Bayreuth Festival 2008 : – a preview by Jim Pritchard. (JP)


These are interesting times on the Green Hill, more so off-stage than on. Bayreuth is still one of the music festivals to attend and the wait for tickets still extends to a decade or more but artistically it is not what it was. Controversial choices of directors have had many Wagner aficionados scratching their heads at they see on stage. Of course it is possible to suggest the audience is not intelligent enough to understand what they are watching, but singers who you might expect to be singing there now spend their summers elsewhere. That is significant.

Yet there is now much hope for the future for many like myself who seek solace in this fairly modest German town for a few days every July or August. It appears that years of feuding between half-sisters Eva and Katharina Wagner is at an end and they are aiming to put in a joint bid to succeed their father Wolfgang. Isn’t it amazing how in 2008 we can still be talking about Richard Wagner’s grandson but at 88 that he still is and he has recently written to the Festival’s board indicating his willingness to relinquish his ‘director-for-life’ status in favour of his two, long estranged, daughters.

As Katharina has suggested in a recent interview,  the catalyst for this was the death last November of Gudrun (Katharina's mother and Wolfgang's second wife). It brought together both half sisters and Eva and her father:  ‘Because of the changed circumstance, the death of my mother, a reconciliation between my father and Eva took place. I say thank God for it, because it really was high time.’ Once Eva and she began talking ‘We came to the conclusion that we got on, and that we really thought along the same lines. But we have not yet had the discussion, “What's your concept? This is my concept.” ’

Eva Wagner-Pasquier is in her sixties and a vastly experienced opera administrator, Katharina is just 30 and made her directorial debut at Bayreuth last summer with a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that earned her and her team a mix of cheers and boos. Other names have been mooted to be involved in the new regime including the conductor, Christian Thielemann, posited to be in charge of the musical side of the Festival.

There is no room it seems now for the sisters’ cousin, Nike, who once wanted to make her own bid for the succession with Eva. 62 year-old Nike is the daughter of Wieland Wagner, Wolfgang’s late brother and former co-director of the Festival and she has acted angrily to this announcement saying ‘It is not nice; we were a team which many in the cultural world considered a dream team’. Who knows the battle may not be won or lost?  We shall see.

Another intriguing announcement that shows the Bayreuth Festival is aiming to shed its elitist image and attempt to attract a new audience is the prospect that performances may soon, even this year, be broadcast onto big screens. Where these will be has not been decided but it appears that the Bayreuth Festival is well on the way to a twenty-first century makeover and a Bayreuth spokesman said it should be a ‘Festival for all’. He added  that Die Meistersinger in July could be the first performance broadcast and then Parsifal but it was considered that the Ring would just be too long to sit through.

With all this, virtually extra-musical  activity going on,  what will the patrons clutching their hard-won tickets get to see this year? The highlight must be a new staging of Parsifal. Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 production has therefore had a much shorter tenure than most Bayreuth productions get. I saw it conducted by Pierre Boulez in its first year and as it sped by,  the mish-mash of Voodoo imagery, hares and maggots did not make me as angry as some. However Boulez only returned once more when I saw it again,  before passing the baton on and since it gained few friends it has now been retired. The young Norwegian opera director, Stefan Herheim, had the late Götz Friedrich as a teacher - a good pedigree - so it will be interesting to see what his slant on this seminal work will be. The conductor is Daniele Gatti who is making his debut on the Green Hill. He does not arrive with a tremendous Wagner pedigree himself  but is a superb conductor of late-Romantic music and so is unlikely to disappoint. More problematic is the cast: both Detlef Roth and Christopher Ventris make their debuts at Bayreuth as Amfortas and Parsifal. Kwangchul Youn (Gurnemanz) and Mihoko Fujimura (Kundry) have well-schooled voices but neither are singers that most would rush anywhere to see. Let us of course celebrate a British tenor finally getting to singing one of the big ‘heroic’ roles at Bayreuth. Christopher Ventris was woefully under-directed at Covent Garden’s recent Parsifal revival and I am sure will be a success.

Katharina Wagner’s production of Die Meistersinger has its second outing and undoubtedly be revised slightly due to its mixed reception last year. Michael Volle and Klaus Florian Vogt reprise their outstandingly individual ‘takes’ on Beckmesser and Walther von Stolzing and I hope Franz Hawlata (Sachs) and Amanda Mace (Eva) will have relaxed more into their roles,  as they were the weaker links in a modest cast of singers.

Elsewhere,  82 year-old German playwright Tankred Dorst’s Ring is in its third year and so desperate to avoid any social or political message that it  appears from reviews that he doesn’t say much at all. I haven’t seen it as it is undercast (though I understand Andrew Shore is a great success as Alberich) and it  seems only worth going for Christian Thielemann’s supreme mastery of the score. Since he will be around Bayreuth for some while yet,  I am sure he will conduct the next new Ring cycle which will  either take us through  to the 200th anniversary year of 2013 or will begin then.

Finally,  the always reliable veteran Viennese conductor, Peter Schneider, conducts Christoph Marthaler’s rather static 2005 Tristan und Isolde which I saw then and again in 2006 with Nina Stemme as Isolde. The Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin, who specialises as Turandot and Brünnhilde, makes a leap from being one of the Valkyries at Bayreuth to make her debut as Isolde this year and Michelle Breedt who is South African but based in Germany debuts as Brangäne. The rather bluff Robert Holl will undoubtedly make a stolid König Marke and Robert Dean Smith’s lyrical and tireless Tristan is always worth hearing.

So it is clear that Bayreuth is in transition in a number of ways. I always look forward to my short sojourn there each summer in which actual performances  play only a small part. It is a very tranquil welcoming town,  offering opportunities to relax and certainly to reflect on what you see and hear. If you are going this year, do try and take in one of Stefan Mickisch’s masterly introductory talks at the Evangelisches Gemeindehaus every morning of a performance. I enjoy these immensely even though my German is limited but even those with no German at all can l enjoy his virtuoso piano playing of the musical illustrations. I will report for ‘Seen and Heard’ on how performances of Tristan, Meistersinger and Parsifal are at this year's  Bayreuth Festival,  early in September.

Jim Pritchard


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