CLASSICAL MUSIC | 27.07.2009
The charm offensive: Bayreuth at the dawn of a new era
"Artistic stagnation" was the catchword back when Wolfgang Wagner, soon to turn 90, was still festival director.
In Year One of the co-directorship of his daughters Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 64, and Katharina Wagner, 31, there is little new to be seen onstage - actually, nothing, with no new productions this season. Yet change is in the air, if only in that these two Wagners aren't at loggerheads with each other.
Considering the worldwide obsession with this most authentic of opera festivals - 133 years after it was founded, still doing what its founder Richard Wagner intended it to - it's unusual that its image was defined for so long by newspaper critics.
Wolfgang Wagner, Richard Wagner's grandson, loved to engage the press in a spirit of confrontation. In the last fifteen years of his tenure, it turned bitter and reflexive.
PR plus musical excellence
Great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner is responsible for having revamped the Web site (www.bayreuther-festspiele.de), and also directs the incorporated subsidiary Bayreuth Medien, which handles multimedia aspects of the festival.
Pre-empting the press and setting the agenda herself, she has said that she has a clear sense of where the festival should position itself: at the forefront of Wagner interpretation worldwide.
And that will require more than public relations.
Hopes are placed in the management expertise of Eva Wagner-Pasquier, in the new conductors announced in the coming seasons (Andris Nelsons, Thomas Henglebrock and Kirill Petrenko), and in the prospect that today's handful of truly exciting Wagnerian singers will be heard in Bayreuth.
The Bayreuth Festival is taking place this year for the 98th time
Repeat boos for Katharina
Considering that Katharina was once again booed for her production of "Mastersingers," it may take some time for the new artistic approach to establish itself. Apparently her new position at the helm doesn't give her any bonus points with the critical Bayreuth audience.
But the musical rendition of "Mastersingers" doesn't get lost in the stage antics - and that's saying quite a bit, considering that Katharina Wagner basically turns the story upside down.
In "Mastersingers," there's quite a bit of singing about singing, as the story revolves around the craft of composition for the voice. Katharina came up with a piece of stage direction about stage direction, with references to the history, not all of it savory, of stagings of the "Mastersingers" since the premiere over 140 years ago. The work was, after all, a favorite in the Third Reich.
To be understood, this meta-level commentary requires an audience that knows the score, the words and a context of different stagings. Katharina Wagner can expect that of the Bayreuth audience, yet she also goes beyond that small elite group of Bayreuth ticket-holders, venturing into the worlds of local public viewing and Internet broadcasting worldwide.
Beyond the Green Hill
Public viewing, simultaneous live stream and audio-on-demand continue with a different work on Aug. 9: Christoph Marthaler's four-year-old setting of "Tristan and Isolde," which opened the festival on July 25.
Though Bayreuth was late to jump on the multimedia bandwagon, bigger and better projects are reportedly in the works on the Green Hill.
It was announced that the Wagners are planning performances of their great-grandfather's early works in the city of Bayreuth (though not in the Festspielhaus), and that the new production of the Ring cycle in the Richard Wagner bicentennial year 2013 will be publicly viewed and broadcast on the Web.
Wolfgang Wagner's daughters are softening the tone he set
Author: Rick Fulker
Editor: Kate Bowen
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