Wagner’s Ideas about the Theatre

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the theatre changed gradually from the enclosed court theatre to a public commercial venue. The theatre auditorium was no longer exclusively reserved for aristocrats. Aristocratic society was decaying and the so-called new money became increasingly influential. Theatre became an enterprise and the performances were subject to the taste of the new class, the rich bourgeoisie. This taste was largely characterised by a tendency towards the richly ornamented, lavishly decorated conventional Baroque tradition. Rococo-style ornaments became very popular.

There were important developments in the manner of staging. Historicism became crucial in theatre production towards the end of the century. It became fancy to criticise leading playwrights for inaccuracy of historical details and great pains were taken by some producers to reproduce the correct historical costumes and settings for a play. King Ludwig of Bavaria, for one, was very insistent on historical precision.

Nevertheless, the Baroque tradition had firmly rooted in theatre practice. The contemporary auditorium was still the same horseshoe-shaped, multi-tiered, lavishly ornamented and illuminated (with the rare exception of some theatres) auditorium derived from the court-theatre tradition, with its very prominent place for the king or sovereign and a rather small proscenium stage. Although no longer exclusive, the nineteenth-century theatre was in the first place a social venue. Its primary function was not to produce opera, but to produce an event were society could meet. One came to be seen and to watch others. The sightlines in the auditorium didn’t offer a good view of the stage but instead an unobstructed perception of the other boxes (and hence people) in the auditorium. Generally, the stage was rather small and the staging of minor importance; the auditorium however was splendidly decorated and since the lights weren’t dimmed during performance, there was plenty to distract the eye.

Not surprising the defenders of a pure theatre found the contemporary theatre practice unbearable. Among them was Richard Wagner. In numerous writings, he proposed an extensive reformation of the art of opera. Opera and theatre (opera being the superior because the more complete art, according to Wagner) had to be freed from the constraints of money and the taste for sensation (closely tied together: the more spectacular the performance, the more people will attend it and the higher the profits will be).

Wagner considered the ultimate goal of the performance to be the evocation of a profound, almost religious experience. To achieve this, the performance had to be untied from everyday life. An entire new, ideal stage-image had to be developed. Art, as Wagner conceived it, had to elevate the human soul. However, the contemporary state of the arts was one of lamentable degeneration. The reasons he tended to seek in the influence of the French style on German opera production. The ‘French style’ had enhanced the taste for the abundant of the spectators and the straining for effects of the performers and producers. Wagner looked gravely upon the established star-system that allowed a few expensive and famous actors to dominate the stage while no attention was played to the skills of the subsidiary actors. The system necessarily lowered the quality of the performance as a whole. Wagner complained that the audience was primarily interested in the opera as a social occasion and only wanted to be entertained. He sharply remarked that the French audience only attended performances to feast their eyes on this or that beautiful ballerina.

Wagner was not the only one to lament contemporary developments in the theatre. His friend Devrient for instance, wondered why not greater care was taken to produce something beautiful and meaningful on the stage. In 1840, he wrote that since every night at least forty thousand people assembled in Germany’s theatre’s to watch a performance, it should be considered of great importance what feelings were evoked by the staged play. Devrient, Wagner and many others considered contemporary opera a futile entertainment produced for a decadent and degenerated part of the audience, and as far removed from True Art as can be.

Considerations of this kind had already been made by several predecessors (Goethe, Schiller, Laub) but Wagner was probably the first one to take action on all fronts: to write a new opera, to produce it in a new way and to construct an entire new theatre. His reform was to be huge and far-reaching because by the end of the nineteenth-century opera was by far the most popular performative art.