Posts Tagged ‘bayreuth festival’

More Random Thoughts on Bayreuth

Tuesday, September 1st, 2015

By: Frank Cadenhead

The Austrian newspaper, Der Kurier, let drop a great deal of information about what to expect in the future for the Bayreuth Festival. The new Ring in 2020, to the surprise of many, will not be conducted by the new Music Director of the festival, Christian Thielemann, but rather the Boston Symphony’s Andris Nelsons with American soprano Christine Goerke chalked in to sing Brunnhilde. She will be singing the complete Ring when the Robert Lepage production returns to the state at the Metropolitan Opera, it has been announced. Hints are that Dimitri Tcherniakov will be creating the new Bayreuth production.

The 2016 Parsifal will also feature Andris Nelsons and will be staged by Uwe Eric Laufenberg with Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role. The 2017 performances will star Andreas Schager. That same year, Die Meistersinger will return with a new production by Barrie Kosky with Vogt as Stolzing and Michael Volle as Sachs. The 2018 Lohengrin will be conducted by Thielemann and staged by Alvis Hermanis with Roberto Alagna in the title role and Anna Netrebko as Else. There will be a new Tannhäuser staged by Tobias Kratzer in 2019. In addition to Goerke for the Ring in 2020, Andreas Schager will be the Siegfried. With time, however, things happen and with the last minute changes in this year’s casting it is way too early to carve these names in stone.

I find the lack of surtitles in Bayreuth to be a symbol of arrogant old thinking that should change. The lack of such an amenity, now literally everywhere in the opera world, is hard to explain in rational terms. If they think all of the audience has memorized the entire dialogue of the always prolix Richard Wagner they simply have never considered the question. With new technology, seat-back additions, like at the Met, would not be expensive and the one percent who have actually memorized every word can turn them off. Frank Castorf’s very detailed Ring dramatics must have left the majority of the audience in various stage of incomprehension a good part of the time.

My impression is that formal wear is now worn by the minority toward the end of the festival run. I can’t speak about opening night but you could see jeans and sport shirts at the last Ring cycle in August. The fact that there is no air conditioning at the Festspielhaus for the August festival is an added encouragement to forget the bow tie and layers.

At the end of the Castorf ring, the larger implications for Wagner’s shrine are being examined whether the regulars like it or not. My first time there, in 1963, Bayreuth and the festival reminded me of a temple of worship and the stiff, well-aged and very formal audiences were acolytes at a ceremony. Significantly, the Wieland Wagner staging of Tannhäuser (with Grace Bumbry as the Black Venus) stirred rage among the traditionalists by abstracting the stage direction. The overt sexuality of the ballet for the Venusberg music was, for me, assuringly apt but provoked the regulars. Aside from the rather more mixed audiences – more varied ages and social levels – a half-century later the Castorf staging still had the traditionalists in a lather. But, at the end of the run, I noted little of this heat. Clearly the staging was intended to puncture some balloons. This lèse-majesté began to be understood better, as with the Chereau Ring, after some time.

The festival Ring program was quite specific about what a dangerous revolutionary Wagner was. While many are aware of his anti-Semitism and assumed he grew socially conservative, Wagner advocated radical social movements all his life. Siegfried’s “Mount Rushmore” with Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao was no accident and his depiction of the lust for wealth and control, here “black gold,” provided a logical background for the drama.

Something that was little discussed among this year’s festival news was a fundamental change in the structure and soul of the festival that will certainly have major long term consequences. My guess is that the change, announced a few days before the start of the festival, will have a ultimate negative impact. The appointment of Christian Thielemann as “music director” of the festival first became public when the new sign for his parking place, with his new title, was widely tweeted. Some days later a press conference gave the official declaration.

Since the beginning, the festival never has had a music director. The structure formally was to hire the conductor and director for a particular opera and wait for the results. Casting was the prerogative of the conductor. Now this is not certain and Kirill Petrenko, the new designated successor to Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic, had his tenor changed just weeks before opening night and it was likely that Thielemann had something to do with that. It resulted in an uncharacteristic public statement critical of the meddling from the notoriously media-shy conductor. I would imagine this will not be the last scandal involving Thielemann who has a long history of arch-conservative remarks and trouble with management and musicians. Clearly there would be conductors and stage directors who would not consider Bayreuth while he is “music director.” My view is that this appointment, approved by the festival’s board of directors, will likely be regretted in the future.

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Random Thoughts on the Bayreuth Festival

Tuesday, August 25th, 2015

By Frank Cadenhead

The book isn’t next to me in my hotel room at Bayreuth, but otherwise it is always within arm’s reach. Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, an illuminating collection of music criticism at its worse, is a vast parade of bonehead reviews of the great classics. It is an obvious reminder that originality in art is not always what you had anticipated when you came through the door. But this very originality is the core of creativity and at the very heart of opera and other arts.

My first encounter with Frank Castorf’s universally-derided production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold on Friday, August 21, found me gobsmacked by the astounding virtuosity of the production and the raunchy energy took me by surprise. It was highly theatrical and the involvement of the singers were central to the dramatics onstage. It was busy and the action was layered with video close-ups on a screen which occupied about a quarter of the stage at the top. A cheap Texan Route 66 motel-gas station, with its above-ground plastic pool for the Rhine Maidens, was the new Valhalla and those chaste girls were now sex-toys for the boss.

The public was unusually aggressive in their disapproval when this production first appeared in 2013. The critics, like sheep, followed along, dismissing the staging and not even feeling the need to describe it in any detail. I read the reviews and the contempt and dismissal was solid, did not appear to need justification and assumed to be final. But this conformist reaction might give us a sense of just how much the world of opera needs to be shaken up. An art critic knows not to immediately rail at some artist who thinks he can paint a soup can and get away with it. Even a ballet critic knows better than to try to keep ballet what it was when he was young when he learned early on that Merce Cunningham was going to stick his finger in your eye the next time too. Journalism which assumes the status quo is universal truth is failing the art and the public deserves better.

The festival’s Ring Cycle program, with content now 21st Century casual, had an essay reminding readers of Wagner’s early political and artistic radicalism, important to understanding many of Castorf’s ideas. Also included were sections of a work explaining the concept of irony, a key element of the new staging but evidently a new experience for most reviewers.

Three years into this production, the Bayreuth audience cheered at the final curtain. The one or two who booed were resoundingly outvoted. And those doing the cheering are the regulars. There is not a lot of tattoos and piercing among the well-aged attendees but clearly they had a different reaction than the first-timers. Certainly the shock has worn off – as it always will, even with that painting of a soup can. While the art of opera has started shaking loose from the doldrums of the last half century with imaginative stagings and with a few new operas gaining attention, it still has a long way to go to find its original creative stride. As Wagner himself commanded, “Kinder! Macht Neues!” (Children, make the new).

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Expunged ‘Tannhäuser’ opens Debate on Artistic Freedom

Friday, May 17th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

The tolerance of German audiences for extreme stage productions is a source of national pride and the envy of many abroad. But a production of Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein which had to be stripped down to concert performance last week has set off a national debate about the sanctity of a director’s artistic freedom. Two seasons ago, the Bayreuth Festival mounted the same opera in a new production by Sebastian Baumgartner which places the heroine, Elisabeth, in a “biogas” chamber. It caused a moral outcry in the press, but the notion of her being “recycled” rather than outright gassed appears to have kept the staging in repertoire. In Düsseldorf, at the Oper am Rhein, the director Burkhard C. Kosminski went a step too far. Naked extras were already being gassed during the overture. An entire family was shot after its members had their heads shaven by soldiers. Venus was dressed in an SS uniform; Elisabeth was raped and burned. The boos in the small city of Düsseldorf started 30 minutes into the production, according to Der Spiegel, and some audience members were so traumatized that they needed medical attention. Criticism from the Jewish community was just the icing on the cake. But Kosminski refused to modify his vision, for fear of betraying his artistic principles. Less than a week after its premiere on May 4, the opera was reduced to a concert version.

The obvious issue, which audience members were quick to point out, is that Nazis and persecuted Jews have nothing to do with Tannhäuser. The opera is about a pilgrim who leaves Venus’ world of love-making, enters a song competition on the Wartburg, and finds redemption in the saintly Elisabeth. An editorial in the German magazine Cicero , dedicated to the intersection of arts and politics, observes that a director turns to Nazis when he has no good ideas of own. The author continues to criticize Germany’s lavish public funding for theater, calling Hitler its “patron saint.” It may be worth noting that the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, a shared entity of the nearby cities of Düssseldorf and Duisburg, nearly entered financial meltdown last season. Was the production a desperate attempt to lend the company a cutting-edge status capable of competing with the many other opera houses in West Germany (let’s not forget that the reunited country possesses altogether one-seventh of the world’s companies)?

In an interview with Der Spiegel this week, Kosminski states the “real scandal” at hand is “censorship in the arts.” He insists that the production intended to mourn, not ridicule, the victims of World War Two, describing himself as “terrified” by criticism from the Jewish community. Just yesterday, he won the support of the president of the Akademie der Künste, Klaus Staeck, who has written a letter demanding that the production be reinstated. “Art—regardless of its quality!—is not a superfluous luxury,” he argues. Is it then justified to use art as a vehicle for emotional torture? And is quality not an important criterium when good tax money is being invested? From a purely literary point of view, there is little to no basis for casting Tannhäuser as a war criminal who is forced into the SS guard. Surely Greek myth is more important to understanding the opera than Wagner’s indirect connection to the Holocaust as a role model of Hitler.

Although the opera derives its plot in part from Thuringian legend, there is little in the way of nationalist undertones compared to later works such as Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and, to some extent, the Ring cycle. Patrice Chéreau caused a scandal upon the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival in 1976 by setting the cycle at the time of early German industrialization. This is a loaded topic, given the industrial killings that followed during World War Two, but the production opened the door to historical allegory on the Festspielhaus stage. Stefan Herheim’s 2008 production of Parsifal, which opens in the Villa Wahnfried in the 1880s and ends in the Federal Republic of Bonn, plumbs the possibilities even further. The appearance of swastika flags and black-and-white footage from the Second World War remains controversial, but Herheim caused the audience to think critically about the inextricability of Wagner’s works from his time and the institution of Bayreuth itself.

Kosminski, through his graphic depictions of the violence and genocide, crossed a threshold that was already at breaking point. Although I didn’t see the production first-hand, the audience’s reaction would indicate that he lacked the sophistication of a director such as Chéreau or Herheim. The exploitation of World War Two—not just to artistic ends but in the media and in academia—has reached a point of saturation in Germany that, thanks to the reaction at the Oper am Rhein, should finally be considered cause for concern. Artistic freedom does not license a director to indulge his darkest fantasies or work out psychological issues at the expense of an opera. Do we go to the theater to be provoked, reviled and confused, or enlightened and transported by an interpretation that allows us to penetrate a given work with more understanding and appreciation? Wagner may remain a thorn in the cultural consciousness, but it is not paying respect to anyone—neither the composer, the German people, nor the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust—to use his stage works as vehicles for cheap, shock tactics under the pretence of creating socially relevant art. As austerity plagues Europe, it is even more shameful to invest in stage productions that ruin rather than illuminate an opera.

rebeccaschmid.info

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In Bayreuth, Persisting with the New

Friday, August 31st, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

„Kinder, schaff Neues,“ (Children, create something new) Wagner wrote in an adage frequently quoted by stage directors in Germany. In Bayreuth, 136 years after the founding of his festival, the spirit is alive and well. Provocatively-minded Regietheater, for lack of a better blanket term, has come to stamp the recently installed administration on the Green Hill, which despite widespread criticism to the contrary sees itself as simply carrying on a long-standing tradition. “The artistic point of view is not much different,” said Co-Intendant Katharina Wagner in interview with reference to the previous administration under her father, Wolfgang. “It´s the continuity of the festival and just trying to get interesting interpretations here. That´s also what our father did and tried to do. But of course if you see the Chéreau Ring now, it´s not as strong as it was, and that´s the point.” She went on to compare its power to that of last year´s new Tannhäuser in a contemporary context.

Sebastian Baumgarten´s staging certainly reaffirms the notion of Bayreuth as a Werkstatt, a place where new ideas can be test-driven to give operatic works fresh relevance. The stage director attempts to transcend the dichotomy between the divine Venusberg and the mortal realm of the Wartburg by confining the action to an industrial plant that is meant to represent a self-contained community founded on ecological awareness, indirectly echoing Wagner´s Artwork of the Future in which he envisioned a society liberated from capitalist values where the Gesamtkunstwerk could thrive. Probing as the concept may be, it has no direct connection to the opera at hand, nor does an installation by Dutch artist Josep van Lieshout that doubles as a set design have any aesthetic or philosophical value. In what may be intended as a humoristic touch, alcohol abounds but is recycled daily in an “Alkoholator,” while a biogas tank will ultimately become Elisabeth´s death chamber (something which did not go down well in the German press last year given the notorious sensitivity to such direct World War Two references). A pregnant Venus cavorts freely onstage, at one point dancing with Wolfram von Eschenbach, after her mountain—caged in metal bars—descends into the basement. The audience members sitting on the sides of the stage in Brechtian fashion did little to compensate for the lack of dramaturgical arc.

Program notes by Edward. A Bortnichak argue that Baumgarten integrates Wagner´s “criticism of the natural sciences, technology and medical research of the 19th century,” an over-intellectualized idea which, even if it made itself at all apparent, would do nothing to tell the story of Tannhäuser´s renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh for redemptive love in Elisabeth. The production effectively creates total ambiguity when the goddess gives birth to what is presumably the title character´s baby at the end of the opera. Sperm-like amoebas also crawl around intermittently, but most tasteless is video art by Christopher Kondek. The x-rayed vision of a man drinking milk (oh, right! Venus is pregnant) nearly ruined Wagner´s sublime ouverture, performed exquisitely under the baton of Christian Thielemann. This year´s audience may be lucky that the production has caused such a scandal. Thomas Hengelbrock refused to conduct this season after complaining that he had to constantly rehearse with a different set of orchestra players, and word has it that the cast is a notch up from the premiere.

I have never heard a German opera in which diction was so clear throughout. Torsten Kerl maintains a healthy voice despite having sung all of Wagner´s roles for tenor and consistently demonstrated clear dramatic purpose. Camilla Nylund was a lovely Elisabeth, with a creamy tone whose occasionally squally high notes were easily forgiven. Michelle Breedt was a rich voiced Venus, and the Hungarian baritone Michael Nagy demonstrated impeccable dynamic shading in the role of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Günther Groissböck brought a powerful bass to the role of Hermann, the Thuringian Landgrave. The remainder of the supporting cast and choruses left little to be desired. If only the staging hadn´t reprocessed the archetypal underpinnings of Wagner´s opera to such crass effect.

Christian Marthaler´s Tristan und Isolde, a 2009 production, represents a more understated approach that nevertheless falls just as flat. Any eroticism is stripped bare, much in keeping with drab sets by Anna Viebrock that appear to reference a 1920s luxury ship. This year´s revival, presided over by German director Anna-Sophie Mahler (rumor has it that Marthaler refused to return because of limited rehearsal time), apparently added a bit more physical contact between the ill-fated couple, but the love potion still seemed to have more of a disenchanting than aphrodisiac effect. The duet “O Sinke Liebe Nacht” featured Tristan and Isolde sitting side by side like retirees in front of a television. Fluorescent lighting is assigned special prominence to illuminate the night and day theme so central to the clandestine romance, yet it hardly took on enough symbolic meaning to animate the action. Marthaler saves some interesting moments for the last act when Kurnewal waves his arms as if trying to swim out of the nothingness, and all the characters except for the dying couple end up facing the walls of the ship´s barracks. Isolde covers herself with a sheet on the same bed where Tristan lay dying from Melot´s wound, a demystifying touch.

If it weren´t for conducting by Wagner veteran Peter Schneider, returning to the festival for the twentieth time, one might have secretly wished for the production to have ended sooner. Schneider´s taut, restrained reading was much in keeping with the vision onstage despite his swift pace. The level of technical perfection and power he cultivated from the orchestra often put the singers to shame, with a transcendent Liebestod that compensated for the magic lacking onstage. To be sure, uninspired as Marthaler´s production is, a more polished cast might have better risen above the odds. In this case, Robert Dean Smith was staid and underpowered as Tristan, while Irène Theorin—one of today´s best Wagnerian sopranos—was not in her best voice, nor did she make the text understandable. She still produced some touching piannissimi in the final scene and ripped through the score´s charged moments. Breedt did not disappoint as Brangäne, Isolde´s maid, but it was Jukka Rasilainen who commanded consistent attention with his smooth bass in the role of Kurwenal, Tristan´s servant. Kwangchul Youn was a powerful King Mark, and Ralf Lukas a vengeful Melot.

The finest production this season is hands down Stefan Herheim´s Parsifal, the only opera on the roster commissioned by Wolfgang Wagner. Herheim´s breathtaking allegorical vision begins at the Villa Wahnfried in the 1880s and ends at parliament in the Federal Republic of Bonn a century later. The story integrates elements from a medieval saga by Wolfram von Eschenbach that served as a source for Wagner´s libretto, inserting a silent actress as Parsifal´s mother, Herzeleide. Most likely with reference to Cosima Wagner, she lies in bed at the center of the Villa´s living room, copulating with her son in dream-like visions (namely when Amfortas holds up a glowing grail) and giving birth to a baby which then appears to be circumcised. Such moments were perplexing and somewhat gratuitous, but Herheim´s keen attention to the dramatic structure of Wagner´s score and the impeccable handwork of his team (sets by Heike Scheele and costumes by Gesine Völlm) redeems even what bordered on the offensive. The walls of Wahnfried were recreated verbatim yet haunted in a surrealist vision of black-winged beings and Parsifal as a young boy, only morphing slightly with hospital beds and mirrored walls for Klingsor´s magic castle, a brothel for the wounded.

Herheim is mostly a genius of subversion, effectively sublimating Christian and inherently anti-Semitic references into a commentary on German politics, such as when a chorus of World War One soldiers passes around bread in the Knight´s chorus, “Nehmet vom Brod/wandelt es kühn,” of the first act or when Amfortas, his head still crowned in thorns, takes the podium in the final tableau and utters “Wehe” to a room of bureaucrats while Kundry and Gurnemanz stand outside a proscenium reproducing the pillars lining the stage of the Festspielhaus—a re-consecration of the stage. Despite the politicization of the opera, a film interlude imitating the credits of the black and white era (video by Momme Hinrichs and Torge Moller) asks audience members to refrain from political debate, quoting the Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner adage “Hier gilt`s der Kunst” (Art reigns here)—a value which helped restore the festival to family hands following the American occupation. This will be the last revival of the 2008 production, but much like Chéreau´s Ring, one imagines that subsequent directors will have a very hard time overcoming its legacy—although Jonathan Meese is likely to stir up his own (succéss de) scandale with his 2016 rendition of Parsifal.

Musically, Herheim had a solid cast with Burkhard Fritz as Parsifal, whose reliable Heldentenor and portly presence were well suited to the role within this artistic vision. The dramatic demands were even higher on Susan Maclean as Kundry as she magically changed forms, and although her voice revealed some strain, her keen expressive powers served to pull off the role effectively. Kwangchul Youn was the vocal stand-out of the evening as the veteran knight Gurmemanz, anchoring the production with his mellifluous bass, while the vocal weaknesses of Detlef Roth only made him a more vulnerable, pious Amfortas. Thomas Jesatko brought crisp singing to the role of the magician Klingsor, promiscuously appearing in pantyhose and a tuxedo shirt, and Diogenes Randes rounded out the cast well as Titurel. The Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan, in his Bayreuth premiere, lived up to the family name (his father, Armin, being a well-known champion of the opera at hand) with an account of Wagner´s score as elegant and sensuous as one might dream, transparent, mysterious, and enchanting. Orchestra playing like this deserves a staging as aesthetically ravishing and intellectually challenging as Herheim´s, reminding us that the creation of something new is not enough: great art has always had the power to move not only its contemporaries but generations centuries later.

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Impressions from the Green Hill: Tattoos, Rats and Embryos

Friday, August 24th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The Bayreuth Festival has had its share of scandal to contend with as Wagner’s bicentenary approaches next season. An international investigation into exclusive ticketing practices; the publicized struggle to find the director for a new Ring cycle; administrative policies that have reportedly shortened rehearsal time; widely reviled productions; and—most recently—the last-minute withdrawal of Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin from the title role in a new production of Der Fliegende Holländer due to an alleged swastika tattoo have marred the regime of Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Pasquier-Wagner, who took the reins from their father Wolfgang in 2008. It will be a test next year when Frank Castorf, intendant of the Berliner Volksbühne and a notorious enfant terrible on the German theatre scene, stages his tetralogy, which he has revealed will center upon the “race for oil” as a turning stage revolves between a post-modern socialist vision of East Berlin and Wall Street on the other—an allegorical concept that is eerily reiminscent of Patrice Chéreau´s seminal 1976 production, commissioned by Wolfgang for the centenary of the cycle´s first performance in Bayreuth.

This season´s new Flying Dutchman, much like the protagonist himself, struggles to find redemption as it sails on into the final weeks of the festival. Jan Philipp Gloger, in his third opera staging, has opted for a capitalist critique that posits Daland and his sailors as Wall Street manipulators, while the Dutchman appears with his scalp branded by some kind of technological degeneration. Senta is a lowly factory worker, packaging fans until she takes a can of red paint and devises a sculptural cardboard podium on which to greet her sailor. She even holds a torch alluding to the Status of Liberty, as if we didn´t understand the references to consumerist culture. Instead of jumping overboard, she stabs herself in the final scene, and the Dutchman bleeds as she releases from the curse of eternal wandering. Mass production continues after their death as the factory churns out blinking sculptures of the couple in their final embrace—a hyperbolic, hokey, if sardonically amusing, final touch.

While Gloger generally does not stray from Wagner´s libretto, he fails to give his social commentary depth and coherence. Sets by Christof Hetzer start off promisingly, with a sleek black motherboard of sorts that flashes with stock market numbers and lights up in time with the music, but the cardboard play world of Senta and the Dutchman looks amateurish at best. Most disappointing was the lack of compelling inter-personal dynamics onstage: the romance between the two main characters was as two-dimensional and alienating as the set itself. Costumes by Karin Jud were underinspiring with the exception of the unidentifiable skin disease on the heads of the Dutchman and his crew which left viewers racking their brains to no avail.

A musically indomitable Dutchman might have saved the evening, but Samuel Youn—who stepped in last-minute to replace Nikitin—was vocally bland. Adrianne Pieczonka brought a lush, expressive voice to the role of Senta, and yet she suffered from occasional intonation problems and a slightly steely edge to her booming climaxes. Franz-Josef Selig sang the role of Daland handsomely despite a slightly husky quality, blessed with clear diction. Michael König was an appropriately menacing Erik as he struggle to pin down Senta, while Christa Mayer did not leave a strong dramatic impression as Mary, Senta´s nurse. In the role of the Steersman, Benjamin Bruns´ ringing tenor opened the opera on a pleasant note. The most redeeming aspect of the evening came from the pit as Christian Thielemann conducted the festival orchestra in a sleek, streamlined reading that was well-matched to the more elegant moments of Gloger´s production, driving the sailor´s choruses at a swift pace while allowing for expansive exchanges between Senta and the Dutchman.

Hans Neuenfels´ Lohengrin has further confirmed the German stage director as a master of controversy, inspiring a passage in Woody Allen´s last film, To Rome with Love, while perplexing critics. The notion of the Brabantians as a pack of slowly mutating rats may sound more far-fetched than it appears within the larger context of the opera, although the staging is full of tasteless gestures—namely presenting Gottfried, Elsa´s abducted brother, as an embryo who tosses pieces of his umbilical cord when Lohengrin departs. Yet the swan knight is not just pureness and virtue. He is also a skilled manipulator, and the laboratory-like setting of Neuenfels´ production (sets and costumes by Reinhard von der Thannen) is as comical—and inane—as it is thought-provoking. One could do without the kitschy video art by Björn Verloh, cartoons which only over-saturate an already visually dense production. The only slightly meaningful moment occurred in the image of a rat skeleton running as smaller rodents fell off its ribs during the famous line “Für deutsche Land, das deutsche Schwert” (for the German land, the German sword), although the willingness of these creatures to abide by deceptively God-given precepts was more than clear at this point. The rat-tailed flower maidens in the wedding scene may not deserve profound reflection, but they were certainly amusing in a self-conscious manner that was severely lacking in Gloger´s Dutchman.

Musings on Regietheater aside, the revival of Neuenfels´ 2010 production mostly profited from having Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role. The seduction is immediate when the German tenor, who also saved Kaspar Holten´s recently unveiled Lohengrin at the Deutsche Oper, utters the opening line, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan” (Now you can express gratitude, my dear swan). The voice is at once angelic and virile, pleading yet authoritative. He was unfortunately not well matched by Annette Dasch, charming but underpowered in this Wagnerian role. Something of a star in Germany, the soprano nevertheless received thunderous applause. Thomas Mayer and Susan Maclean were well cast as the sinister couple Friedrich von Telramund and Ortrud, and Wilhelm Schwinghammer brought a powerful bass to the role of King Heinrich. Youn fared better as the King´s Herald than as the Dutchman the night before. Shimmering tremolo and sumptuous harmonies emerged with grace and passion under the baton of Andris Nelsons despite some minute technical imperfections, confirming Bayreuth´s tradition of superior musical standards despite a recent tendency toward wayward stagings.

Stay tuned for more on Parsifal, Tannhäuser and Tristan…

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