In 1909 she visited Bayreuth, accompanied by Sydney-Turner and Adrian. “Now we are going to read Parsifal, and then lunch, and then we shall hear the immortal work,” she wrote to her sister, Vanessa, on August 7. The next day she summarized her impressions in the following terms: “Saxon and Adrian say that it was not a good performance, and that I shan’t know anything about it until I have heard it 4 times. [ . . . ] We have been discussing obscure points in Parsifal all the morning” (L1: 404). On August 11 she saw another performance of Wagner’s last work. On this occasion she felt “within a space of tears” and reached the conclusion that “it is the most remarkable of the operas; it slides from music to words almost imperceptibly” (406). In that year Siegfried Wagner and Karl Muck were the conductors. The few available recordings with them suggest a fundamental difference between their interpretations: the composer’s son, Siegfried (himself a composer), tended toward more transparency in orchestral playing (Siegfried Wagner Conducts Wagner, Archipel 0288), whereas Muck was instrumental in creating a long tradition of slow performances that stressed heaviness (Richard Wagner: Parsifal, Naxos Historical 8.110049–50). It would be interesting to know which of the two versions appealed more to Virginia Stephen.
While she wrote to her sister that Lohengrin was “a very dull opera” (L1: 409) before actually seeing that performance in Bayreuth on the evening of August 19, 1909, her comment may need some explanation. The impressions of a young and relatively inexperienced person should perhaps not be taken too seriously, but it is worth noting that Parsifal is not an easily accessible work, so she may have sensed some of the distinct qualities of Wagner’s art if she enjoyed it. It must be borne in mind that she could give only the “impressions as an amateur” in her article published in the Times on August 21. The remarkable thing is that she ascribed the superiority of Parsifal over Lohengrin to the fact that in the later work “the words are continued by the music so that we hardly notice the transition” (E1: 289), a feature that echoes Wagner’s own intentions. Needless to say, Lohengrin can be called an outstanding achievement from at least two perspectives: (1) as the culmination of the German Romantic opera represented by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Carl Maria von Weber, Heinrich August Marschner, and Albert Lortzing, or (2) as a model for the Expressionism of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, composed in 1911, a one-act opera with an opposition between darkness and light (an F sharp and C polarity) comparable to the contrast underlying the structure of Lohengrin, and a blood motif inspired by the music associated with Ortrud in Wagner’s work. For different reasons, both of these contexts were unknown to Virginia Stephen.
From Bayreuth, Sydney-Turner, Adrian, and Virginia Stephen went to Dresden, where they saw a performance of Salome by Richard Strauss. “I was much excited, and believe that it is a new discovery. He gets great emotion into his music, without any beauty” (L1: 410). Once more, an insight might be detected beneath the surface of Virginia’s statement: the realization that expressivity can be attained without an appeal to conventional beauty.
Back in London Virginia may have heard a performance of Tristan und Isolde in 1910 (L1: 425) and Elektra (HL 239), a work that deploys dissonance in a more radical way than Salome, and may also have attended Der Ring in 1911. It seems almost certain that she saw few Wagner performances after her marriage to Leonard in 1912. A letter to Katherine Cox written in May 1913 testifies to the influence of Virginia’s husband: “We came up here 10 days ago to attend the Ring – and I hereby state that I will never go again[ . . . ]. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp – O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still” (L2: 26). In 1923 she wrote about her loss of enthusiasm to a younger woman in terms that suggest a focus on the action rather than on the music: “I went to Tristan the other night; but the love making bored me. When I was your age I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world – or was it only in deference to Saxon?” (L3: 56). Two years later, in a letter addressed to Sydney-Turner, Virginia seemed to express a more qualified view: “I have been to the Walküre, and to Lords: at both places I looked for you in vain. [ . . . ] Walküre completely triumphed, I thought; except for some boredom – I can’t even enjoy those long arguments in music – when it is obviously mere conversation upon business matters between Wotan and Brunhilde: however, the rest was superb. The fire is terrible: I saw at once that it was made of red silk, and that used to be done quite satisfactorily. Also I missed the ride of the horses” (L3: 186). Aside from the reservations that refer to the visual components of the production, the characterization of act 2, scene 2 suggests an inability to recognize the turning point of Der Ring: the dramatic function of Wotan’s outburst of despair caused by the realization that he is unable to create a human being who could have the freedom of will that is denied to the gods. Virginia failed to understand why the composer once described this as “the most important scene in the whole tetralogy” (Donington 155). Wotan’s monologue, moving gradually from almost unaccompanied speech to a complex musical texture in which singing is combined with orchestral development, functions as a self-examination that sheds light on the contradictions of his past. As Pierre Boulez remarked, “La totale confession de Wotan devant Brünnhilde (La Walkyrie, acte II) s’impose comme indispensable à la compréhension de son caractère, qui s’y révèle beaucoup plus profondément qu’au moyen de quelque autre procédé plus actif” (176) [Wotan’s full confession before Brünnhilde (The Walkyrie, Act II) imposes itself as indispensible to the understanding of his character, which reveals itself here much more profoundly than by means of some other more active method].
Although shortly after this performance of Die Walküre she conversed with the Jewish stockbroker Sydney J. Loeb (1876–1964), who was the son-in-law of Hans Richter and an ardent Wagnerian (D3: 26), in one of the stories composed around the same time Virginia made a guest of Clarissa Dalloway refer to the Meistersinger (CSF 194), and in 1931 she listened to Ethel Smyth’s lengthy argument about Parsifal (D4: 49). She missed the 1935 performance of Tristan und Isolde as well as Der Ring of 1937 and 1938 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with superb singers in the leading roles such as Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Maria Müller, Tiana Lemnitz, Margarete Klose, Franz Völker, Max Lorenz, Lauritz Melchior, Herbert Janssen, and Rudolf Bockelmann. The British press was enthusiastic, and the surviving recorded parts of the two cycles (Wilhelm Furtwängler Conducts Excerpts from Götterdämmerung, Music & Arts CD-1035 and Eklipse EKR 62) suggest that these performances may have been the most powerful in history. It would perhaps not be far-fetched to conclude that Virginia stopped learning German and lost her interest in Wagner under her husband’s influence. She may have felt some loss; “There was a time when I went out to operas, evening concerts &c, at least 3 times a week,” she noted with regret in 1915 (D1: 19). In her later years she rarely attended performances of operas composed after 1800. In 1928 she saw Christoph Gluck’s Armide, a work she found not too interesting (L3: 497);