2023-07-27 12:45:50
Culture Wagner Festival 2023
What does the state want from Bayreuth?
Status: 1:15 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
A treasure is sunk here: Wormser Hagendenkmal
Source: Michael Deins/Promediafoto/picture alliance
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Rising prices, performances that are not sold out: On the green hill in 2023, it’s also about money. The federal government and Bavaria have now announced that they will be more involved in the Wagner Festival. But the public commitment is subject to conditions.
A small annoyance on the sidelines of the festival: in Salzburg, where you can park in the garages behind the festival halls and stomp or stomp into the performances with dry feet, parking for eight hours has cost six euros for at least 20 years (with a ticket that you can snatch away).
In Bayreuth, which is much less glamorous, the greedy city is offering a 100 percent price increase for its meadow pitches, which were promptly softened by a downpour at the beginning of “Parsifal”: ten instead of five euros, as last year. Peanuts, compared to the ticket prices, which have also risen, but the intention is clear – and upset.
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Bayreuth – The live ticker
2023 seems to be the summer when it’s all about festival money: rising ticket prices, falling subsidies, performances that aren’t sold out. At least it’s a good thing that the two most important sponsors have apparently come to a mutual agreement on the festering case of the Bayreuth Festival.
Blume and Roth want something for their money
Both Bavaria’s Minister of Culture, Markus Blume of the CSU, and the German Green Party’s cultural director, Claudia Roth, said before “Parsifal” that they wanted to play a financially significant role on the Green Hill. Both tied these vague promises to reforms. Director Katharina Wagner, whose contract that has been in place since 2008, is due to be extended to 2025 in the fall. For Blume, who would like to shoulder 37 percent of the subsidy instead of the previous 29 percent, Ms. Wagner is “my plan A”.
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) at the Parsifal premiere in Bayreuth, accompanied by the writer Albert Ostermaier
Source: dpa/Karl-Josef Hildenbrand
Even to be able to finance the anniversary festival planned for the 150th annual application with eleven Wagner operas for the first time (with the hill premiere “Rienzi” plus a historically charged new “Ring”), quick action is required. To put it plainly: the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, which had become a nuisance anyway under the ignorant and presumptuously art-prohibiting leadership of the former Bavarian finance minister Georg von Waldenfels, hardly had anything to report.
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Wagner Festival – The Criticism
They only cause trouble with tickets returned late and interfere unduly in creative matters. Even with the out of tune Christian Thielemann, who has long been seeking his salvation in summery Salzburg (there is talk of four concertante Strauss “Daphnes” 2024), one vehemently intrigues with conservative directorial taste against the mistress of the hill, who is ready to leave.
The dazzlingly successful “Parsifal” conducting by the Spaniard Pablo Heras-Casado makes it clear: the post-Thielemann period has long since begun and is full of quality. The Finn Pietari Inkinen, the French and Ukrainian conductors Natalie Stutzmann and Oksana Lyniv stand for a polyglot, diverse Bayreuth constellation in the mystical orchestral abyss, which Salzburg, for example, could only marvel at. The announced staff leaders Semyon Bachkov, Daniele Gatti and Philippe Jordan can also be heard.
Only: It all has to be financed. May the federal government and Bavaria come to an agreement quickly.
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