Sounds & Fury

Oh Dear

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct. See below.]

This is not encouraging:

The composer's [Richard Wagner's] great-granddaughter, 30-year-old Katharina Wagner, has a lot on her plate. She has just taken over the Bayreuth opera festival, together with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, winning a drawn-out power struggle with her cousin [Nike Wagner]. At the premiere of her uninspiring "Rienzi" in Bremen on Oct. 11, it was easy to imagine that all this had distracted her.

Set in 14th-century Rome, "Rienzi" is an epic seven-hour drama describing the rise and fall of a populist leader whose power goes to his head. He promises peace and delivers bloodshed, until finally the people turn against him. Later in life, the composer himself was a little embarrassed about the work which made him famous overnight (he was 29 when he conducted the premiere in Dresden in 1842.) Katharina has thankfully given us a four-hour version. It still feels long.

She has also turned it from drama to farce, especially the first two acts. Megalomania becomes vanity, violence becomes impudence in her interpretation. Rienzi is a preening, prancing, buffoonish showman, a media politician with a penchant for kitsch and an out-of-control ego. Part Liberace, part Silvio Berlusconi.

But, then, we hardly expected anything more — or different — of Katharina.

RTWT here.

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Update (9:16 PM Eastern on 13 Oct): Different voice; same assessment.

Update 2 (11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct): And yet another voice, but essentially the same assessment if more kindly put.

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.

It's Official

The Stiftungsrat (board) of the executive governing agency of the Bayreuther Festspiele, the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth, has, by a margin of 22 of the Stiftungsrat's 24 votes (the vote was 22-0 with two abstentions), chosen half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier to be the Festspiele's new co-directors to succeed their father and longtime Festspiele director, Wolfgang Wagner.

The Bayreuth Festival board on Monday named half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier to replace their father at the helm of the German festival dedicated to the music of composer Richard Wagner.

The women — the composer's great-great [sic] granddaughters — will replace their father, Wolfgang Wagner, who stepped down at the end of August after 57 years as director of the festival.

Surprise!

RTWT here, and more here, here, and here.

The Spirit Of Bayreuth Past

This close of Wagner season finds even we at near the Wagner saturation point for the time being. But we can't resist posting this video with its wraith-like imagery of that incomparable conductor of Parsifal, Hans Knappertsbusch, conducting in his shirtsleeves in Bayreuth's "invisible" sunken pit the so-called "Transformation Music" in a 1959 Bayreuth production of the music-drama. Our thanks to Ms. Mostly Opera for the video which she posted along with several others in her interesting retrospective of the Bayreuther Festspiele covering the years from 1943 to the present.

An Explanation

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep. See below.]

We've received several eMails concerning our somewhat provocatively titled post, "Devil's Spawn Make Bid For Bayreuth Festspiele", asking what we had against Nike Wagner and Gerard Mortier that prompted us to assign to them such parentage. The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort. The more grotesque the better. With Nike we have the additional objection that she's a longtime champion of opening the Festspiele to the production of works of other composers which is simply unthinkable and a gross and insupportable perversion of Richard Wagner's purpose for establishing the Festspiele, and a perversion of what the Festspiele is and must remain to ensure its future.

Our objection to those two certainly does NOT mean we have no objections to those other two: the frontrunners for 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. Eva is the most sensible choice at this juncture (as some of you might know, the board of the Stiftung chose her for the directorship several years ago, but failed in their attempt to get papa Wolfgang to step aside at that time), but she too has a predilection for Eurotrash Regietheater, but it's a predilection tempered by common sense, and not nearly as extreme and ideologically mindless as Katharina's and those other two.

We trust that answers any similar lurking questions on this matter that haven't yet made their way into our inbox.

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Update (11:29 AM Eastern on 27 Aug): Even as we typed the sentence, "The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort," in our above, we said to ourself, "Don't do it, Douglas. Close the gates on the morons preemptively. Don't use that shorthand language even though you're entitled to use it given that Eurotrash Regietheater has been a veritable idée fixe on this blog since its inception over four years ago. Spell it out in detail yet once again to prevent the moronic charge that ossified 'traditionalists' such as you insist on pretending that the 20th and 21st centuries never happened, and are satisfied only when operas are staged as they were staged by their creators and have since been staged before the middle of the last century."

We should have taken our own advice. So far, some half-dozen variations of the above charge have infested our inbox in response to the shorthand language of that above quoted sentence.

Why is it that champions of Regietheater make the automatic assumption that all who speak against it speak against it because they're stuck-in-the-mud "traditionalists"?

Well, perhaps some are. We, however, as we've demonstrated repeatedly and made abundantly clear on this blog, are most decidedly not to be counted among them. Our objection is NOT to Regietheater per se. Our objection is to Regietheater become Eurotrash; Regietheater in which the Regie hijacks a universally acknowledged masterpiece of another to express his own personal "vision" and promote his own personal agenda in the process of which the vision of the work's original creator is distorted beyond all recognition, and the work itself invariably diminished by being robbed of its manifold layers of meaning and response that are at the very heart of what's responsible for the work being the universally acknowledged masterpiece history has declared it to be.

So, those of you tempted to heap abuse upon our head by the moronic charge that we're a "traditionalist" would do well to save yourselves the trouble as your virtual crayon-scrawled missives will be consigned instantly to the cyber bit bucket unremarked and unanswered.

That is all.

As you were.

Update 2 (2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep): For a qualification of our above comment on Katharina Wagner, see this post.

Devil's Spawn Make Bid For Bayreuth Festspiele

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 12:08 PM Eastern on 1 Sep. See below.]

Is the Bayreuther Festspiele doomed? Might be if the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth loses its collective mind, and lets these two get their feet through the door.

Nike Wagner, the great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, has joined forces with Paris Opera chief Gerard Mortier to challenge her cousins Katharina and Eva for the leadership of the Bayreuth opera festival.

RTWT here.

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Update (1:31 PM Eastern on 25 Aug): We should make clear just for the record that we don't seriously think the Stiftung will go with the Nike/Mortier ticket or even consider it seriously. Our guess is that the unspoken intent of the Stiftung is to install the Eva/Katharina team to meet the backroom "handshake agreement" with Wolfgang for his stepping aside, but with the very real expectation that after a year or two or three, Eva (with the Stiftung's sanction) will force Katharina out altogether (a good thing), and leave Eva in sole charge. We're not entirely happy with that state of affairs, either, but we think it's something we can live with.

Update 2 (2:32 PM Eastern on 26 Aug): For more on this, see this post.

Update 3 (12:08 PM Eastern on 1 Sep): It's official! Details here.

Extensive Live Bayreuth Coverage

Extensive live coverage of the Bayreuther Festspiele and Bayreuth itself, including loads of neat photos, can be found right here at Mostly Opera whose author is at this year's Festspiele.

Worth your while to click over and browse.

Bayreuth Goes Video-Live On The Web

For the first time in its history, the Bayreuther Festspiele will, on 27 July, stream on the Web a live video feed of this year's opening performance of its production of Die Meistersinger with Konzept and direction by Katharina Wagner. But there's a catch. A $77 catch to be more precise. That's what it'll cost you to view the feed. Notice, please, we said, "cost you". Given our knowledge of that Eurotrash production, we'll be taking a pass on the opportunity.

Details on the live video streaming of Die Meistersinger can be read here.

His Last Bow

Wolfgang Wagner, 88-year-old director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, has, after 57 years, the first 15 of those years in partnership with his brother, Wieland, (finally) tendered his resignation as Festspiele director effective 31 August reports Bloomberg News:

Wolfgang Wagner, the 88-year-old director of the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth and grandson of the composer, announced he is stepping down from his post after 57 years, ending an impasse over the festival leadership.

His successor hasn't yet been appointed and it is now up to the Wagner family* to agree on who should take over the 132-year- old festival, Thomas Goppel, the Bavarian minister for science, research and art, told reporters in Bayreuth.

[...]

"This wasn't an easy decision," said Stefan Mueller, Wolfgang Wagner's lawyer. "But once it was clear that his two daughters were willing to team up, he thought it was time to leave. Mr. Wagner is convinced that this would be the soundest solution and he thinks it will go through."

Wagner's resignation takes effect on Aug 31. The 13 family members* have until then to come to an agreement on who should take over, Goppel said.

Next up: And the successor(s) is...

Stay tuned.

* Actually, it's not up to the Wagner family, but the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth, the Festspiele's governing board, to choose Wolfgang's successor.

The Soap Opera Takes A New Turn

Here's a development few expected would, without third-party arm-twisting or intervention, ever come about. Reports Top News:

Wolfgang Wagner, 88, the chief for life of Germany's Wagnerian opera festival in Bayreuth, has offered to step down if his two formerly feuding daughters take over the job, a spokesman said Friday.

[...]

Peter Emmerich, Bayreuth Festival spokesman, confirmed Friday to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the elder Wagner had hinted he might retire and that the two daughters could jointly step into his place.

Emmerich said Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier had realised they could work together if the circumstances were right.

The Bayreuth Festival's trust board, which runs the government-subsidized event and formally employs Wagner, is to meet April 29 and the sisters are expected to outline their succession plan then.

And PR Inside adds:

Wolfgang Wagner wrote in a personal letter to donors dated April 8 that he was prepared to support his daughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier as part of a group to succeed him, Germany's 3sat television reported, citing unidentified sources from the foundation that oversees the festival.

It was the first time Wagner had indicated he would support Wagner-Pasquier, 62 — an experienced manager of artistic and musical events who enjoys the support of the foundation — as part of the leadership. The team could also include non-family professionals such as star German conductor Christian Thielemann and cultural manager Peter Ruzicka, Wagner suggested, according to the report.

As ever, the soap opera continues.

Stay tuned.

Kin Beneath The Skin?

You'd never so much as even suspect it, we'd guess, but Samuel Beckett and Richard Wagner really were, in some respects at least, aesthetic kin beneath the skin. Or so playwright, Guardian theater columnist, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux posits.

On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays – often quiet, approaching silence – that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner.... But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers ... there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an anthology of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

Mr. Hunka has lots more to say on this, and while we're not familiar with Beckett's full oeuvre, we are familiar with Godot, and although we confess we never saw any parallels between that extraordinary play and Tristan, a work with which we're intimately familiar, Mr. Hunka has persuaded us that, in some respects at least, they do indeed exist.

We suggest you read this excellent piece and judge for yourselves.

The Shot Heard Round The (Opera) World

We speak, of course, of Peter Gelb’s innovative stratagems for promoting opera to a wider, more diverse public. The sound of that shot has now reached and penetrated even the hallowed halls of the insular, tradition-bound Bayreuther Festspiele.

The Bayreuth Festival intends to break new ground this year with the live broadcast of an opera to a public viewing area, organizers said Wednesday. The move would fulfill the dream of festival founder Richard Wagner, who wanted to open up the world-famous event to as many opera lovers as possible, festival spokesman Peter Emmerich said.

Emmerich left open which performance would be chosen for the live broadcast from the festival hall to a public area in the centre of the Bavarian town.

RTWT here.

Well Whadayaknow

A culture commentator who gets all his Wagner facts and commentary straight. New York Times culture commentator, Alan Riding, in his New York Times Sunday Book Review review of Jonathan Carr’s new book, The Wagner Clan, writes:

Is this how Richard Wagner should be judged: by his stormy life and by the oft abhorrent behavior of his family? Not in the view of true devotees of his music — and they are legion. Every summer, the lucky few with hard-to-get tickets traipse to Bayreuth in Bavaria for the opera festival that Wagner himself created in 1876. They enter the shrine of the Festspielhaus. They visit the composer’s grave. They are even welcomed by his octogenarian grandson, Wolfgang.

On the other hand, how can one ignore that this artist’s stirring music and anti-Semitic views were warmly embraced by Hitler, and that Wagner’s family identified his music with a Nazi regime that even the composer might have opposed?

[...]

Still, in Carr’s view, the past cannot be buried until the Wagner family admits it “made a terrible mistake.” Yet Wagner’s operas remain immensely popular, despite the sins of his family. And perhaps here lies the only shortcoming of “The Wagner Clan.” Carr has not tackled just what makes Wagner’s music so intoxicatingly dangerous. After all, without the music, the Wagners would have been just another family.

RTWT here.

Uh-Oh

The plot of the soap opera that is the Wagner family and the succession of the directorship of the Bayreuther Festspiele takes another jarring — and completely unexpected — turn:

Gudrun Wagner, wife of Bayreuth Opera Festival director Wolfgang Wagner and a key partner in helping him stage the annual event, died Wednesday, officials said. She was 63.

She died Wednesday morning at a Bayreuth hospital. No cause of death was immediately given, said Peter Emmerich, a spokesman for the festival.

"It is with deep emotion and with silent grief that I must convey that this morning my loving wife and close co-worker Gudrun Wagner died fully unexpectedly," Wolfgang Wagner said in a statement.

We suspect this event will force the board of the Festspiele to quickly make some tough decisions it was hoping it might be able to put off till a more opportune time presented itself.

RTWT here.

Unmitigated Chutzpah

The unmitigated chutzpah of this avant-garde, Eurotrash charlatan is simply beyond belief.

In a recent interview in the German edition of Vanity Fair, the director-cum-artist Christoph Schlingensief has expressed an interest in heading the prestigious Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. But as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, the controversial Schlingensief does not want to take the position alone. "Why shouldn't Bayreuth be taken over by a team of artists?" Schlingensief asked. "Why shouldn't I apply [for the position as festival director] with Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy or Doug Aitken?"

For Schlingensief, Barney, McCarthy, and Aitken are the dominant American media and performance artists. Schlingensief — who directed Wagner's Parsifal at the festival in 2004 to mixed audience reactions — is critical of the fact that only members of the Wagner family have applied to take over from outgoing director Wolfgang Wagner. "I link Wagner with life," Schlingensief said. "Bayreuth needs contact with life, that's all. And life is not always commensurable with the Wagners."

Nor with the Schlingensiefs of this world.

Presumptuous, contemptible little cretin.

(The above news item taken from Artforum International Magazine.)

About That Getting-The-Facts-Right Competence Of MSM Journalists Thing

The following grafs, representing more than half of a news story written by one Tony Paterson for the Brit The Independent, are so loaded with half-truth and outright error (and in one graf, gratuitous and invidious innuendo) that it can only be the work either of a total incompetent, or of someone who was pulled from a news desk having nothing to do with classical music to cover the story, and who did his background “research” in a Facebook or MySpace chat room.

The grafs in question follow with the misinformation italicized by me. All Square-bracketed comments are mine.

• A bitter and invariably operatic feud that has divided the family of the German composer Richard Wagner for more than a decade neared its denouement yesterday when three female descendants of the maestro [great-granddaughters Katharina Wagner, Nike Wagner, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier] staked rival claims in a battle to become his artistic successor. [Those claims were staked months ago in the case of Katharina, and years ago in the case of Nike and Eva if the latter two can even be said to have “staked a claim”.]

• Wolfgang Wagner, Richard's 88-year-old grandson and director of the home of Wagner opera — Germany's famous Bayreuth music festival [sic!] — has claimed the role as the composer's rightful heir since he took over the post 40 years ago. [Wolfgang never made such a claim. The role passed to him on the death of his brother and co-director, Wieland, to both of whom the role was passed down from their grandmother, Cosima, wife of Richard, through their father Siegfried, Richard Wagner’s son, and mother Winifred.]

• Members of the powerful Richard Wagner Foundation [Der Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth], which is partly run by the German government and controls the Bayreuth Festival, were holding a closed meeting in the Bavarian city yesterday to decide on the financially troubled event's future. [The Stiftung is NOT "partly run by the German government." Rather, the Stiftung board is mostly comprised of representatives of several local German governments, and the Bayreuth Festival is not now nor has it for the last almost half-century been “financially troubled.”]

• In advance of the meeting, Karl Gerhard Schmidt, the foundation's chairman, took the unprecedented step of calling for Wolfgang's resignation as soon as possible, saying that because of his deteriorating health, the festival was de facto "without a director". [Karl Gerhard Schmidt is the chairman of the Society of Bayreuth Friends, not chairman of the Stiftung.]

• Katharina, who likes wearing black and sports a suitably Teutonic blonde mane, has been groomed for the post by her parents for decades. This year, she made an important debut at the festival, directing Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg [sic], a classically German opera that was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler. [As Katharina is only 29 it’s rather a bit much to say she’s been “groomed for the post by her parents for decades”; Die Meistersinger is hardly “a classically German opera”; and the fact that Katharina is blonde is neither “suitably Teutonic” nor pertinent. Ditto in spades that Die Meistersinger “was a favourite of the Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler.”]

• Yet here the complications also abound, for Eva and Nike have been at loggerheads with Wolfgang for over a decade. [They’ve “been at loggerheads” for almost four decades.]

• Katharina insists she is "very well qualified for the job". She took steps to strengthen her position by enlisting the support of prominent conductors and composers. [Katharina enlisted the help of but a single conductor — Thielemann — and no composers, “prominent” or otherwise, of which anyone’s publicly aware.]

• Of the three rivals for the post, only Nike has argued in favour of liberating the festival from the "dictatorship of the [Wagner] gene". But the foundation is obliged by its statutes to give the job to Wagner family members. [The Stiftung is under no such obligation. It’s obliged to offer the position to a Wagner family member only if it considers that family member to be the best choice for the position. It’s otherwise free to look elsewhere.]

So much for the getting-the-facts-right competence of MSM journalists over us loose-cannon bloggers. This grossly ill-informed piece would be a genuine embarrassment for even a local rag. How much more so for a national daily such as The Independent.

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.

A Bayreuth Fantasy

[Note: This post has been edited as of 5:20 PM Eastern on 31 May to add a previously and inadvertently omitted footnote. See below.]

It's once again that time of year when the thoughts of Wagnerians worldwide turn toward Bayreuth and the annual Bayreuther Festspiele which this year opens on 25 July with a new production of Die Meistersinger directed by Wagner great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner, daughter of Wagner grandson and present Festspielleiter (general manager) of the Festival, 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner, in her debut production for the Festival.

It's now widely assumed, and is in fact an almost certainty, that Katharina will succeed her father as Festspielleiter of the Festival,* and in artistic terms that bodes nothing but ill for Wagner's works and for the Festival itself as Katharina is a devout and avid Regietheater adherent and the perpetrator of several prior Eurotrash productions of her great-grandfather's works in other theaters, one of which we commented on at some length here.

Regular readers of this blog know in what utter contempt I hold such productions. But not every Regietheater production is Eurotrash as witness, for stellar instance, Wieland Wagner's now (justly) legendary Konzept productions of Parsifal and Der Ring des Nibelungen for the 1951 through 1958 Bayreuther Festspiele (the Ring of the latter of which years I witnessed at firsthand). I in fact welcome such dramatically and aesthetically true-to-the-spirit-of-the-original re-imaginings of the stagings of these and other of Wagner's works. But given that, unique among all the great operas, Wagner's operas are in all their aspects the work of a single creator, there ought to be model benchmark stagings of those works staged just as Wagner envisioned them originally so that those, today and in the future, who've never had the experience of witnessing them be given the opportunity to do so which in fact was among the principal reasons Wagner established the Bayreuther Festspiele. In addition, those who have witnessed such stagings would then forever possess an authoritative point of reference from which to make informed assessments of alternate stagings of these operas.

Today, alas, such benchmark stagings are all but nonexistent. Even the conservative Met's new production of the Ring due in 2010 will be a Konzept production, its now decades-old and not-so-great "traditional" production finally being chucked into the dustbin of operatic history into which, I suppose, it ought to have been chucked some years ago. But, as an institution, the Bayreuther Festspiele has a special obligation to such "traditional" productions; an obligation it has singularly failed to fulfill since the Festival's resurrection after World War II.**

It's easy enough for someone such as myself to sit in front of a computer terminal and type out such snarky critical remarks as those above, and self-publish them on this blog for all the world to read. But what if, by some prodigious feat of necromancy, I received a call from the Bayreuther Festspiele telling me that, if it were my pleasure, I'd be given full, unassailable, and un-meddled-with control of the Festival with all its resources intact, and with full financial backing available to me for anything I chose to do? If I deigned to accept that offer, just what would I do, and how would I go about defining or redefining the Festival's mission, and in what direction would I take it for the future?

Well, I've actually given that extravagant fantasy some serious, soul-searching thought, and the answer is I would, first, reestablish the original mission of the Festival; reestablish its mandate and its very raison d'être: viz., to produce model performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and, additionally, of the entire Wagner canon for the elucidation of opera houses and opera audiences worldwide.

But just what, exactly, does that mean, and what would it entail?

My answer to that question is fairly straightforward, and not nearly as expensive as it might appear on first reading, although it wouldn't be cheap. And that is to produce each Festival year two musically and dramatically exemplary productions of each work given that Festival year using the same cast, conductor, and musical forces for each of the two productions, each production to run in its own alternate cycle, each cycle repeated, say, three times during each Festival year: a cycle of the works given that Festival year staged in strict accordance with Wagner's original stage directions, the productions never changing from Festival year to Festival year except for minor touchups here and there, and insofar as new technical means became available to make more convincing or aesthetically pleasing the naturalistic inscenation envisioned by Wagner; and a cycle of the works given that Festival year staged giving full license and free reign to current-day re-imaginings of the staging of the works, but re-imaginings done in compliance with the A.C. Douglas Prime Directive:

Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically effective translation of the score of the opera into its concrete physical form on the stage so long as what thou doest is at every point consonant with the score — text and music — and contradicts or diverges from it at none,

the productions presented in this cycle changing completely after every fourth or fifth Festival outing or thereabouts as is the current practice.

In this way, and this way alone, can the Festival 1) fulfill its obligation — its mandate and raison d'être — to present as inalterable benchmarks model stagings of the works as Wagner himself envisioned them originally using the very latest and very best technical means available to realize that vision on the stage, and 2) establish its (the Festival's) relevance (you should pardon the term) to the present and for the future by presenting re-imagined Konzept stagings of the works that give voice to and realize on stage the most imaginative current-day interpretations and understandings of the manifold timeless and universal layers of meaning contained within each of these deathless works of art.

Is such a program for the Bayreuther Festspiele an opium-laced, Wagnerian pipe dream? Or is it just flat-out loony.

Not a bit of it. It's entirely practical if initially (underline, initially) a bit expensive, and requires only the will and money to do it.

Would such a program be a moneymaker? I'd bet, giving odds, it would, with the "traditional" cycle booked even more years in advance than the Konzept cycle. Would the institution of such a program initially raise outraged howls of protest from practically all quarters? But of course. This is the Bayreuther Festspiele, after all. But as enlightened a program for the Bayreuther Festspiele as I think such a program would be, I won't be awaiting with bated breath my call to service.

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* This apparent done deal may very well be upset or mooted by the authority known as the Richard Wagner Stiftung Bayreuth the eight-member board of which by a 1973 agreement holds the ultimate power to name the Bayreuther Festspiele's Festspielleiter the selection of which, if no member of the Wagner family is considered suitable by the board, is to be made by a board-appointed three-person commission drawn from among the directors of Germany's leading opera houses. Hope springs eternal.

** The disastrous Peter Hall-Georg Solti 1983 Bayreuth Ring is an exception. But it was so badly thought out, mishandled, and mismanaged on every front that it were better had it never been attempted.