The Man Doesn't Have A Clue

Guess who. That's right. None other than New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini again. In a "color" piece filed from the Bayreuther Festspiele, he writes:

If the Wagner family truly wants to jolt the festival [sic] with new perspectives on the master’s works, I have a proposal. How about, now and then, performing works by other composers? It would place Wagner’s astounding achievement in context to hear at the house he built both works that inspired him, like Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” and works that would have been impossible without his example, like Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.”

And how about, every so often, commissioning a composer to write a music drama [for Bayreuth] with Bayreuth’s acoustics in mind? Sacrilege, I know. But what a way to honor Wagner the status-quo-smashing modernist.

And this is the music critic The New York Times — The New York Times, for chrissake!, this country's "National Newspaper of Record" — sends to cover the Bayreuther Festspiele (and I refrain from pointing out one glaring error, and an innocent and technically correct but curiously misleading bit of wording that also appeared in this otherwise vapid and information-stale piece).

What's wrong with this picture?