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The Bayreuth Festival in Germany, with impressive support from American patrons and artists, continues to innovate with productions that blend tradition with contemporary artistic visions.
Since its inception, the Bayreuth Festival has been a magnet for American patrons, performers, and visionaries, shaping its legacy with their unique contributions. Mark Twain’s account for the Chicago Tribune of the 1891 season, where he encountered numerous American friends, highlights the festival’s early international appeal. Fast forward to the present, American directors like Yuval Sharon and Jay Scheib are pushing the boundaries of operatic performance, continuing this transatlantic tradition.
The Bayreuth Festival, founded on Richard Wagner’s revolutionary concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk— “total artwork”— has always been a crucible of artistic innovation. Wagner’s vision materialized in the form of the Bayreuth Festival House (Festspielhaus), a modern architectural marvel, which Twain referred to as ‘the shrine of St Wagner.’ However, the opening season in August 1876, featuring the complete four-opera Ring Cycle fell short of Wagner’s expectations, particularly with regards to the stage sets. Consequently, the composer sought ‘real artists’ for his design team, eventually partnering with an unknown Russian painter Paul von Joukowsky for the 1882 premiere of Parsifal thus setting a new precedent for scenography at Bayreuth.
In keeping with Wagner’s preference for artists as stage designers, this year’s Festival features a new interpretation Tristan und Isolde, with sets by the Lithuanian artist Vytautas Narbutas. Together with Icelandic director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson, Narbutas creates a dreamlike atmosphere similar to that of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 film Poor Things. The haul of Tristan’s ship is Wunderkabinett of bizarre objects looted during his sea voyages. Garbed in surreal swaths of lace and crinoline Isolde, Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund, fatally enmeshes Tristan, Austrian heldentenor Andreas Schager. The two give an ecstatically beautiful interpretation of this tragic love story.
Returning to the playbill for the fifth time since 2019, Tobias Kratzer’s production of Tannhäuser has become a festival favorite. Kratzer’s inventive, comic twist on this quasi-religious opera, bolstered by Manuel Braun’s video and camera work offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Festspielhaus. A live feed of drag queen Le Gateau Chocolat and Venus, fearless American mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts, scaling the Festspielhaus’s brick facade, delighted the audience and garnered rapturous applause and foot-stomping ovations.
Indeed, Americans have played a crucial role in Bayreuth’s history, especially in recent years. In 2018, Yuval Sharon became the first American director to helm a Bayreuth production with his low-tech Lohengrin, employing old-fashioned painted stage sets by famous German artists Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy. On the other end of the design spectrum, Jay Scheib’s Parsifal, which premiered in 2023, had the audience once again wearing augmented reality glasses. Scheib commented, “I have felt very at home in this storied place, even in attempting a technological leap with virtual and augmented reality. It’s been a Labour of Love serving Wagner’s Parsifal like waking daily into a wild Wagnerian dream—a space that’s difficult to leave.”
Finally, Valentin Schwarz’s much-decried Ring Cycle, received an enormous boost from one of the great voices of our time, American tenor Michael Spyres, in the role of Sigmund. The sublime conducting of Australian Simone Young, only the third woman to conduct in Bayreuth history, also infused this lackluster production with vital energy.
Twain referred to the Bayreuth Festival as a pilgrimage with “devotees coming from the very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his own Mecca.” As anticipation builds for the Festival’s 150th anniversary, American ‘Wagnerites’ not only continue to make the pilgrimage but to artistically shape this unparalleled celebration of the operatic arts.
