Sombre faces at Bayreuth

Sombre faces at Bayreuth

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norman lebrecht

July 29, 2014

This is a meeting yesterday of the directorate of the Friends of the Bayreuth Festival. Not much to laugh about.

katharina wagner thielemann

l-r: Business director Dieter Sense, Christian Thielemann (back to camera), Katharina Wagner and Wolfgang Wagner. Photo: Dr. Klaus Billand

Comments

  • mr oakmount says:

    A random photo, probably taken with a mobile phone … and the point is?

  • Prewartreasure says:

    This remark may come-across as sexist; it’s not meant that way, but as a long-time supporter/follower of this once wonderful summer festival, in my opinion the proverbial wheels started wobbling in the latter years of Wolfgang Wagner’s life, falling off when the women took over!

    ‘Kinder schafft neues’ does NOT mean ‘Kinder schafft scheiße’

  • Hasbeen says:

    Sorry, but how can anyone know what was being discussed.

  • william osborne says:

    Actually, they were discussing the state of opera in the USA which is incomparably worse, hence the somber faces. And not that that is an unusual German facial expression….

  • anonymus says:

    Laughing was never the general idea in Bayreuth.

    On a serious note, I wonder why the superiors don’t make Thielemann artistic director of Bayreuth. What will save Bayreuth is uncompromised quality of music and singing. The stage direction has to to follow what the score dictates. Thielemann could be a good administrator and executor of Wagner’s original idea, to celebrate the Gesamtkunstwerk.
    Enough of all the stage directors, that are alien to Wagner’s oeuvre and music.

  • Claudia Menlo says:

    The opening performance of the Festival was interrupted by a severe mechanical problem with one of the sets that required an impromptu intermission for repair and the performance stretched an hour longer than the scheduled time. Given then very tight scheduling of the Bayreuth performances there can be only an extremely limited time given over to working on a permanent fix to the problem, so for this summer there is the lingering worry that whatever went wrong before might go wrong again.

    So maybe this specific problem is what has the Bayreuth chiefs frowning. Or, on the other hand, maybe they had some bad wurst at lunch. Since nobody bothered to ask them what they were talking about, all we can do is speculate, right?

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