Letter from Bayreuth

This was a big summer in Bayreuth, one of the comparatively rare seasons when all the later Wagner operas were performed together. The 106th Festival started on July 25th with a new staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Barrie Kosky, the Australian-born Intendant of Berlin’s Komische Oper, and closed August 28th with the end of the five-year run of Berlin director Frank Castorf ’s exuberantly iconoclastic Der Ring des Nibelungen. In between, there were further outings for Bayreuth boss Katharina Wagner’s darkly bleak Tristan und Isolde and the Parsifal of actor/director Uwe Eric Laufenberg, which is set in today’s troubled Middle East. I doubt there has been a more eclectic mix of productions of these music dramas in the dozen years they have played side by side in Bayreuth. Ironically the Tristan, which ends unconventionally with King Mark exercising his seigneurial rights, dragging the very-much-alive Isolde away from Tristan’s corpse after her “Liebestod,” is the most straightforward of the lot.

This was Katharina’s second year as sole director of the festival, following a seven-year stint as co-director with her half-sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Katharina ranked by many as the most egregiously wrong-headed example. It’s arguable, however, that there really hasn’t been any fundamental change of artistic policy since the festival was run by the sisters’ father, Wolfgang Wagner. He positioned Bayreuth as a workshop for ideas and interpretations around his grandfather’s music dramas, and hired a succession of leading theatre practitioners from around Europe to realize the vision.