WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.360 --> 00:00:02.960 With Wagner, music and words are always one. 2 00:00:04.480 --> 00:00:08.240 Words with Wagner are already music, 3 00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:13.200 it is very important to always work that out. 4 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:21.800 Of course, if you only read the Wagner text without music, 5 00:00:21.800 --> 00:00:25.240 it sometimes seems a bit strange, 6 00:00:25.240 --> 00:00:26.760 I admit, 7 00:00:26.760 --> 00:00:34.640 but when you listen to the music within the word and 8 00:00:34.640 --> 00:00:38.360 you hear how the vowels are used, 9 00:00:38.360 --> 00:00:44.200 which are a music in themselves, 10 00:00:44.200 --> 00:00:49.360 whether he uses a dark vowel – an O, a U, an Ü – 11 00:00:49.360 --> 00:00:52.440 that is quite different from an A and an E and an I. 12 00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:58.040 And he employs that incredibly consciously. And then there 13 00:00:58.040 --> 00:01:00.840 is the whole way he uses consonants. 14 00:01:00.840 --> 00:01:06.720 The consonants that ring out are a W 15 00:01:06.720 --> 00:01:08.880 as in “Wehmut” (wistfulness) or “Wonne” (delight), 16 00:01:08.880 --> 00:01:13.080 all these things, or the L, particularly with Wagner. 17 00:01:13.080 --> 00:01:17.200 I don’t know how often I have sung the word “Lust” – 18 00:01:18.280 --> 00:01:20.880 and there this L is so important. 19 00:01:20.880 --> 00:01:24.160 And you have to savour it. That’s already music. 20 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:27.400 You have to sing vowels and consonants 21 00:01:27.400 --> 00:01:30.400 with feeling and sentiment – it’s the only way. 22 00:01:31.240 --> 00:01:33.560 Only in that way can you perform it. 23 00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:40.400 When I say “The lust”, it has to come out from within. 24 00:01:41.520 --> 00:01:47.720 I think that what interested Wagner more than religion 25 00:01:47.720 --> 00:01:48.840 was mysticism, 26 00:01:50.680 --> 00:01:56.560 which stood somewhere above all religions, 27 00:01:56.560 --> 00:01:57.480 or it unites all of them. 28 00:02:00.120 --> 00:02:02.960 I think that influenced him much more 29 00:02:02.960 --> 00:02:04.120 in all his works, 30 00:02:04.120 --> 00:02:06.960 especially in “Parsifal”, of course, 31 00:02:06.960 --> 00:02:09.960 where there was also the influence of Buddhism. 32 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:17.000 But nowhere is he entirely unequivocal and concrete. 33 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:20.720 And I also don’t believe that this was his world. 34 00:02:20.720 --> 00:02:23.680 I really believe that he occupied himself considerably more 35 00:02:23.680 --> 00:02:27.480 with mysticism. 36 00:02:29.040 --> 00:02:29.680 I don’t want to say: 37 00:02:29.680 --> 00:02:35.800 spirituality? No, but mysticism was important for him. 38 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:38.720 “Prima la musica e poi le parole”, 39 00:02:38.720 --> 00:02:40.560 that is always the fundamental conflict 40 00:02:40.560 --> 00:02:43.280 hat we in the opera have had to struggle with for centuries. 41 00:02:43.280 --> 00:02:46.680 With Wagner the conflict is settled, so to speak, 42 00:02:46.680 --> 00:02:48.440 simply in that he says: “I make both.” 43 00:02:48.440 --> 00:02:50.920 So there is no longer any contradiction at all. 44 00:02:50.920 --> 00:02:53.960 Of course, the result is that with his unbelievable hybris, 45 00:02:53.960 --> 00:02:55.400 as it were, he creates 46 00:02:55.400 --> 00:03:00.000 and aspires to a ground-breaking, 47 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:02.080 pure culture of his own language. 48 00:03:02.080 --> 00:03:04.400 That is very interesting in opposition 49 00:03:04.400 --> 00:03:06.560 to the cosmopolitan Giuseppe Verdi, 50 00:03:06.560 --> 00:03:09.200 who sees himself entirely as a citizen of the world and 51 00:03:09.200 --> 00:03:12.120 always refers to the existing literary tradition of theatre – 52 00:03:12.120 --> 00:03:14.800 Schiller, Shakespeare and so on –, 53 00:03:14.800 --> 00:03:18.240 which he often uses in his works, 54 00:03:18.240 --> 00:03:21.320 while Wagner creates new premises, so to speak, 55 00:03:21.320 --> 00:03:23.280 and creates his own new artificial language, 56 00:03:23.280 --> 00:03:24.320 which is meant for music. 57 00:03:25.200 --> 00:03:32.200 In complete delusion, you could say: 58 00:03:32.200 --> 00:03:35.200 the belief that he could really be in a position 59 00:03:35.200 --> 00:03:39.720 to communicate to the audience, all of them united, as it were, 60 00:03:39.720 --> 00:03:45.560 so that the hermeneutical level of the language 61 00:03:45.560 --> 00:03:47.680 can actually no longer appear as a problem, 62 00:03:47.680 --> 00:03:50.400 because it will always be caught up by music, and vice versa. 63 00:03:51.240 --> 00:03:55.080 In every country, whether Germany or Italy, 64 00:03:55.080 --> 00:03:57.880 it doesn’t matter in this connection, 65 00:03:57.880 --> 00:03:58.920 you have to first ask: What is the stage? 66 00:03:58.920 --> 00:04:01.960 And that applies to the political stage, but also to the stage per se, 67 00:04:01.960 --> 00:04:07.520 and to the possibility to be able to communicate at all, and 68 00:04:07.520 --> 00:04:09.760 to a thought that should bear up 69 00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:11.640 new social structures, as it were, and all that, of course, 70 00:04:11.640 --> 00:04:14.280 in the wake of a revolution 71 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:15.840 that turned Europe on its head … 72 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:21.440 [Belonging and …] 73 00:04:21.440 --> 00:04:22.800 and identification. 74 00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:27.520 … but there is definitively always an almost fatalistic longing for 75 00:04:27.520 --> 00:04:29.320 a fundamental change, 76 00:04:29.320 --> 00:04:31.840 which must create preconditions for 77 00:04:31.840 --> 00:04:33.960 what could constitute a “We”. 78 00:04:33.960 --> 00:04:37.040 The “We” is always threatened with Wagner, 79 00:04:37.040 --> 00:04:37.840 very basically. 80 00:04:38.400 --> 00:04:41.520 And he worked that out again and again 81 00:04:41.520 --> 00:04:42.680 both in the social and the individual context. 82 00:04:42.680 --> 00:04:44.280 And that really implies, I believe, 83 00:04:44.280 --> 00:04:46.160 a kind of schizophrenia 84 00:04:46.160 --> 00:04:49.000 in every respect, not only between the individual and the artist: 85 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:51.080 the bridges that you always have to build between yourself 86 00:04:51.080 --> 00:04:52.240 and the world, 87 00:04:52.240 --> 00:04:56.040 fundamentally in the quest for the “We”, 88 00:04:56.040 --> 00:04:58.520 in the search for God, in the search for “I”. 89 00:05:00.520 --> 00:05:06.480 And in this respect I have been shaped, or my approach was 90 00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:10.240 probably always shaped by the perspective 91 00:05:10.240 --> 00:05:13.480 that I had on Germany as a Norwegian. 92 00:05:14.640 --> 00:05:16.520 Although, on the one hand, with an absolute 93 00:05:16.520 --> 00:05:18.720 identification with “Germanness”, 94 00:05:18.720 --> 00:05:22.360 as I had been taught, but from the outside, 95 00:05:22.360 --> 00:05:24.240 not from within. 96 00:05:24.240 --> 00:05:25.680 And I was not schooled in German. 97 00:05:26.160 --> 00:05:28.440 It was never my mother tongue, 98 00:05:28.440 --> 00:05:31.000 but I only picked it up later. 99 00:05:31.240 --> 00:05:33.600 … because they are all people, they are not only Germans, 100 00:05:33.600 --> 00:05:35.120 but rather the whole world comes together 101 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:37.160 to celebrate Wagner at this place. 102 00:05:37.160 --> 00:05:38.880 And I believe a great 103 00:05:38.880 --> 00:05:41.640 many questions come up in this respect: 104 00:05:41.640 --> 00:05:43.800 Who are “We” as Germans in this context? 105 00:05:43.800 --> 00:05:46.600 And the fact that one tried exactly that, 106 00:05:46.600 --> 00:05:49.280 at least in pictures, so to speak, articulated 107 00:05:49.280 --> 00:05:50.480 as a kind of discontinuity 108 00:05:50.480 --> 00:05:57.280 that keeps falling back on us as an unanswered question – 109 00:05:57.280 --> 00:06:01.560 that produced a lot of emotions on which I could build.