Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Wagner Revisited via the Stendhal Syndrome

Past issues of this Newsletter have carried articles about the impact that Wagner has had on other artists, mainly poets and dramatists.  This time we look at Terrence McNally's play The Stendhal Syndrome .  Members may be familiar with McNally's very successful 1995 play Masterclass , based on Maria Callas' masterclasses at the Julliard School of Music in New York City. That play also had a very successful season at the Sydney Theatre Company with Robyn Nevin giving a powerful performance as the Diva.

Around 1995 McNally also wrote a one-act play Prelude and Liebestod and then around 2003 wrote a companion piece Full Frontal Nudity as meditations of the overwhelming impact art can have on people.  This is the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Wikipedia provides this useful description: ‘Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly 'beautiful' or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world. It is named after the famous 19th century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence, Italy in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio.'

Full Frontal Nudity is McNally's explicit exploration of this Syndrome, but rendered ironically and satirically through the thoughts and words of three American tourists being introduced to Michelangelo's David by a tour guide named Bimbi and so sensitive that after years of daily exposure David still takes her breath away. She leads a widowed, retired English teacher of uncertain sexuality, Mr. Charlotte [!]; Leo Sam pson, a foul-mouthed macho punk; and Lana Maxwell, a dumb blonde who doesn't even know there was such a biblical figure.   The tourists present a range of emotions and reactions from the punk's penis insecurities through Mr Charlotte's embarrassment with nakedness to the genuine Stendhal experience of the guide.

Prelude and Liebestod , on the other hand, uses two rounds of Wagner's music as the backdrop to a the characters thoughts: ‘ The piece is set in a concert hall during a performance of Richard Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde and consists of five interlocking monologues -- by the famous gay Conductor (Larry Eisenberg), his frustrated Wife (Jayne Clement), the tetchy Concertmaster (Klair Bybee), the nervous Soprano (Roberta Orlandi), and a Young Man (Matt Ryan) who's hell-bent on seducing the maestro. Eisenberg, as the breathtakingly egocentric Conductor, brilliantly carries the weight of the piece in a long series of soliloquies, which he must deliver while conducting Wagner. It's a daunting exercise in split focus, requiring him to maintain his constant connection to the music, while delivering a complex, coruscating series of reminiscences, self-examinations, and a musical orgasm that ends in a colossal emotional meltdown.
McNally explained his approach in an interview for the 2004 performance: ‘ how art can affect us emotionally, psychological, erotically' – hence the Stendhal Syndrome.  McNally also notes that the music was not intended to dominate, but to set the tone and to engage the sensual/sensuous response of the audience to this powerful music for his own ends – a kind of piggy-backing on Wagner's work.  Later in this interview, McNally tells us: ‘ . It was always my intention that the second time he does [the piece, within the play] the music pretty much fades out and he stops conducting and we go into his inner life. The audience, you ask them to accept the conceit that we're going into this very intense interior monologue now. But he's still communicating with his wife and the young man and the concertmaster and the soprano through looks.'

McNally also elucidated what he saw as the link between the sexually explicit content of his characters' thoughts and Wagner's music-drama: ‘It's graphic and I think honest and ultimately moving: a man so lost in an impossible moment for anyone to live in which is that incredible moment of supreme ecstasy which is Liebestod, which happens to Wagnerian characters in love. They become so overwhelmed that they die, literally. It's very strange and I think that music famously is prolonged foreplay before orgasm. That chord that's started in the very beginning of the Prelude does not resolve itself until the last note of the soprano and cadenza in the orchestra. I think it's pretty clear to me what Wagner was writing about and it was shocking in its day. It just seemed the ideal piece of music to write about.'

Another review from 1989 gives us a more specific idea of the play and of McNally's indebtedness to Wagner's seminal work: ‘ As [the music] begins, quietly and full of eloquent pauses, the Conductor begins a monologue, speaking his thoughts aloud. At first they are merely conventional expressions of self-satisfaction: ‘I never met anyone as interesting as me,' he says. He basks in the attention of the hall, of the Wife, of the young Man.
As the music grows in complexity and feeling, so too does the conductor's soliloquy. It becomes an aria, following the moods of the music, peaking and receding, filling with anger, loneliness, sexual hunger, loathing. ‘What is transfiguration but an orgasm coupled with a heart attack,' he cries. The other characters also speak their minds, but they are only single instruments; their voices and thoughts join through the conductor in this symphony of human feeling. [Actor Larry] Bryggman's solo [as the Conductor] is a virtuosos piece, by turns elevated and vulgar, sublime and profane, summoning and purging pity and fear, combining the little death of sex and the bigger one that follows life.'  Another reviewer noted: ‘ Still, as the Conductor leads his orchestra and a young soloist through pieces from ''Tristan und Isolde,'' simultaneously conducting an internal monologue to the swirls of Wagner, Mr. Thomas [the Conductor in this performance] makes it clear that this nasty, strutting egomaniac is rising to heavenly heights. His intensity rivals the production's recorded music. Great art, it seems, does not require purity of soul from those who create it or, for that matter, from those who experience it.'

McNally's work also seems to open up a Pandora's Box of ethical and artistic problems of appropriating works of art for one's own ends.  At the worst, we hear and see great works of art debased in advertising designed to sell us some dubious product.  At the best, such appropriation can make us see the work or art in a new light and, ideally, learn to appreciate it more.

Sadly there does not seem to have been any local performances, but perhaps one of our more adventurous theatre companies could be encouraged to schedule The Stendhal Syndrome for 2013, Wagner's 200 th birthday??

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