Winds of change blow in Wagner's Bayreuth (News Feature)

Jul 22, 2009, 2:08 GMT

   Bayreuth, Germany - The internet has wormed its way into Bayreuth, that citadel of 19th-century high culture, where the annual Richard Wagner opera festival opens this Saturday.

Most days, the festival organizers in Germany are podcasting about the preparations.

The mini-videos, in German and available at no cost online, show stage rehearsals, cleaning ladies scrubbing the festival theatre, gardeners planting flowers outside and conductor Peter Schneider fine-tuning the orchestra.

For the second year, one opera is to be broadcast live via giant screens outside the theatre and over the internet. Tristan and Isolde will air this way on August 9 to paying guests in front of far-away computer monitors.

Tristan will also be the opening-night production, with European VIPs gathering Saturday in their finery at this shrine to the controversial German genius of the operatic arts.

It can take years on waiting lists to get a once-in-a-lifetime ticket to a single Bayreuth show.

This year's month-long festival will be the first under the joint management of Katharina Wagner, 31, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 64, both great-granddaughters of the composer, who lived 1813-1883.

Both women spent their young years assisting their now retired father, Wolfgang, 89, to mount the arts event, which performs nothing but Wagner operas.

Katharina Wagner has become the festival's public face, and has even become something of a celebrity in the German tabloid media whose readers are not particularly opera aware. The various internet promotion ideas are her work.

She directed The Meistersinger at Bayreuth in 2007 and her next production will be a new Tristan in 2015.

Her father favoured her as his sole successor, but the festival board preferred a tandem with her half-sister Eva, whose Bayreuth work suddenly ended in 1976 in a family feud and who was blocked from re-entry in 2001.

The elder sister, who is famed as a talent scout and has worked at Covent Garden in London, the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, the Teatro Real in Madrid and the New Yorker Metropolitan Opera, tends to avoid the media.

The Bayreuth festival is often seen as hidebound. It may take more time for winds of change to blow strong.

   All seven shows selected for this year are revivals of previous productions: the Tristan, sung by Robert Dean Smith and Irene Theorin in the title roles and directed by Christoph Marthaler, was for example first staged in 2005.

There will however be a brand-new children's version of The Flying Dutchman as a matinee this Saturday, with Christoph Ulrich Meier directing.

All 10 performances of this Wagner for Children were booked out in the blink of an eye.

Another novelty this year will be lectures before the performances: Wagner lovers take their operas very seriously.

Conversely, the printed programmes are lightening up, and this year no longer contain long, scholarly articles about the different operas in history.

The run-up to the opening was dogged by a pay dispute between a union representing stagehands and the board.

For the first time, operating the festival, which began in 1876 in a specially built summer theatre, is no longer a Wagner family business operation.

Wolfgang Wagner was lifetime head and sole proprietor of the operating company, Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH, set up in the 1980s, until August last year, when he retired.

Its shareholders are now the German and Bavarian governments, the city of Bayreuth and the Friends of Bayreuth society. The Wagner half-sisters do not have lifetime contracts, but terms until 2015.

Internet: www.bayreuther-festspiele.de