Disheartening, Not To Say Perverse

[Note: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug. See below.]

After reading numerous verbal descriptions and viewing numerous production photos of the new Eurotrash production of Lohengrin at this year's Bayreuther Festspiele — the sometimes-called "Rat Lohengrin" due its costuming of the chorus in rat costumes complete with full rat-head and rat-face masks — we felt it time to say goodbye to the 134-year-old Festspiele. As we then wrote:

[I]t's been a long and checkered career for the Bayreuther Festspiele, both artistically and otherwise, since its establishment in 1876 and today the oldest music festival extant, and perhaps it's now time to remember fondly its past days of artistic excellence and glory, and bid a final farewell. After all, nothing lasts forever.

Among our reasons for bidding the Festspiele farewell was our conviction that,

[T]he new co-directors of the Festspiele — Wolfgang Wagner's two daughters, Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier — are not only little inclined to satisfy the demands of that...requirement [viz., the disavowing of Eurotrash Regietheater stagings], but seem intransigently committed to flying in the face of that requirement, as was their father before them, in the false and perverse belief that it is just such stagings that will guarantee the future outside-Germany relevance and importance of the Festspiele.

As if to confirm that conviction, we today read the following reports from two European news sources concerning the late Christoph Schlingensief, perpetrator of perhaps the most Eurotrashy piece of Eurotrash to ever sully the stage of the Festspielhaus:

The Richard Wagner opera festival [sic] was winding up on Saturday for this year with a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg [sic] with the festival dedicating the final performance to theatre director Christoph Schlingensief. [...] "Schlingensief has set a lot in motion," opera festival spokesman Peter Emmerich told the German Press Agency dpa. As a result, all the festival employees and performers wanted to pay tribute to him on Saturday. [The Earth Times]

And,

[Schlingensief] fought and won the right to put a dead hare on stage at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, the Richard Wagner opera extravaganza, when he staged Parsifal there in 2004. Although viewed with a mix of praise and disdain, his production was credited with giving the staid festival a much needed lift.

Paying tribute to him this week Katharina Wagner, the festival’s co-director, said, "His Parsifal was a turning point for Bayreuth, from both the interpretational aspect and the way of working. After Schlingensief had been here, everything became more open, more flexible." [The Arts Desk)]

Truly disheartening, not to say perverse.

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Update (1:29 PM Eastern on 31 Aug): There occurred on a venerable opera forum the following exchange between another member and us in response to our above entry. We quote it here verbatim and without further comment. The other member's two comments have here been italicized, and our response to each posted immediately below each comment.

This seems to me a (not to say perverse) misreading of what amounts to an in memoriam. Nobody involved here is praising the "product" of Schlingensief's "Parsifal" production unreservedly.

The Bayreuther Festspiele gesture as articulated by Emmerich and Katharina was indeed intended as an _in memoriam_ for Schlingensief. And that's *precisely* what made it so perverse as it chose to memorialize a stage director who declared proudly two years after the fact (and therefore no advance avant-garde hype) that it had been his intent with his Bayreuther Festspiele production of _Parsifal_ to "reconcil[e] Nietzsche with Wagner by negating Wagner's silly Buddhist dream."

If it wasn't perverse of the Bayreuther Festspiele to memorialize such a creature, then perverse is a word bereft of any meaning whatsoever.

However, part of the mission of Bayreuth is experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically, and an essential element of the idea of experimentation is [the] concept that one can learn more from a bold failed attempt than one can from a more conservative success.

Yes, part of the Bayreuther Festspiele mission is "experimentation in how to present Wagner theatrically," and it's a laudable enterprise. But when the Festspiele chooses to hire Eurotrash vandals and thieves such as Schlingensief and Neuenfels who have NO intention of "present[ing] Wagner theatrically," but whose sole intention is to present their own respective "vision" theatrically by hijacking what Wagner wrote and twisting it to their own purposes, it in no way fulfills the goal of that laudable Festspiele enterprise, but is instead a gross perversion of it, and precisely that which makes (made) their stagings the unmitigated Eurotrash they indisputably are.