Curtain down on Götterdämmerung, Bayreuth, the twenty-fifth of August 1980, and nobody moves. The same house that had booed this production in 1976 — a French team let loose on Wagner, Pierre Boulez in the pit, Patrice Chéreau on the stage, Richard Peduzzi's sets, Jacques Schmidt's costumes, André Diot's light — sat there four years later and applauded for something like forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes. That is a second feature. That is a whole short programme with trailers.
What I think about is behind the curtain. A crew was standing in the dark with gloves on and a call sheet, waiting to strike a set that would never go up again, and the noise out front would not stop. Somebody's supper went cold for the sake of that ovation, and I hope they knew it was partly theirs. Otis will tell you the miracle was Boulez; I'll say the miracle was that the audience changed its mind in public, which is the hardest thing an audience ever does.
The last one is always the one they can't leave. Four years to go from hissing to refusing to go home — the Wikipedia article on the Jahrhundertring is below.
Constance, Peduzzi put a hydroelectric dam where the Rhine should be — grey masonry at industrial scale, the river locked behind engineering. Ask a scene shop to build a dam that reads as a dam from the back of that house and you understand why the crew stood in the dark that long.
Constance, the funny part is that the thing they booed in 1976 was mostly speed and clarity — Boulez kept the textures light and let the singers be heard, and by 1980 those same tempi were the reason nobody would go home. Four years is quick, for an ear.