2024-07-30 19:36:52
For the first time in years, the Wagner Music Festival began at the end of last week in Bayreuth, Bavaria, without former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who excused herself from attending. The audience watched a new production of the opera Tristan and Isolde under the baton of Semjon Byčkov, chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, the DPA agency reported.
Even before the opening, the German government’s commissioner for culture, Claudia Roth, caused a stir when she suggested that operas by composers other than Richard Wagner, who founded the festival for this purpose in 1876, should also be presented in Bayreuth.
“I can think of, for example, Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck,” she mentioned a work from the end of the 19th century, whose author, at Wagner’s invitation, assisted in the performance of the opera Parsifal in Bayreuth and, in addition, taught the composer’s son. “It is important that the festival opens up to young people and goes towards them. Bayreuth should be more varied, colorful and fresh,” Rothová thinks.
According to the DPA agency, the statement outraged the Wagnerian world. “Nonsense,” responded Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, for example, according to whom “Berlin has no say in what will be played in Bayreuth.”
At the opening ceremony last Thursday, the politician already chose a more cautious tone when she emphasized that “Bayreuth is equal to Wagner, Wagner is equal to Bayreuth and the core of the festival will always be Wagner’s operas, of course I do not intend to change anything”. But she indicated again that the composition of the audience will become more and more diverse in the coming years and that focusing exclusively on Wagner might not be enough.
Given that the festival is largely funded by the federal government, according to the Financial Times, it was only a matter of time before external pressure for reforms came. However, the organizers resisted for now.
Festival chief Katharina Wagner and Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder. | Photo: ČTK / imago stock&people
Wagner’s great-granddaughter, opera director and manager Katharina Wagner, remains at the head of the event. In May of this year, she extended her contract for another five years, although she agreed that an operations manager would also stand by her side. More productions of Wagner’s operas are planned for next year, and in 2026, the 150th anniversary of the festival’s founding, organizers want to present all ten of the most famous, plus the author’s early work Rienzi from 1842.
According to Germany’s Deutsche Welle, this year’s new production of Tristan und Isolde earned a standing ovation. The audience particularly appreciated the performance of Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund and Austrian tenor Andreas Schager in the title roles, as well as mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer as Isolde’s maid Brangäne.
People also applauded the conductor Semjon Byčkov, significantly more than the Icelandic director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson, whose unique atmosphere and ideas at first, according to critic Gaby Reucherová, quickly faded away. In the end, not much happened in the mostly static, gloomy scene, distantly evoking the interior of a shipwreck. Richard Fairman from the Financial Times also has reservations about the direction, while he praises the singing performances and the conductor Byčkov.
More women than men
The Bayreuth Music Festival, which is the most important opera festival in Germany, is visited by tens of thousands of people every year. This year, for the first time after many decades, when the performers were dominated by men, more productions are directed by women.
The French-born Nathalie Stutzmann took on last year’s Tannhäuser again, the Wandering Dutchman sounds here again under the baton of the Ukrainian star Oksana Lyniva, and the Australian conductor Simone Young wins applause here for the Gold of the Rhine, the first part of the Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.
The scene in the new Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde resembles the interior of a shipwreck. | Photo: Enrico Nawrath
In addition to Semjon Byčkov, this year the audience will also see the forty-six-year-old Spaniard Pablo Heras-Casado conducting. He is again presenting last year’s production of Parsifal in Bayreuth, but he is slowly starting to think up a new cycle of the Ring of the Nibelung for the year 2028.
The show has been organized by Bayreuther Festspiele since 1985, in which the Federal Republic of Germany, the Free State of Bavaria and the patronage Society of the Friends of Bayreuth hold twenty-nine percent shares, while the City of Bayreuth owns the remaining thirteen percent.
The festival currently manages 27.7 million euros, which translates to about 704 million crowns. Another 84.7 million euros, i.e. more than two billion crowns, has already been promised by the federal government for the planned reconstruction of the Festival Theater built by Richard Wagner and architect Otto Brückwald on the so-called Green Hill.
However, the renovation of the building completed in 1875 will be even more expensive. The state of Bavaria promised roughly once as much to the organizers for the reconstruction, adds the DPA agency.
Video: Classical music has huge “balls” and nobody in it deals with gender, the conductor describes (September 15, 2023)
“It’s unfortunate when a female conductor tries to stylize herself as a man,” conductor Anna Novotná Pešková said in the Spotlight show. | Video: Blahoslav Baťa