"Oh, the stench of Venice!" So cries out an enraptured, almost intoxicated Richard Wagner in Professor Cornelius Schnauber's fanciful yet extraordinarily well-informed play Richard & Felix: Twilight in Venice. The play's premise is simple but requires of audiences a considerable suspension of disbelief. The year is 1883. Wagner and his family are spending their winter holiday in Venice. This much is true; the next bit, not so much...
While in his palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, Wagner hears the music of Felix Mendelssohn. He is soon visited by Mendelssohn (actually, his ghost) and begins with him what becomes a rather tortured philosophical tug-of-war. Mendelssohn's ghost, equipped with a sort of omniscience that affords him knowledge of future events, flatly blames Wagner's personal anti-Semitism and his ultra-Teutonic, quasi-nationalistic music for stoking the flames of German anti-Jewish hatred that ultimately led to horrors of the Holocaust, some 50 years in the future. Let's be frank. While this play's primary aim is the exploration of the anti-Semitic views of Richard Wagner, it seems to at times treat the matter as a foregone conclusion.
And Schnauber does suggest, more than once, that Wagner's music was essentially the soundtrack to Hitler's Holocaust. It was not. When Mendelssohn (a Jewish-born baptised Christian) insists that "...he that sows bad seeds is responsible for the weeds that grow" Wagner responds that he cannot be blamed for sins he himself did not commit. I am personally of the mind that one can legitimately dispute the extent to which Wagner's music and the mythologies and ideologies that informed it were an influence to and inspiration for the architects of the Third Reich. Even so, there comes a point when one must address this fundamental question: Is a morally reprehensible artist capable of creating good and meaningful art? This basic question is far older than Nazis and Wagner and is one to which I shall devote considerable energies in future blog posts. But I digress...
The acting in this particular production is superb. It would have to be in order to pull off such an esoteric premise. Don DeForest Paul's Wagner is wonderfully earthy, lecherous, immediately comprehensible, and full of lots of rich little detail; this is an actor who does not merely declaim but employs every muscle and sinew at his disposal. Jerry Weil's Mendelssohn is plucky and impish, which is rather remarkable as it is difficult to imagine the ghost of Felix Mendelssohn causing anyone much angst. Mendelssohn, in life, was often mocked for his mildness and conservatism. One of my favourite moments in the play is when Wagner complains to Mendelssohn that he was "...always so precise, overly precise!" The person of Cosima Wagner, who was on this evening played by the stunning Kathryn Larsen, is treated slightly less charitably by Schnauber as she repeatedly rails against the corrupting influence of Jews in music. (I daresay this bares a good deal of fidelity to the real-life Cosima who, according to certain sources, was a far more inveterate anti-Semite than her composer husband.)
The impressive acting notwithstanding, the play does require the audience to have at least a passing familiarity with the music of Wagner and Mendelssohn. Herr Schnauber, whose own father was a low-level Nazi apparatchik, is clearly a credible historian of war-time Germany and of German attitudes towards Jews before, during, and after. He has penned dozens of books on German history, art, and culture and is the former chair of the German department of the University of Southern California as well as the founder of that school's Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.
I saw the play on Good Friday evening at the surprisingly relaxed and informal MET Theatre in Hollywood. The performance took place in the MET's more intimate downstairs theatre, the Great Scott, a venue which seemed to lend the actors' already powerful performances even greater resonance. Richard & Felix: Twilight in Venice will run until 25 April with performances Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The play is directed by L. Flint Esquerra and is a co-presentation of Ring Festival LA. Visit the MET's website for additional information. And go see this extraordinary drama!
Nota bene: The opinions expressed on this blog and its related media are solely those of J. Anthony McAlister. They in no way represent the opinions of Los Angeles Opera, Ring Festival LA, or any of their associated partners.
