Push Is Fast Coming To Shove — Or So It Seems

If this report is accurate, Wolfgang Wagner’s days as head of the Bayreuther Festspiele are fast coming to an end whether he agrees to step down or not. All factions that make up the governing board of the Festspiele (Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth) are pressuring the old boy (he’s 88) to voluntarily resign his lifetime appointment, and make way for new blood even if that new blood is not that of his chosen heir, Katharina Wagner, his 29-year-old daughter with his second wife, Gudrun.

Germany’s cultural power-brokers yesterday piled the pressure on the 88-year-old grandson of Richard Wagner in the hope of persuading him to step down from the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, one of the world’s greatest musical events.

The man at the centre of the storm is Wolfgang Wagner, who has run the festival since 1966. Since the death of the composer the festival, on the so-called “Green Hill” of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, has been managed by a member of the clan.

Mr. Wagner, frail and confused, refuses to surrender the post unless it goes to his 29-year-old daughter, Katharina. The politicians and businessmen who make up the majority of the Bayreuth Foundation, which supervises the festival, begged to differ at a crisis meeting yesterday. Mr. Wagner decided not to attend the meeting and let his lawyer fight his corner in an often passionate and irritable debate.

Although they kept the old man in place — the statutes give him the job for life unless it can be proved that he has lost his faculties — the board called on all contenders to prepare their concepts for the future of the festival. Clearly the intention is to hold a beauty contest and line up a successor whether Mr. Wagner approves or not.

RTWT here.