Just in: Bayreuth fires ‘Nazi-theme’ director

Just in: Bayreuth fires ‘Nazi-theme’ director

main

norman lebrecht

November 15, 2014

Jonathan Meese has been booked for Parsifal in 2016.

He’s notorious for flashing swastikas and Hitler salutes.

Last summer he promised not to do so at Bayreuth.

But they fired him anyway today. Financially unviable, apparently.

 

jonathan-meese.si

 

Comments

  • harold braun says:

    No comment!!!!

  • Richard Dubugnon says:

    Yeah, for some reason they seem to dislike swastikas there, since the death in 1980 of Siegfried Wagner’s wife, Winifred Wagner who was a friend and open supporter of Hitler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Wagner

    Also remember the recent Evgenii Nikitin scandal http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/spiegel-interview-with-opera-singer-evgeny-nikitin-on-his-tattoo-a-848510.html

  • Chris says:

    Getting rid of this troubled child was probably a god idea.

  • Theodore McGuiver says:

    Who said there was never any good news coming from Bayreuth?

  • John Borstlap says:

    It has become a tired cliché to sport swastikas and hitler salutes at German iconic locations… as if the nazis are still around and have to be nailed to the wall. Boring, puerile, cheap, trivial, in short: KITSCH.

    This director is nothing more than the juvenile neo-nazi hooligans – the kitschy, wanton remnants of sixties adolescent protest – with the difference that these never go to a Bayreuth production. Also, the ‘bourgeois audiences’ that ‘supported Hitler’ are since long dead. Bayreuth was right to get rid of such quasi-artists who seem not to be able to find something to say, and thus resort to such clichées.

    These sort of ‘protest gestures’ have become petrified in the modern cultural establishment, and are in fact more reactionary and bourgeois than the imagined audiences to which such gestures are directed.

  • Novagerio says:

    And they fired him because he’s too expensive? To put it this way is to condemn the audiences to ignominy…

  • MOST READ TODAY: