Life bitterly imitated art this week in the fate of the Russian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, who was scheduled to sing the Dutchman on Wednesday in a high-profile new production of the opera that opened this year?s Bayreuth Festival.
Mr. Nikitin withdrew just a few days before the premiere, after a German television news segment featured video footage in which one of his many tattoos seemed to resemble a swastika. Other photos revealed other tattoos that were apparently Scandinavian runes that had been co-opted as SS symbols during World War II.
?I had them done in my youth,? Mr. Nikitin, 38, said of the tattoos in a statement released by the festival on Saturday. ?It was a big mistake, and I wish I?d never done it. I was not aware of the extent of the irritation and offense these signs and symbols would cause, particularly in Bayreuth given the context of the festival?s history.?
In more recent statements released through the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, Mr. Nikitin, in a shift, said that the tattoo never depicted a swastika; the video footage, he said, captured an intermediate stage in the creation of the eight-pointed star that appears in current photos. And he now implied that it was done not in his rebellious youth but just a few years ago.
This strange, changeable story encompasses heavy-metal culture ? Mr. Nikitin was in a band in Russia ? and the charged deployment of Nazi imagery during the Soviet era. But while the details keep altering, their implications are profound for a festival that cannot and should not stop thinking about its past.
The incident comes at an important moment for Bayreuth, led since 2008 by two of Wagner?s great-granddaughters, Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Next year is the 200th anniversary of the composer?s birth, the occasion for a new production of the ?Ring? cycle. The Villa Wahnfried, where the family lived and Hitler would regularly stay, is in the midst of major renovations before reopening in 2014: the past brought into the present once again.
It is easy to mock Mr. Nikitin?s original statement, to doubt that any adult could be unaware that a swastika would raise hackles at Bayreuth. The sensitivities here are real and reasonable. After all, everyone knows that Wagner himself was a virulent anti-Semite and later Hitler?s favorite composer, and that the festival, which opened in 1876, was closely allied with the Nazi Party before and during World War II.
From a distance it can sometimes seem that the festival itself is like the Dutchman, locked in a cruelly extended cycle of recriminations and guilt over the errors of an isolated period now nearly a century ago. But ?Silenced Voices,? a somber temporary exhibition on the verdant grounds in front of the Festival Theater that details the stories of the Jewish artists who performed at Bayreuth before the war, is a crushing reminder that the festival did not make a mere foray into Nazism.
Proto-Nazi ideals of racism, rabid nationalism and ethnic cleansing were at the core of Wagner?s conception of Bayreuth, a conception carried through with intense loyalty by his family after his death in 1883. To view ?Silenced Voices? and then look up at the proud, implacable Festival Theater is to feel only sadness and revulsion, to question whether these wounds can ? or should ? ever heal.
Nikolaus Bachler, the artistic head of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, told a German newspaper that Mr. Nikitin had sufficiently apologized, adding, ?I have never heard the Wagner family regret anything in the last 50 years.?
That is untrue. It is a major gesture, and an improbable one not so many years ago, that the Wagner great-granddaughters scheduled the ?Silenced Voices? display, let alone gave it such a prominent location.
And after decades of trying to blanch the festival?s stains artistically by strenuously avoiding the past ? Wieland Wagner?s abstract designs after the war were intended to offer the greatest possible contrast to the Romantic realism of Bayreuth?s origins ? recent productions, including Katharina Wagner?s own version of ?Die Meistersinger von N?rnberg? in 2007, have explicitly dealt with its dark history. Stefan Herheim?s 2008 ?Parsifal? even recast the opera?s plot as the story of Bayreuth itself moving through time.
Source: http://magazineforever.com/critics-notebook-evgeny-nikitin-and-wagners-flying-dutchman
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