Breaking: Katharina Wagner gets to keep her job
OperaAfter months of speculation, the stakeholders have given the hereditary director of the Bayreuth Festival another five years of rule until 2030. However, they have decided to impose a General Manager, using the English term, to rein in her impulses and expenditure.
Katharina, 45, said she is ‘very happy that a common way had been found… to secure the autonomy of art through an independent budget.’
She added: ‘I am extremely relieved.’
Katharina is just a square peg in a round hole. No way I’ll be going back to Bayreuth while she’s there.
And I thought she’s just a round hole.
I have very mixed feelings. For one thing, I appreciate the tradition of leadership “in the family.” Furthermore, there’s no guarantee than a change would be better–the devil you know… But I do think some of the decisions made in recent years are misguided. For one, I really think doing Rienzi on the Green Hill is wrong.
Like all of us, Katharina has made some mistakes over the years. But she has also been willing to break with Bayreuth traditions that her predecessors probably thought were inviolable. Here are three examples.
1. “We never discuss the Third Reich” – wasn’t it Katharina who erected the permanent display about artists and musicians who were victims of the Nazis?
2. “We never sell tickets to individual Ring operas: if you want to see the Ring, you have to buy a ticket for the whole cycle”. That rule was – sensibly – abandoned last season.
3. “We never perform Wagner’s early operas in the Festspielhaus” – Katharina has announced that Rienzi will be performed there in 2026.
Is it now time to abandon a fourth tradition, namely “We always launch a new production of the Ring in a single season, rather than building it over two, three or four seasons”? The last two Rings at Bayreuth (Castorf and Schwarz) were both so bad that they should have been axed after their first outings. But that was not viable for financial reasons. Even the very worst productions at Bayreuth, such as Baumgarten’s Tannhäuser, survive for four seasons.
Would it not be better for Bayreuth to build a Ring, like most other houses do, over several seasons? That might prevent a recurrence of Bayreuth’s unprecedented failure, in 2023, to sell all its tickets. Only 92% of Ring tickets were sold, presumably because people had heard how poor the production was. That figure would have been lower were it not for item 2 above.
It would be unfair to blame Katharina for the failure of productions such as these. She clearly tries to follow her great-grandfather’s dictum “Kinder, schafft Neues!” [“Children, make something new!]. Sometimes that leads to failure, other times to success, such as (imho) the Bayreuth productions by Herheim, Neuenfels, Kosky, Kratzer and Tcherniakov. My point is only that the stakes are four times as high when you back a little-known director for the whole of the Ring.
Picking winners when it comes to opera directors is far from easy, and I don’t imagine that the arrival of a General Manager will do much to address that problem. But I wish the new regime well, and can’t wait to see what Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson makes of Tristan on the Green Hill this summer.
The production problem is an invented one; to have a ‘concept’ of a director, as a blanket spread over the work. Staging the work as much as possible from the idea of the work itself, and in the service of the work, is always much better – there is enough room for interpretation, but leaves the nature of the work intact. It is about the music, which depicts the inside of the drama, and the staging/visuals depict the outside. So, to arrive at a synthesis of inside and outside should be the aim and not the imprint of the director’s own ideas – which more often than not turn-out to be antithetical to the work.
Seattle started doing complete Ring-in-a-season in 1975 and was quite successful at it. Part of their success was they did not have the trashy sets and wacko directors of Bayreuth, administered by entitled, talentless Wagner offspring.
What about hiring Sharon Yuval he’s a young wunderkind director.
Yuval Sharon directed Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 2018, 2019 and 2022. He was obliged to use designs prepared for another director who withdrew. I saw the production twice. It was good but less engaging than its predecessor, the (in)famous Lohengrin-with-Rats, by Hans Neuenfels RIP. I really liked THAT production.