Provisional Retraction

In our post of 26 August titled, "An Explanation", we wrote:

Our objection to those two [Nike Wagner and Gerard Mortier) certainly does NOT mean we have no objections to those other two: the frontrunners for [now appointed to] the co-directorship of the Festspiele, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. The latter is in every way objectionable, and has no place in the directorship of the Festspiele.

We're now beginning to see that we may have been too hasty in our judgment.

First, over the past few days it's been made clear in the German press that Eva will be mainly responsible for all Festspiele artistic matters, while Katharina will mainly handle all matters administrative. This echoes the highly successful division of labor between Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner when in 1951 they took control of and reopened the Festspiele after the war.

That's comforting.

Comforting as well is Katharina's public declaration that she's committed to documenting fully and publicly all the ugliness of the Festspiele's and the Wagner family's past Nazi associations by opening up without reservation the Bayreuth archives to qualified historians thereby breaking the longstanding Wagner family tradition begun by Cosima Wagner, wife of Richard, of Geheimniskrämerei, secrecy for secrecy's sake, and Wolfgang's devotion to Verschwiegenheit, a word whose meaning hovers somewhere between secrecy and discretion, especially in this matter.

There are, in addition, other, less specific, signs that we find encouraging, and so, for the nonce, we've decided to retract our above quoted unequivocal objection to Katharina, and adopt instead a wait-and-see attitude; an attitude we confess we perhaps ought to have adopted from the get-go.