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Lars von Trier’s Lost Ring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Nila Parly
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Abstract

In 2002, film director Lars von Trier agreed to stage Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The project was abandoned, however, after two years of preparation. For this article’s research, I conducted interviews with key persons involved with the project, not least Lars von Trier himself, and I was given access to unseen materials (documents, videotapes and other items) from the archives of Lars von Trier’s film company, Zentropa, which shed light both on the director’s plans for the production and on the process that would eventually spell the end of the project. The materials, however, turned out to illuminate not only what the opera world lost, but also what von Trier’s later films gained from his immersion into Wagner’s creative world. In this article I seek to map both the ill-fated process and explore the later benefits from it in the films Antichrist (2009), Nymphomaniac (2013) and, above all, Melancholia (2011), with its echoes of Wagner’s apocalyptic Götterdämmerung.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

Nila Parly, independent scholar; nila.parly@mail.dk

My sincere thanks to Lars von Trier, Vibeke Windeløv and Elisabeth Linton for giving me such fascinating and informative interviews; to Zentropa for their hospitality and for allowing me to publish photographs and other material from their archives. I would also like to thank the staff at Zentropa for their help in putting the film clips I have referenced onto one DVD, and Lars von Trier’s assistants Sanne Tatjana Larsen and Lasse Andersen for all their practical help in connection with this project.

References

1 ‘De laver et kæmpe ligbål der til sidst. Brünnhilde forstår, hvad der er sket pludselig – hvorfor forstår hun pludselig, hvad der er sket? Nå, der er nogen, der sladrer. Og så forstår hun, hvad der er sket, og så siger hun: okay, så må hun tage konsekvensen af det, og så tager hun sin hest – den skal åbenbart også tage konsekvensen, den har ikke gjort en skid, den har bare stået og gumlet i baggrunden i flere af scenerne – og så vælter hun ind i det der ligbål […] og dør selvfølgelig i flammerne, må vi gå ud fra, og ringen, som hun har, den har hun ikke på … hun har da ikke fået den på? … Nå, hun er i hvert fald død … sidst havde han den på hånden, jeg tror, han har den på hånden … i hvert fald så brænder det hele op, og så stiger Rhinen, og rhindøtrene kommer trallende op, og de griber ringen, og Hagen, han kaster sig efter ringen og drukner, må vi gå ud fra, bliver hevet ned af de der rhindøtre. Så slutbilledet er – og det går lynende hurtigt der til sidst der – ligbål, hest og rytter ind i ligbålet, kæmpe kor på stranden, Rhinen stiger op, dækker det hele, rhindøtrene vælter rundt, og i baggrunden (står der så som en lille slutbemærkning) brænder Valhal ned, ikk’. Sådan er den!’ Lars von Trier’s description of the last minutes of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. Filmed on 11 August 2002. Videotape from the Zentropa archives. The English translation given here represents an attempt to provide a faithful rendering of the original Danish, complete with pauses and asides. The rest of the tape, containing the earlier parts of this account, has been lost.

2 According to Lars von Trier’s assistant director, Elisabeth Linton, it was not Wolfgang Wagner’s own idea to choose the Danish director for this task; the suggestion came from his wife, Gudrun Wagner. Interview with Elisabeth Linton, 30 May 2016.

3 The confidentiality agreement was signed on 30 June 2014.

4 The forty-six minute video, now in my possession, includes clips of meetings with Gudrun and Wolfgang Wagner, conductor Christian Thielemann and designer Kalli Júlíusson, and recordings of a number of technical rehearsals.

5 Elisabeth Linton specialises in opera direction, and was scheduled to take over the practical task of directing the individual singers during the last part of the rehearsals, an arrangement in many ways similar to that adopted by Lars von Trier in Riget II and Breaking the Waves, where he left a good deal of the individual direction to film director Morten Arnfred. According to Linton, at a later stage in the process she shared this function with the daughter of Gudrun and Wolfgang, Katharina Wagner, now artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival. Interview with Linton, 30 May 2016.

6 See, for example, Lucy Badley, in Lars von Trier (Urbana, 2010), 9 and 147, who refers to the fact that von Trier stated in an interview that he has had Nietzsche’s book Antichrist on his bedside table since he was twelve years old. It is perhaps no coincidence, in this light, that von Trier should have presented himself as Nietzsche’s alter ego in his 2007 film script De unge år. Erik Nietzsche sagaen del 1 (The Early Years. The Erik Nietzsche Saga, Part 1), about his own early years at the National Film School of Denmark.

7 It is worth noting that when Lars von Trier uses Wagner’s music in his films, it is always without voices. In the early film Epidemic (1987), he uses the Overture from Tannhäuser, and – as discussed below – in the later films Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013), the Preludes to Act I and Act III of Tristan and the transformation music from Das Rheingold respectively.

8 During the shooting of The Element of Crime (1985), for instance, von Trier and his cast and crew spent some time underground in the Copenhagen sewers. When filming without sound, von Trier would switch on the ghetto blaster he carried with him and make the cavernous sewer tunnels ring with Wagner’s music. It was, in von Trier’s own words, ‘fucking mythological’. Thorsen, Nils, Geniet. Lars von Triers liv, film og fobier (Copenhagen, 2011), 171–173 Google Scholar .

9 Lars von Trier has fought depression and panic attacks in the same way as Wagner (and many of his contemporaries): by taking baths and going for long walks. Thorsen, Geniet, 154–5.

10 There are many similarities between von Trier’s female characters and Wagner’s Senta from The Flying Dutchman and Elisabeth from Tannhäuser, a fact that others have remarked on before me; see, for example, Schepelern, Peter, Lars von Triers film. Tvang og befrielse (Copenhagen, 2000), 212 Google Scholar , or Rockwell, John, ‘Lars von Trier’s Vision Was Just What Wagner Needed’, New York Times, 11 June 2004 Google Scholar .

11 ‘As in Antichrist, Melancholia opens with an overture’, as explained in ‘Longing for the End of All’, interview between von Trier and Nils Thorsen, March 2011, melancholiathemovie.com.

12 Interview between von Trier and Nils Thorsen, March 2011.

13 ‘En overdragelsesforretning’ was originally signed by the director on 22 June 2004. It is still available in Danish at www.scribd.com/document/328998800/Lars-Von-Trier-en-Overleveringsforretning-Danish and in English in Ryan Minor’s article ‘Deed of Conveyance’, Opera Quarterly 23 (2007), 341–7. Lars von Trier’s notes on Die Walküre and Siegfried are reproduced in the original Danish at www.jernesalt.dk/trierringen.asp and in Italian in Francesco Ceraolo’s book, Registi all’Opera. Note sull’estetica della regia operistica (Rome, 2011) 101–79.

14 Von Trier, ‘En overdragelsesforretning’, 5–6.

15 Quoted by von Trier in ‘En overdragelsesforretning’, 2.

16 Von Trier, ‘En overdragelsesforretning’, 3.

17 Von Trier, ‘En overdragelsesforretning’, 4–5.

18 Von Trier, ‘En overdragelsesforretning’, 5.

19 When I interviewed her on 30 May 2016 von Trier’s assistant, Elisabeth Linton, told me that the original plan was for the Rhine Maidens to perform in the nude.

20 Most likely the version by Danish translator and Wagner biographer Nebelong, Henrik. Rhinguldet, Valkyrien, Siegfried, and Gudedæmringen (Copenhagen, 1983)Google Scholar .

21 Lars von Trier did, in fact, spend the night on the stage at the Festspielhaus in order to meet ‘Wagner’s spirit’. And, while there he actually did have a somewhat startling encounter with a Wagner. Not Richard but Gudrun, who turned up in the middle of the night, woke him and whispered to him that she was sure he was afraid of her. And then she was gone, leaving this angst-ridden man scared out of his wits in the dauntingly ‘enriched’ darkness of the vast stage at Bayreuth. Videotape from Zentropa, recorded 11 August 2002 in Bayreuth, and my own interview with Lars von Trier, 15 April 2015.

22 One cinematic lighting device which von Trier considers ‘stealing’ is the one used with the poisoned milk in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, where the light is inside the glass. This, he suggests to Kalli Júlíusson, might be used in the scene with the drink of oblivion in Götterdämmerung.

23 Interview with Vibeke Windeløv, 18 May 2016, and interview with Linton, 30 May 2016.

24 Interview with Lars von Trier, 30 April 2015. As far as von Trier was concerned the scrim did not pose any sort of acoustic problem; the real acoustic problem, in Bayreuth as in many other places, was that every cast member wanted to sing from the ‘sweet spot’ centre stage, where the acoustics are particularly good.

25 Interview with Linton, 30 May 2016. Linton emphasises that the Wagner family was ‘extremely supportive and positively disposed towards’ Lars von Trier, but that other directors had left Bayreuth while he was there, among them Martin Kušej, who had been scheduled to stage a production of Parsifal, but was so exasperated by the Wagner family’s interference in the designing of the sets that he pulled out. Linton had heard from Katharina Wagner that Thielemann also had a tendency to make changes once the orchestra rehearsals had started. So von Trier’s team was worried that these three might meddle with the staging at a later stage, and the concept of ‘enriched darkness’ was simply too fragile for that. Everything had been planned right down to the last detail and any later changes could bring the whole edifice tumbling down.

26 Interview with Windeløv, 18 May 2016. It was the production team that had asked for this extension, due to the additional demands being made on the singers, who would be performing on a darkened stage and sometimes have to be attached to wires by snap-hooks to ensure that they did not fall. Lars von Trier had calculated that the bulk of the rehearsals would be led by his assistants, but the Wagner family expected him to be in attendance for the whole of the rehearsal phase.

27 Interview with Windeløv, 18 May 2016. Lars von Trier told me later that when acting as concept consultant for a new opera about Martin Luther by Danish composer Bo Holten he considered using several of his ideas for the Ring project in this opera, which was scheduled to open in Germany in 2017, to be transferred later to the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. Holten’s opera was never finished, however, due to lack of funding.

28 The conductor on this recording is Daniel Barenboim, and it was used by von Trier for timing the changes of lighting in rehearsals.

29 Lars von Trier suggested to me in conversation that for him in the ultimate production of the Ring the characters would represent members of the Wagner family, but that in this particular production he wanted to pursue the idea of the ‘Black Theatre’. Interview with von Trier, 30 April 2015.

30 This is because movement in the direction of reading is subconsciously experienced as something positive, whereas movement against the direction of reading is associated with negativity. See, for instance, Larsen, De levende billeders dramaturgi, 199.

31 Lars von Trier, video recording from the Zentropa archives, 19 June 2002.

32 From the Zentropa archives.

33 Rockwell, ‘Lars von Trier’s Vision’.

34 Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen on video recorded 30 May 2002.

35 The sets for Antichrist and Nymphomaniac were, as it happens, designed by scenographer Kalli Júlíusson, who also designed the sets for the Ring project and for Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville.

36 Ceraolo, Registi all’Opera, 87.

37 Ceraolo, Registi all’Opera, 76.

38 See Carolyn Abbate’s dramaturgical sketch in Parly, Nila, ‘Flying a Wagner Kite’, Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2009), 161–162 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

39 For more on von Trier’s use of simultaneous scenes, see Ceraolo, Registi all’Opera, 80–1.

40 Kim Skotte, review of Melancholia in the newspaper Politiken, 19 May 2011.

41 Skotte, review of Melancholia. This review and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen’s article ‘Melancholia – verdens dionysiske undergrund’, Peripeti 17 (2012), 8–19, are probably the two treatments closest to a comparison between Melancholia and the Wagnerian universe of destruction. Neither mentions the Ring, however, nor von Trier’s planned production of it. To my knowledge, then, no one before has pursued an actual comparative analysis of Melancholia and von Trier’s Ring project.

42 Lars von Trier in the bonus material on DVD of Melancholia, 2011.

43 Von Trier, DVD of Melancholia.

44 Letter to Franz Liszt, 11 February 1853, in which he encloses a privately printed copy of the libretto of the Ring. Stuart Spencer and Barry Millington, trans. and ed., Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (London, 1987), 280–1.

45 Richard Wagner on the prelude to Tristan and Isolde in a programme note from the premiere. Richard Wagner, Nachgelassene Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1885), trans. Piero Weiss in Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, ed. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (New York, 1984), 377.

46 Also see Wagner’s own writing on the liberation of women from the power of their spouses in ‘Über das Weibliche im Menschlichen’, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 14, ed. Julius Kapp (Leipzig, n.d.), 206.

47 Thorsen, Geniet, 214.

48 With Justine standing in as Lars von Trier’s alter ego, both as a melancholy personality and a creative artist (she is an art director), this could also be read as a metaphor for his own working process, since it has become a principle with him never to watch films produced during his own years as a film director, possibly in order to save his artistic decisions from being influenced by current mainstream tendencies. Live interview by Peter Schepelern with Lars von Trier at the University of Copenhagen, 15 April 2015. The interview was part of a one-day seminar on Lars von Trier and his films and is available on the university’s website: hum.ku.dk/faknyt/2015/april/lars_von_trier_gav_sjaeldent_interview_paa_koebenhavns_universitet/.

49 Lars von Trier in Director’s Statement, 13 April 2011, http://melancholiathemovie.com.

50 Von Trier himself points out that this opening sequence is a collage of all the visions that Justine has during the film, Thorsen, Geniet, 127–8.

51 Lars von Trier on videotape from the Zentropa archives, 19 June 2002.

52 Polo Pujadas, Magda, ‘Die Melancholie bei Richard Wagner und Lars von Trier’, in Richard Wagner – ein einmaliger Rezeptionsfall, ed. Berta Raposo (Heidelberg, 2014), 293 Google Scholar .

53 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie (Munich, 1982), 1: 92 Google Scholar .