changes in the nature of urban culture itself during the inter-war years.
Parsifal as ‘anti-urban’, provincial opera
Richard Wagner’s relationship to the European opera world was complex. He yearned for success, especially in Paris, Europe’s undisputed opera capital, and was frustrated by his repeated failures. He wrote long treatises that imagined a new type of opera, ‘music drama’, but his first realizations of this idea – Die Walküre (completed 1856, premiered 1870) and Tristan und Isolde (completed 1859, premiered 1865) – bewildered audiences. Although backed by Bavarian King Ludwig II, Wagner’s plans to build a major new opera house in Munich provoked such scandal in the 1860s that he relocated to the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth, which thereafter became his home and the centre of his operatic universe. In 1872, construction of his Festival theatre (Festspielhaus) commenced. With its completion in early 1876, Wagner could finally hold the inaugural Bayreuth Festival that same summer, which featured three complete performances of his Ring der Nibelungen tetralogy.
These circumstances help explain why Parsifal premiered in provincial Bayreuth and why it was conceived as a rejection of urban operatic culture. A first component of this framing is Wagner’s term for the work. It was not an ‘opera’, but rather a Bühnenweihfestspiel, or ‘Festival Drama for the Dedication of the Stage’. As Nicholas Vazsonyi has established, this tack was part of a broader branding strategy for his works. In addition, it distanced Wagner’s later works from prevailing, urban-based operatic practice.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, Wagner’s specific choice of words is significant. The stage to be ‘dedicated’ via Parsifal was his own festival stage, thereby intimately linking Parsifal to his own festival project.
Following the failed revolutions of 1848–49, which forced the composer into exile in Switzerland, Wagner reconceived the ancient Greek theatre festival into a modern means to promote art in the public consciousness and a ‘proper sense’ of Germanness.Footnote 20 But whereas the classical Greek festival was an urban event, from the early 1850s on, Wagner increasingly privileged a bucolic setting, far removed from the big city. In September 1850, he confided to his friend Theodor Uhlig (a conductor in Dresden) that he would ‘erect a theatre out of “boards and beams” in a meadow near Zurich … permit all those who admired his work to attend without charge, have three performances one after another and then tear down the theatre and burn the score’.Footnote 21 Sixteen months later, Wagner confided to his future father-in-law, composer Franz Liszt, that the ‘Nibelung drama could not be performed in a large city with a metropolitan audience; instead it was to be done for those who appreciated his music in some “beautiful quiet place” far from the “smoke and disgusting industrial smell of our urban civilization”’.Footnote 22 Tellingly, Wagner’s rhetoric here is of a piece with contemporary anti-urban remarks made by such British writers as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and John Ruskin.Footnote 23
The composer’s experiences in Munich during the 1860s further soured his views on the urban operatic establishment. While the controversy over the proposed new opera house prompted his growing estrangement from the city’s major cultural figures, it was ultimately Wagner’s dissatisfaction with the Bavarian Court Theatre’s premieres of Das Rheingold (1869) and Die Walküre (1870) – performances that King Ludwig commanded – that pushed him to pursue his dreams of a festival in Bayreuth.Footnote 24 He had hoped to use the eighteenth-century Margravial Opera House there for that end, but it proved too small for his needs, necessitating the construction of what became the Festival theatre. Geopolitical considerations, too, made Bayreuth a fitting site for Wagner’s initiative. It was located close to the geographical centre of what became, in 1871, the Second German Empire. Moreover, although Bayreuth still lay within Bavarian territory, Wagner could hope to trade on the town’s historic ties to the Prussian, Hohenzollern dynasty to gain support from the Prussian sovereigns who now doubled as German emperors.Footnote 25
Attractive too for Wagner was the fact that although Bayreuth had the status of a city (Stadt), it was urban in name only, with no competing theatre or even spa.Footnote 26 In 1871, the town had only 17,841 inhabitants.Footnote 27 If this qualified Bayreuth as a provincial town, it had no part of the marked urban expansion that occurred in Germany in the following decades, which transformed similar-sized cities such as Bochum (21,000 inhabitants in 1871) into great, industrial cities (c. 137,000 in 1910).Footnote 28 Indeed, by 1910, Bayreuth’s population had not yet even doubled (34,574). Importantly, the land Wagner acquired for the Festival theatre also lay outside incorporated Bayreuth. On the eve of World War I, the theatre was still surrounded by meadows, evoking the festival landscape he had imagined during his Zurich exile (see Figure 1).
Map of Bayreuth, c. 1914. Source: Wanderbuch durch das Fichtelgebirge und seine Nachbargebiete: Frankenwald, Obermaintal, Waldnabtal, Basalte bei Kemnath, Eger u. Böhm. Bäder, Robert Prell (Wunsiedel, 1914–16).
Although public reaction to the inaugural Bayreuth Festival was broadly positive, it was not the ideal festival experience that Wagner had imagined.Footnote 29 Even worse, it was in debt when it closed, which prevented holding another festival for the foreseeable future. To help pay these debts, Wagner approved the presentation of complete Ring performances outside of Bayreuth. The first of these took place at the Leipzig Opera in 1878, whose director, Angelo Neumann, then established a touring company that brought Ring performances to audiences and theatres across Europe.Footnote 30 Thus, while Siegfried and Götterdämmerung had their premieres as ‘provincial’ operas, by 1882 all four Ring dramas had been integrated into the repertory of the continent’s urban theatres.
After 1876, Wagner turned to creating Parsifal. While the drama’s subject, a reworking of the medieval Grail legend, cannot itself be framed as either pro- or anti-urban, the composer made two choices that firmly linked it to his festival initiative’s anti-urban ethos. First, he composed Parsifal to take advantage of the Bayreuth Festival theatre’s unique acoustic conditions. As he discovered during the rehearsals and performances for the Ring in 1876, the theatre’s deeply sunken pit made it possible to create particularly thick orchestral textures and call the orchestra to play loudly without the risk of covering the singers on the stage. By exploiting these possibilities throughout the Parsifal score, Wagner made the theatre’s acoustics an integral part of the composition.Footnote 31
Second, and in keeping with this special relationship between theatre and score, Wagner wanted to ensure that Parsifal would only be performed at Bayreuth. This required that Ludwig II renounce his rights to it, which Wagner had conceded to obtain the king’s assistance with covering the Festival’s outstanding debts. On 28 September 1880, Wagner wrote to Ludwig to request that he cancel this part of their agreement. Wagner’s justification for the request is of interest here: he exploits the work’s message of redemption, the ‘liturgical’ quality of its Grail ceremonies, even the ambiguity of the word ‘Weih’ in the work’s title (it can also mean ‘consecration’) to argue that his last, ‘most holy work’ should be spared a ‘lowly’ opera career. It was unthinkable, he asserted, ‘that a work, which brings the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith to the stage, appear in a theatre and before an opera public such as they exist today’. He continued, ‘In the future, Parsifal should be performed in Bayreuth and there alone. In no other theatre should Parsifal be offered as “amusement” to the public.’Footnote 32
In short, this letter situated Parsifal within Wagner’s continued animus towards the modern city and its operatic culture. Indeed, his concern that in the big city Parsifal would be treated like any other ‘repertory opera’ reflects not just his anxieties about the nature of urban life, but also what Fritz Stern has termed the ‘cultural pessimism’ of late nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe.Footnote 33 Rejecting the progressive reading of the move from community to society in Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1885 classic Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Wagner presents small-town Bayreuth as a bastion of ‘Kultur’ – true, healthy, German culture – as opposed to big-city ‘Zivilisation’, which was marked by superficiality, immorality and a lack of vitality.Footnote 34
No less important, Wagner’s remarks about his desire that Parsifal never be performed off the ‘Green Hill’ of Bayreuth, coupled with Ludwig’s decision to grant this request on 15 October 1880, provided the foundation for Bayreuth’s monopoly over the work. By 1880, Wagner’s financial situation had improved to the extent that he could finally announce the holding of a second Bayreuth Festival at which Parsifal would be premiered. In his statement to Festival patrons, published in its journal, the Bayreuther Blätter, Wagner declared that ‘my last creation is exclusively and in perpetuity reserved for performance at the Bayreuth Festival Stage’.Footnote 35 In October 1881, he reiterated his position about keeping Parsifal for Bayreuth, apprising his friend Angelo Neumann that, after its Festival debut, the opera would not go on tour, as had the Ring. Footnote 36
The second Bayreuth Festival was both an artistic and a financial success,Footnote 37 but not even six months after its close, on 13 February 1883, the composer died. His widow Cosima organized a third Bayreuth Festival in 1883 in her husband’s memory, once more with Parsifal as the sole work, and a third Festival devoted to Parsifal followed in 1884. All the while, Cosima firmly rejected every request to stage Parsifal elsewhere. Indeed, while contemplating turning the Bayreuth Festival into a recurring cultural event, Cosima understood that Parsifal gave the Festival an important exclusivity: only there could Wagner’s final work be heard. With the exception of 1896, when she revived the Ring, Parsifal was the only work offered at every festival between 1882 and 1914. Festival supporters – and the Wagner family – also increasingly framed the event as both pilgrimage and festival. The visit to Bayreuth, with the Parsifal performance as its crowning moment, obliged individuals to quit the distractions of the urban environment, escape the rhythms of daily life and participate in a theatrical experience that many found profound and enthralling.
Nevertheless, the anti-urban discourse that Wagner, his family and friends spun around the Festival and Parsifal never acknowledged a critical reality. Namely, the Festival was dependent on the very urban modernity that Wagner decried. Lacking its own artistic staff, the Wagners had to recruit festival orchestra members, choristers, soloists and directors from the big city opera houses. By 1900, the Festival’s rosters included artists from across German-speaking Europe and soloists even hailed from beyond Germany and Austria.Footnote 38 Furthermore, Cosima relied on other theatres’ managers and artistic staff to help identify and prepare future ‘stars’ for Bayreuth. Gustav Mahler, who directed first the Hamburg and then the Vienna Court Opera, was largely responsible for pointing Anna Mildenburg, who became the Festival’s leading soprano soloist between 1897 and 1914, to Bayreuth.Footnote 39 In addition, the extant visitors’ lists reveal that the festivals relied on metropolitan populations, and increasingly also on those living outside Central Europe, to fill the theatre’s seats.Footnote 40 With few exceptions, these men and women made their way to Bayreuth via train, that quintessentially nineteenth-century urban technology.Footnote 41
The pull of the big city was likewise evident in the support networks and publicity schemes developed for the Festival. Even before 1876, Wagner had encouraged the formation of voluntary associations (Wagner Vereine) in Munich, Berlin, Graz and Vienna to bring together patrons who could promote and raise funds for Bayreuth. The Bayreuther Blätter, edited by the Wagner-family confidant, Hans von Wolzogen, and published in the industrial city of Chemnitz, had a regular rubric where it published information about individual societies and their activities. In sum, even as Bayreuth’s monopoly over Parsifal endured, the opera knew, at least indirectly, the metropolis. Conversely, although Parsifal was absent from the big city as staged drama, urban orchestras and concert societies were programming excerpts from it – from the preludes to Acts I and III to the dance of the ‘Flower Maidens’ – even before 1900.Footnote 42
1914: coming to the big city
Until 1913, the Wagner family succeeded in preventing Parsifal’s migration to the metropolis. Ten years earlier, the Metropolitan Opera had exploited a gap in international copyright law to present the work in New York City, but this was an exceptional situation.Footnote 43 In 1913, however, the stage was set for a fundamental change in Parsifal’s circumstances. By a twist of fate, the year marked both the hundredth anniversary of Wagner’s birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Whereas the former event was cause for celebration, the latter aroused concern: according to German law, it marked the end of copyright protection for a creative artist’s oeuvre. Footnote 44 Consequently, on 31 December 1913, Bayreuth’s monopoly over Parsifal would come to an end. In 1903 Cosima had tried, unsuccessfully, to forestall this eventuality by petitioning the German parliament (Reichstag) to recognize Wagner’s ‘testamentary’ wish that Parsifal only be performed in Bayreuth. In 1912, a public petition campaign sought again to secure Bayreuth’s Parsifal monopoly, but to no avail.Footnote 45
The elimination of copyright protection for Parsifal in 1913 made possible its move to the big cities. However, its arrival in the metropolis in 1914 only started the process of its urbanization – that is, its integration into the structures and rhythms of urban life. Just as in studies of rural-to-urban human migration, so too with Parsifal: its arrival in the city set off a period of adjustment that entailed adaptation to urban realties but also the preservation of some ties to its former provincial existence.Footnote 46 Moreover, at least until early August 1914, it was not clear whether Parsifal’s move to the big city was definitive, or if, as with many migrants, it would eventually return to the countryside.Footnote 47
In 1913, theatre impresarios and managers on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly awaited Parsifal’s passage into the public domain. As the opera season reached its conclusion in June, many theatres had already begun to plan for staging the long-forbidden fruit. For example, the director of Vienna’s Court Opera, Hans Gregor, met with the artist Alfred Roller in June to discuss the latter’s commission to design sets and costumes for the Vienna premiere (in January 1914).Footnote 48 Specialist publications also served as forums for exchanging ideas about how to stage Parsifal, a key challenge facing all the urban theatres, given the notable technical and acoustic differences between their houses and the Bayreuth stage, and the sense that the original Bayreuth production’s aesthetics were now passé. In 1913 the Union of Artistic Theatre Managers (Vereinigung künstlerischer Bühnenvorstände) even organized a special double issue devoted to the ‘Parsifal design question’ to launch the third volume of its journal, Die Scene. Footnote 49
Parsifal’s legal debut in the big city also took place in 1913, namely in Zurich, an urban centre with some 200,000 residents. Opening at the Municipal Theatre on 13 April, the premiere was possible because under Swiss law, copyright protection for works ended precisely 30 years following an artist’s death, rather than at the end of the anniversary year. Zurich’s production is also noteworthy because it demonstrated that Parsifal could be successfully performed outside of Bayreuth.Footnote 50 Indeed, public reaction to Zurich’s run of performances was effusively positive. From the orchestral playing to the choral singing, from the soloists’ interpretations to the directorial concept and sets, everything had been achieved at a high and convincing level, a glowing tribute to Zurich’s status as the place where Wagner first conceived of creating Parsifal.
Zurich was the tip of the proverbial iceberg that crashed into urban theatres across the world in the first half of 1914. Companies vied with one another to hold the first production in 1914, an honour that ultimately fell to Barcelona’s Gran Teatro del Liceu, whose Parsifal premiere began at 10.25 p.m. on New Year’s Eve (with the final curtain falling at 5.00 a.m.). In Berlin (German Opera), Bologna, Bremen, Breslau, Budapest, Madrid, Prague (Royal and New German Theatres) and Rome, Parsifal opened on New Year’s Day. By the end of January, Parsifal had also appeared in Saint-Petersburg, Paris, Brussels, Milan and Vienna, and played in 19 different theatres in German-speaking Europe. In Berlin, Prague and Vienna, Parsifal even appeared on two different stages, each with its own production. Of the major German cities, Munich waited the longest to inaugurate its production, which premiered on Wagner’s birthday – 22 May – by which time Parsifal had also been staged in Antwerp, Brünn/Brno, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Lyon, Marseille, Monte Carlo, Pisa and Venice.Footnote 51
By the time the Bayreuth Festival opened in July 1914, 48 different urban theatres had premiered their productions of Parsifal, 34 alone in German-speaking Europe.Footnote 52 This Parsifal mania spoke partly to the mystique that had enveloped the opera from the beginning. Although excerpts from Parsifal were often played at symphony concerts, experiencing the work as staged opera had been possible only for those with the means to procure a ticket and travel to Bayreuth, a journey that normally entailed a minimum two-night stay in the provincial town. The extraordinary interest in Parsifal also spoke to a consensus about the work’s place in the operatic repertoire: it was a great work by a German master and opera companies with the requisite resources (stage, players, singers) felt an obligation to present it.
Judging from the number of performances for which Parsifal was scheduled in 1914, there was an incredible degree of pent-up demand for the work. In city after city, initial performance runs quickly sold out, even though seats were offered at elevated prices and performances excluded from subscription packages. Berlin’s Royal Opera was the market leader, with 48 performances between January and August, but the German Opera in Charlottenburg was not far behind, with 44 performances in the same period. In Vienna, the ‘People’s Opera’ (Volksoper) and the Court Opera made major commitments to the work, with 33 and 27 performances respectively.Footnote 53 More commonly, runs of Parsifal in 1914 ranged from 8 to 12 performances. But this already surpassed the seven performances planned for the 1914 Bayreuth Festival, of which only two took place before World War I abruptly closed its doors.
By any measure, then, Parsifal had a spectacular outing in the big city in 1914. That this was at all possible calls attention to both the nature of the social, economic and cultural systems that had developed in Europe’s cities during the height of European urbanization and the networks that promoted exchanges and movement among them. Exploring these factors also makes it evident that Parsifal’s integration into this metropolitan environment remained a work in progress as the guns of August (temporarily) dimmed the lights at Europe’s theatres.
First, urban conditions played a major role in satisfying the considerable demand for the work. Admittedly, this was partly a matter of urban populations wishing to see Parsifal. Significant, too, was the fact that the number of urban theatres regularly offering opera in Central Europe had almost doubled since 1870, from roughly 54 in 1873 to some 101 in 1914.Footnote 54 Still, realizing almost 50 new productions in Europe of a challenging stage work like Parsifal in less than 12 months was only possible because of the resources to which urban theatrical institutions had access and because of the commercial networks that late nineteenth-century urbanization had nurtured. The availability of supplemental musicians and railroad connections between major cities facilitated the task of gathering enough orchestral players to perform Parsifal, especially in medium-sized cities.Footnote 55 In terms of personnel, the greatest test was to amass the requisite choral forces, which figured prominently in each of the work’s three acts. To that end, many opera companies followed the lead of Zurich’s municipal theatre: they invited other singing societies in the city to join the regular opera chorus.Footnote 56 Wiesbaden’s Royal Theatre took a different approach, establishing in 1914 a permanent ensemble of supplemental choristers (Extrachor) on which it relied thereafter for other operas needing big choruses.Footnote 57 City-based entrepreneurs also sought to profit from new market opportunities by offering to provide theatres with the props, costumes and even the unique bells that rang during key moments of the Grail scenes.
Parsifal mania did not just play out on stage, it was also a highly mediatized phenomenon dominated by urban media outlets. Starting in early 1913, with the coverage of Zurich’s Parsifal production, urban newspapers, general interest periodicals and special interest journals devoted significant coverage to the wave of Parsifal performances such that they gained national, even international, exposure. Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, for instance, reported on the Parsifal premieres in Berlin and Prague, and published articles to prepare local audiences for its opening night at the Vienna Court Opera.Footnote 58 In January 1914, the day after the premiere, the Neue Freie Presse devoted its front page to Parsifal, including a review that ran for an additional three pages in the Feuilleton space. The following day, it ran a story on Parsifal’s impact on the Vienna public. In addition, specialized journals, such as the Neue Musik-Zeitung (Stuttgart) and Bühne und Welt (Hamburg), published a steady stream of reviews of Parsifal performances throughout the two empires and from elsewhere in Europe.Footnote 59 Fascination with the choices each theatre made for their Parsifal set designs and costumes prompted Frankfurt am Main’s Kunstgewerbe Museum to organize a public exposition of stage designs and models from a number of theatres, which ran throughout April and May 1914 and received major coverage – with colour illustrations – in such general interest periodicals as Velhagen & Klasing’s Monatshefte (Berlin) and the more specialized Dekorative Kunst (Munich).Footnote 60 One of Berlin’s major publishing houses, the Ullstein Verlag, even took advantage of Parsifal’s liberation to add a Parsifal issue to its popular series Musik für Alle (Music for Everyone), which offered simplified piano reductions of key moments in the score for performance at home by amateur musicians.Footnote 61
While Central European urban cultural institutions, media and commercial networks treated Parsifal during the first half of 1914 as if it were well established in the urban milieu, these productions still maintained notable ties to provincial Bayreuth. First, urban theatres themselves felt obliged to meet the musical and dramatic expectations that the composer had established there. In large part, this stemmed from the facts of the Bayreuth premiere: Richard Wagner had both written the Bayreuth Festival theatre into the score and led the production. After his death, his widow Cosima proclaimed it a model staging and ruled out any suggestion that it be modified to take account of new production standards or changes in aesthetic taste.Footnote 62 The ‘branding’ of the Bayreuth production had been so successful that big cities’ producers and designers felt compelled in 1913–14 to hew as close to the Bayreuth model as possible. That is, to give their urban audiences an ‘authentic’ Parsifal experience, theatre managers understood that they must offer something that was as Bayreuth-like as possible.
Accordingly, at most houses sets and costumes were largely variations on the Bayreuth model. This was especially true of the designs for the Grail hall that figured in Acts I and III, which all riffed on the cathedral-inspired space featured at Bayreuth. The court operas in Berlin and Vienna, and also London’s Covent Garden, even hoped to outdo Bayreuth, taking advantage of the considerable financial largesse made available for this prestige event to outfit their productions in ways unimaginable in Bayreuth. House after house tried to recreate the Bayreuth sound by approximating the Festival theatre’s deep orchestral pit. In Zurich the existing pit was covered, whereas in Berlin’s Royal Opera the first rows of seats were removed so that a temporary, covered pit could be constructed. Judging from the reviews, however, these efforts came up short. More successful, musically, was the mimicking of Bayreuth performance practices and tempi. Since the opera houses of Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Vienna, in particular, had been supplying Bayreuth with players and singers for years, a solid foundation existed in those cities for performing Parsifal ‘à la Bayreuth’.Footnote 63
Big city opera houses also sought to replicate the festive character that prevailed in Bayreuth. Newspaper reports and memoirs suggest that in 1914 urban theatres generally succeeded in creating a special aura around their Parsifal performances.Footnote 64 In their desire to do justice to Wagner’s work, theatres and their artistic personnel put serious investments of time and effort into preparing their productions. Theatregoers were also conscious of the mystique that surrounded the opera and behaved accordingly, both inside and outside of the theatre. Even the Bayreuth tradition of not clapping after the first act was piously observed. Moreover, practical realities ensured that Parsifal was spared the life of a ‘regular repertory show’ in the big city. At least until the theatres got used to Parsifal’s demanding technical requirements, it was simply impossible to rotate it in and out of the repertoire. Theatres thus typically blocked off entire periods of their schedules to offer it. Berlin’s Royal Opera, for instance, scheduled initial Parsifal runs from 5–25 January and again from 1–9 and 11–20 February, 11–20 April and then 31 May–7 June.Footnote 65 In these ways, theatres largely succeeded in creating a festival atmosphere for their Parsifals, fashioning temporary oases where audience members could briefly escape the hustle and bustle of the big city and reflect on art, culture and even notions of community. As the critic Karl Stock concluded, the initial performances of Parsifal showed that theatre was still capable of ennobling the [German] public.Footnote 66
Settling in: Parsifal as ‘urban opera’
The outbreak of war at the beginning of August 1914 prompted not only the Bayreuth Festival’s early closure but also a general cessation of theatrical life in Central Europe. By October, most big city theatres were resuming their activities. However, even after the war ended in November 1918, the Wagner family’s precarious financial situation prevented the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival until July 1924.Footnote 67 Anders Jarlert has proposed viewing this ten-year period as a time of Parsifal’s exile, a notion that is in tune with the position of the composer’s family and devotees: Bayreuth was the opera’s only legitimate home and productions elsewhere were inherently second-rate.Footnote 68 I would suggest, however, that the metaphor of migration is a more useful lens than exile for examining Parsifal’s situation in Central Europe after August 1914. Even if it occasionally looked longingly at the now closed Bayreuth Festival theatre, Parsifal now owed its survival as a living piece of musical theatre to the big cities and their cultural systems. Moreover, between August 1914 and around 1932, the opera was integrated into the urban milieu and became urban, a development marked above all by the emergence of a performance culture that, by the mid-1920s, not only ignored Bayreuth’s pretentions but also offered entirely new ways to experience the opera.
At the end of 1914’s Parsifal mania, many Central European critics and opera specialists thought it would be a one-off event. The big city theatres did not abandon the experiment, however. Of the 34 houses that premiered Parsifal in 1913 or 1914, 15 stopped programming the Bühnenweihfestspiel during the war, but returned it to the schedule thereafter (in some cases, only in the mid-1920s). Five theatres – Bremen, Chemnitz, Kassel, Stettin and Zurich – did not offer the work during the 1914–15 season, but it returned either one or two seasons later. At the remaining 14 houses, Parsifal remained in the active repertory. In part, these theatres needed to recoup their investments in the productions. But they also were convinced that they should continue to programme it, especially with Bayreuth being closed. Moreover, starting in 1915, additional theatres premiered Parsifal: Mannheim and Darmstadt in 1915, Kassel in 1916 and Rostock in 1917. When peace returned to Central Europe, the opera opened in Karlsruhe (1919), Essen and Magdeburg (1920), Aachen (1921) and Duisburg (1922). Critically, the urban theatres did not just regularly revive existing Parsifal productions, they also accorded it new ones: Leipzig (1920), Zurich (1921), Mainz and Freiburg (1923), Munich (1924), Breslau (1927) and the Berlin State Opera (1929).Footnote 69
In short, while the Bayreuth Festival theatre lay dormant, Parsifal’s presence in the metropolis grew. And it was in the city that audiences and artistic personnel encountered and engaged with it. Consequently, when the Bayreuth Festival reopened in 1924, it was even more dependent on these urban-based artists than it had been before 1913, for the latter now fully incarnated the work’s performance traditions. Quantitative data also reveal how Parsifal was becoming established in the operatic culture of Central Europe’s cities. While 1914 was exceptional both in respect of the number of theatres offering the work (34) and the total number of performances (556), for the rest of the war period it played in at least 16 theatres annually with a still respectable 126 performances in 1914–15 and 105 in 1915–16. After 1919, the situation improved: some 27 houses offered 155 performances during the 1920–21 season and 33 theatres gave 141 performances in 1921–22.Footnote 70
New productions attest to a work’s vitality and its perceived importance for a house and its repertoire. That theatres devoted significant new resources to Parsifal, especially after 1918, suggests that their initial assumptions about audience demand had been largely correct. Not only was there considerable public interest in the work, but it was sufficiently strong and sustained that theatre managers had to ensure that their productions stayed fresh. Given the severe economic challenges facing German and Austrian theatres after 1918, the level of investment in Parsifal is even more noteworthy.Footnote 71 In Leipzig, a new Parsifal production opened in 1920 and another one in 1925. While the 1920 new staging had a healthy run of 15 performances that season, thereafter Parsifal had only 2 to 4 performances per season; its new production of 1925 had a seasonal run of only 6 shows.Footnote 72
In Parsifal’s case, becoming urban was not just a matter of having a regular presence in the metropolitan opera house repertories. It also reflected the emergence of performance practices that reflected urban conditions and that increasingly distinguished the cities’ offerings from the Bayreuth original. By the early 1920s, it is evident that a uniquely urban approach to the work as ‘festival theatre’ had emerged. In 1914, no company could fully recreate this dimension of the Bayreuth model. While Munich alone had a summer music festival where Parsifal was scheduled, this event still took place in the city. Moreover, as noted earlier, when the cities started to stage Parsifal, their scheduling choices were dictated primarily by practical concerns. Parsifal was scheduled at times when the house could be devoted to the production. And yet, already in 1914, several companies decided that, given the work’s references to Good Friday, it would be appropriate to plan their premieres for the end of Lent.Footnote 73 By 1920, the use of religious feasts to establish a festival context for Parsifal had become widespread. Above all, the opera was scheduled to coincide with Holy Week and Easter, from Hamburg to Vienna and from Berlin to Karlsruhe. But other feast days were also used to establish a festive framing: Ascension Thursday (Frankfurt), Pentecost (Leipzig), All Saint’s Day (Vienna), even Christmas and St Stephen’s Day (Coburg and Dresden). Towards the end of the 1920s, theatres in Protestant areas of Germany claimed one further holiday for Parsifal’s benefit: the Day of Remembrance and Prayer (Buß- und Bettag) (Bremen, Duisburg, Leipzig, Hamburg).Footnote 74
In addition, the continued closure of the Bayreuth stage after 1918 opened up a creative space in which theatres and artists could approach the design and staging of Parsifal from new perspectives, drawing inspiration in particular from such designers as Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig and Alred Roller.Footnote 75 The fact that Bayreuth doggedly refused to retire its original production after the Festival reopened in 1924 only underscored the cities’ role as ‘Parsifal-laboratories’. Arguably the most significant of these efforts was Munich’s 1924 production, with designs by Leo Pasetti, stage direction by Max Hofmüller and a young Hans Knappertsbusch in the pit. In particular, Pasetti’s sparse, stylized stage pictures, which tended more towards fantasy than realism, won widespread praise from the critics. The writer for Munich’s most important daily, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, even declared Pasetti’s approach to the Act II Flower Maiden scene to be an important improvement on Bayreuth’s.Footnote 76 Theatres across Germany soon started to solicit copies of Pasetti’s sketches to prepare their own new productions, and clear signs of Pasetti’s influence appear in Panos Aravantinos’ designs in 1925 for Leipzig’s new Parsifal, which the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten proclaimed to be ‘worthy of Bayreuth itself’.Footnote 77 Similarly innovative and progressive in their design aesthetic are the Parsifals Hans Wildermann created for Dortmund (1921) and Breslau (1927).Footnote 78 In sum, as Katherine Syer has stated, while no clear model for the Parsifal stage picture materialized during the inter-war period, the initiative in resolving the ‘stage picture question’ had passed fully from Bayreuth to the metropolitan theatres.Footnote 79
There was a third way in which Parsifal became profoundly urban after 1918: it was incorporated into the emergent radio culture. This was the most radical reshaping of Parsifal performance culture and something in which Bayreuth had no part. In its early years, Central European radio culture was irrefutably urban: the broadcasting studios were all located in big cities and urban-based institutions were fully responsible for programming. In addition, the limited range of the receivers, coupled with their elevated cost, meant that well into the 1930s radio audiences were primarily composed of city dwellers.Footnote 80 From its earliest days as a civilian medium – Germany’s first public broadcast occurred in Berlin in October 1923 – Central European radio authorities also invested heavily in broadcasts of musical theatre. The pioneer in this regard was Cornelis Bronsgeest, who, starting in November 1924, organized regular studio broadcasts of opera for Radio Berlin’s ‘Funk-Stunde’. His ‘triumphal’ transmission of Parsifal on 10 April 1925 (Good Friday) also highlighted radio’s tremendous potential for creating new audiences for opera.Footnote 81
Contemporary observers were quick to recognize that radio offered different ways to experience works like Parsifal, one that limited the sensory field to hearing. But even progressive composers like Kurt Weill were wary of the consequences. In his review of Berlin Radio’s first season of radio opera, Weill was complimentary of Bronsgeest’s achievements. Still, he concluded that, at best, radio was but a poor substitute for live theatre.Footnote 82 Nonetheless, the radio stations persevered. In 1926, the radio stations in Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna each carried a live broadcast of Parsifal from the local opera house (in Vienna’s case, from the Volksoper). Nonetheless, as the Viennese journal Die Bühne noted, recording technology could not yet do sufficient justice to live performances.Footnote 83 Only in 1931 did technological advancements finally make possible live music broadcasts of high quality. That July, the Bayreuth Festival authorized a first live broadcast (featuring Tristan and Isolde) from its stage, which became the first opera broadcast internationally. Bayreuth’s Parsifal, however, was not offered to radio audiences until 1951.Footnote 84 German and Austrian radio audiences were never deprived of Wagner’s final work. It was broadcast in some form – selected acts or in full, as live broadcasts or recordings – every year from 1926 to 1939.Footnote 85 However, in all its variations, the Parsifal that played on the radio was made in the metropolis, not in Bayreuth.
Conclusion
By framing the first 55 years of Parsifal’s performance history in German-speaking Europe in terms of the opera’s urbanization, this article contributes to the writing of an urban history of opera, and of music more generally. If many aspects of the story are specific to this dramatic work, its particularities open up multiple opportunities for thinking anew about the relationships between opera/music and city during this critical period of modern European urbanization. Richard Wagner’s creation of Parsifal as ‘festival theatre’ for provincial Bayreuth reflected his own criticism of European opera culture, which by the 1850s was anchored in the big cities and increasingly responded to the needs of urban elites, noble and bourgeois alike. The evolution of urban conditions also helped give rise to the repertory opera in German-speaking Europe, which was a particular target of Wagner’s concerns vis-à-vis Parsifal.
At the same time, even with Parsifal, Wagner was unable to escape fully what had become the fundamental urbanity of European operatic practice. To perform Parsifal or the Ring at Bayreuth, the composer needed the musicians who had trained at the urban conservatories, played and sang for the city-based court and municipal theatres and were able travel to Bayreuth because of the expansion of urban-centred railway systems. Wagner had composed the Bayreuth Festival theatre’s acoustics into the Parsifal score. But his very approach to the orchestra also depended on the professionalization and expansion of urban orchestras during the nineteenth-century’s final decades, making it possible to imagine not just the Ring and Parsifal, but also such works as Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1909, which required some 110 orchestra members) and non-operatic compositions for chorus, vocal soloists and orchestra like Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1907) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder (1911). Seen from this angle, and replying to a query posed by Peter Borsay in 2002, there was indeed something truly urban about late nineteenth-century opera: in its composition, its performance and its reception.Footnote 86
Parsifal’s gradual urbanization from roughly 1913 to 1930 casts further light on what it meant for opera to be urban (or to ‘become’ urban), at least during the twentieth century’s opening decades. At first glance, it is tempting to see this history as simply another example of the circulation of operas from the theatre of their premiere to other houses and countries.Footnote 87 After all, the move from Bayreuth to Zurich, Brno and Dresden did not occasion changes to the score, or even necessitate translating the libretto, which did occur for Parsifal’s premieres in Paris and in Italy. Nevertheless, the shift to an urban setting for Parsifal performance did require adjustments, for the theatres in Bremen, Breslau, Frankfurt, Prague and Stettin were not the same as the Bayreuth stage, nor were their artistic forces or, in most cases, even their audience members.
We observe still more about urban musical life and its cultural systems when we shift to the metaphor of migration and couple it with the notion of musicking, with their attention to fluidity, process and action. Parsifal’s move to the big city was not just a matter of performing the same score as in Bayreuth. Urban cultural conditions in 1914 made ‘Parsifal mania’ possible, and not just the mounting of more than 30 new productions in as many Central European cities. Trains, trams and subways brought urban, suburban and eventually regional populations to the theatres where it played. The urban media, too, made important contributions: alerting people to performance schedules and ticket availability, while also publishing reviews that shaped the work’s reception. If the public (and critics) expected metropolitan theatres to offer performances that respected Bayreuth traditions, urban conditions imposed certain restraints on ‘replicating’ the Bayreuth experience. But it also created opportunities, and the longer that the Bayreuth Festival theatre remained closed, the more that urban actors took advantage of them, whether by imagining anew the stage design at the opera house or by exploring the new frontiers of opera on the radio. The reference to radio is particularly salient, because it helps us view Parsifal’s experiences during the 1920s and early 1930s as less peculiar and more exemplary of broader trends that shaped the evolving relationship between opera/music in the big cities of early twentieth-century Europe.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Dorothee Brandt, Avi Sharma and the participants in the research seminar of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin for their insightful comments on an early version of this article. I am grateful too for the many suggestions offered by Margaret E. Menninger, by this journal’s editor, Shane Ewen, and by the two anonymous reviewers of this journal, which proved invaluable in recrafting key aspects of this article.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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