Exhibition “VolksWagner” in Bayreuth: Wagner in pop culture – culture

Right next to Richard Wagner’s upper class and educated home in Bayreuth, which he christened “Wahnfried”, is the Richard Wagner Museum, the minimalist new building by the Berlin architect Volker Staab. “VolksWagner” is now housed there, a special exhibition that is completely critical of Wagner, intoned cheerfully to cheekily, about the somewhat different approach to Wagner’s work – namely by means of “popularization, appropriation, kitsch”, the subtitle of this show.

The artist and visionary is also described there as a “businessman”, his “work of art of the future” should have an effect on all areas of life, not only for the beautiful and rich, but for the whole “people”. According to one of the many text boards, Wagner had “gathered an institutionalized fan community” around him in order to be able to finance his festival “in a kind of crowdfunding” with the help of the founding of Wagner associations, for example, or through the mass sale of souvenirs. Wagner thus invents “the cultural marketing that will enable the ‘Wagner brand’ to triumph around the world”. Contradictions included.

Four years of controversial reception: In 1876, Karl Marx recorded a “Bayreuth Fool’s Festival of the State Musician Wagner”, the new Richard Wagner Festival with the “Ring of the Nibelung” at the opening. In 1898, the Brit George Bernard Shaw described the shock in his book “A Perfect Wagnerite”: He discovered the anti-capitalist narrative of the “Ring” saga. In 1924, the 33-year-old Adolf Hitler stayed in Bayreuth: After a ten-year break due to the war, the festival was said to be installing “their ethnic national self-image”. The program book Official festival guide proclaims “the true German culture that is desecrated in the new republic”. Hitler becomes a guest of the Wagner family. July 1933: The National Socialist Monthly Magazine German essence celebrates on the front page “Richard Wagner and the new Germany”.

The air battles of the Wehrmacht against Crete were accompanied in the German newsreel with the “Valkyrie Ride”.

Politicization, ideology and worldview, nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism, they are essential to the history of Wagner’s impact and, at least until 1945, to his festival on the Green Hill. “VolksWagner” brings to the fore the apparently lighter perspectives of the political and the culturally seemingly irrelevant in history and the present, which are not work-analytical, oscillating between high and popular culture.

Not everyone knows, for example, that Wagner’s martial “Valkyrie Ride” had become a sound beacon of warlike aggression since May 30, 1941 at the latest, because the German newsreel accompanied the air battles of the “Wehrmacht” over Crete with Wagner’s combat music. Not only the “Ride of the Valkyries” made it to Hollywood, Wagner’s leitmotif technique conquered the American film music of the 1930s and 1940s, composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner transferred Wagner’s symphonic-motivic relationship magic into the structures of film art with virtuosity. The exhibition shows excerpts from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”.

The accompanying music for pious wedding rituals, i.e. the “bridal choir” from the third act of “Lohengrin”, which was used for the first time in 1858, when Princess Victoria married Friedrich von Prussia, also ensured that Wagner had a widespread impact: ” Loyally guided, go where love will keep you in peace!” In Wagner’s opera, however, the choral song leads directly to the relationship catastrophe of the noble couple.

During World War I, this caricature served as an emblem for French supply trains: “La Wachkyrie” (based on Wagner’s “Valkyrie) laughed at German soldiers. A few years later, it became “La vache qui rit”, the “laughing cow”, which became the trademark French processed cheese became world famous.

(Photo: private property/Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth)

The popularization of Richard Wagner and the festival, called “ambivalent” in the Bayreuth exhibition, gained momentum with all its caricatures and parodies even during the lifetime of the composer, who had a “polarizing, controversial personality”. The show playfully shows how kitsch and criticism are allied with each other, such as the image of the “Laughing Cow” associated with French processed cheese, which as “La Vache qui rit” is identical to the Valkyrie parody “La Wachkyrie”, the German war propaganda is being teased by Wagner’s music. In the direction of mass consumption with Wagner, the popular TV advertisement for the “Radeberger” Pils in the 1990s was stimulated by the “arrival of guests at the Wartburg” from the “Tannhäuser”. One heard Wagner’s music and drank doubly elated. The sparkling wine brand “Rheingold” by “Söhnlein” was one of the early commercials, entered in the trademark register in 1876. The winery received “the imperial privilege that German warships are only christened with this sparkling wine”.

Wagner rocks. The band “Manowar” honors him as the father of heavy metal

The Bayreuth exhibition shows that Wagner “rocks”. 1973 Jim Steinmann’s musical “Rhinegold” premieres in New York, the band Manowar has been producing music in her New York studio “Haus Wahnfried” since the 1990s that is “extremely loud and revolves around themes such as struggle, honor and masculinity”. The band worships Wagner as the father of heavy metal. The stage show of Rammstein does not refer to Wagner literally, but keeps his sights set on him with her “martial demeanor, brute music and ambivalent symbolism”.

With all the kitsch evidence of Wagner, the propagandistic or parodistic Wagner posters, the topic of Hitler and National Socialism in Bayreuth is of course of urgency. The design for the propaganda poster “Es lebe Deutschland” by K. Stuber (1935) with Hitler as the demonic Parsifal seems downright obscene: the dictator with the swastika as the bright “leader and redeemer of people who have been brought into line with the body politic”. The poster from 1970 for Adrian Hoven’s film “Siegfried and the legendary love life of the Nibelungen” with Raimund Harmstorf lifting a naked blonde is vulgar. Slogan: “Young Siegfried was a great pike, he pleases all the ladies.”

In comparison, how harmless our present today! Instead of propaganda and parody, it offers tourism promotion. For example with the “Walk of Wagner” in Bayreuth, avoided by the exhibition. It leads from Haus Wahnfried via numerous stations up to the Festspielhaus on the Green Hill. One of the stations along the way invites you to meditate on the Wagner bronze bust from 1986, created by Arno Breker, known as the “sculptor of the Führer”, who was already active during the National Socialist era. So that brings us back to him, the Bayreuth demon Adolf Hitler.

“VolksWagner. Popularization – Appropriation – Kitsch”. Special exhibition in the Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth. Until October 3rd.

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