Bayreuth - Page 2

purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate
seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is
jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success
which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer
theatres of the highest class. There is no reason why the
experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for
Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and
anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as
annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no
likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance,
a Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill,
not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful
summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours
between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, is
it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors?
If a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel
towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief
annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit
would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously
greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take
the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set
aside as mere pilgrimage mania.

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the
performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is
sometimes tolerable, and sometimes abominable. Some of the
singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to
practise the self-control and physical training that is expected
as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist.
The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that
Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly
modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous
picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains
with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks
so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite
impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her.
The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the
barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was
at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are
sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden,
an intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half
historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most
striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants
with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and