Richard Wagner – a visual walk through his universal creative work
Richard Wagner was a composer – he created music that generally set the stage for the musical development of the 20th century. The music is not visible, although Wagner allows Tristan to say in his delirium at the end of "Tristan und Isolde", "Wie, hör' ich das Licht?" ("What? Is it the light that I hear?"). What this means is that in a true masterpiece of universal proportions, such as the work of Richard Wagner, the boundaries between acoustic and visual perception blur – you hear his music and you see in front of you what that music is telling you. And you see this collection of posters for Wagner productions, collected over the last 30 years from all over the world, and you hear the music behind them, especially if you know Wagner's music. That's probably the case if you've come to Sofia for this interesting Wagner Festival with the new production of "Lohengrin" and the new Ring of the Nibelung by Prof. Plamen Kartalov from 2023, who also directed "Lohengrin". All of these operas, which you will be able to see this June, are featured in this collection. This was announced by the press centre of the Sofia Opera and Ballet.
But Wagner's magnum opus, the tetralogy "Der Ring des Nibelungen", is the centrepiece of this exhibition. Work on this greatest work of musical theatre ever created by man occupied Wagner for some 25 years, a significant period of his life. In the four music dramas "Das Rheingold", "Die Walküre", "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung" he projected his vision of a better world, demonstrating the incompatibility of power and love. With "The Ring" Wagner offers socially revolutionary ideas and concepts of great relevance to our lives, people and societies as a whole, with a real dimension of universality.
This can be seen in various aspects of the posters for "The Ring" from this exhibition. There is fire again and again as a primal and ultimately uncontrollable force symbolized in "The Ring", also the sword Nothung, mainly in posters from Sofia, Essen, Minden, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Vienna, Wroclaw, etc. You see a remarkable series of reproductions of paintings made for the Danish Gothenburg "Ring" and you see the humorous and colourful "Ring" posters of the German Detmold. You see the Ring itself in many ways, such as yellow for Bayreuth's "The Ring in One Evening". Or stylized mythologically in association with the Chinese dragon in the Shanghai Grand Theatre, in direct relation to fire in Sofia or in the "ColónRing" in Buenos Aires.
Many of the posters refer to the myths behind "The Ring" and other works by Richard Wagner, such as "Der fliegende Hollä" from Mannheim's National Theatre, "Tannhäuser" from Germany's Heidenheim Festival, "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" – with a wooden model of a shoe – as well as "Parsifal".
The posters you see for Wagner's latest work, "Parsifal", offer a wide range of visual associations with the many themes and messages of this masterpiece, from a suffering Parsifal in Stockholm to Siena's association with the Grail Temple in Sofia. A poster from Wroclaw in Poland seems to bring together many of the associations one might develop for "Parsifal"... Last but not least, you see the red Grail itself from an exhibition in Bayreuth.
Enjoy the adventure with a visual walk through Wagner's work and try to hear the music behind what you see by asking Tristan the question in a slightly different way, "What? Is that the music I see?"
Klaus Biland, Sofia, 13 June 2024
(Reviews on my home page www.klaus-billand.com)