The centerpiece of Bayreuth's 150th-anniversary season was the first performance ever of Richard Wagner's “youth work” Rienzi in the Festspielhaus. Rienzi has never belonged to the traditional ten-work Bayreuth canon, so staging Wagner's only grand opera on the Green Hill was a genuine experiment. Since 2026 marks 150 years since the first Bayreuth Festival of August 1876, the opening days carried extra[...]
Staging Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Germany, and especially at Bayreuth, has been a challenge since World War II ended. Its unbridled celebration of German art and culture has been […]
The 2024 Bayreuth Festival season marked the third and penultimate year of Valentin Schwarz’s staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Like many current productions, Schwarz’s version opts for a contemporary setting, […]
A gloomy town center surrounded by orderly but claustrophobic buildings. Violence seething under the surface of respectability. A boy whose mother committed suicide after being abused by a town’s businessman […]
Forty years after reporting on my first visit to Bayreuth (see Wagner Notes Vol. IV No. 5, November 1981), this city in the time of Covid is, in many respects, […]