Bayreuth festival

   Ha, ha, ha

   Apr 25th 2002 / The Economist
   [As usual, no byline]

   At 82 Wolfgang Wagner is not yet ready for Valhalla

   If you should visit the Bayreuth festival theatre, you may be
   startled by a spectral guffaw echoing in that charmless but acoustically
   exquisite pile.  It is the sound of Wolfgang Wagner, the founder's
   grandson and for more than half a century director of the festival,
   enjoying the last laugh.

   Those who have fought to follow the near-interminable struggle for
   control of the festival among the pugnacious descendants of the master
   (as some zealots still call Richard Wagner) may gape to learn that
   Wolfgang is still able to laugh at all.

   The last few years have brought the white-maned, short-tempered
   boss all manner of troubles:  rows with Placido Domingo and Waltraud
   Meier, two old Bayreuth favourites; fortissimo boos for a new "Ring"
   production; and the death of a key conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli,
   between seasons.  And Wolfgang himself faced a crescendo of complaints,
   even from once-loyal allies, that he was past it and should go.

   In early 1999 Wolfgang did signal that the hunt for a successor
   should begin, believing (though he never said so directly) that
   his wife Gudrun, now 57, would get the job.  To his chagrin the
   24-member board of the Richard Wagner Foundation instead named Eva
   Wagner-Pasquier, Wolfgang's estranged daughter by his first marriage.
   Game and set, it seemed, to Eva.

   But Wolfgang comes into his own with his back to the wall, where
   it has often been.  He it was who had to go to war while his elder
   brother Wieland stayed home on orders of Adolf Hitler, a Bayreuth
   fan devoted to the children's English-born mother, Winifred; he who
   did most of the organisational donkey work when the festival re-started
   in 1951.  His productions were often (usually rightly) judged inferior
   to his brother's.  Yet when Wieland died in 1966, Wolfgang grasped
   all the power he had hitherto shared and cannily secured a contract
   for life.

   Wolfgang, in short, cannot be booted out unless proved guilty of
   grave misconduct.  True, commercial success is far from everything
   and there is plenty of scope for debate about how Bayreuth's facilities
   and repertoire (which excludes Wagner's early works) might be developed.
   But even Wolfgang's foes can't deny that, year in year out, the
   festival is swamped by half a million applications for 50,000 tickets.

   In the end, Eva decided to concentrate on her work in helping to run
   the Aix-en-Provence festival.  Others contenders, such as Wieland's
   fiery daughter Nike, who once perspicaciously called the family "a
   selfish, pretentious mass with prominent noses and thrusting chins",
   remain helplessly in waiting.

   So no change at Bayreuth? Indeed there is - but not everyone has
   yet realised how much.  Even Wolfgang knows he will not live for ever,
   and that the festival would be plunged into crisis if a smooth power
   transition were not guaranteed.  So he began looking for a hero
   seemingly as mythical as Siegfried; a proven opera manager who knows
   the Wagner canon backwards and who (this is the tough part) gets on
   not only with all branches of the Wagner family, but with the
   politicians and lawyers who also sit on the foundation's board.

   Amazingly, someone fitted the bill; Klaus Schultz, 54, who has run
   opera houses in Aachen and Mannheim and is now boss of Munich's
   Staatstheater am Gartnerplatz (recently showing "Das Liebesverbot",
   one of those early Wagner operas Bayreuth audiences never get to
   see).  Just before Christmas the board unanimously appointed him
   Wolfgang's right-hand man.  Since then Mr Schultz (who stays on at
   Gartnerplatz) has been shuttling to and from Bayreuth, learning the
   ropes there as only Wolfgang knows them.  Does that mean the Bayreuth
   sceptre is set to pass to a non-Wagner? Not really.  If Wolfgang
   dies, becomes, as he puts it, a mummy or, improbably, retires, then
   Mr Schultz would take over as acting director.  But acting for how
   long?

   A tip for the finale
   At the Wurzburg opera house's "Flying Dutchman" this autumn you will
   see the debut as producer of one Katharina Wagner, aged 23.  She is
   the daughter of Wolfgang and Gudrun and happens to live in Berlin
   just across from the Deutsche Oper, whose chief conductor Christian
   Thielemann is regularly feted at Bayreuth and who will lead the "Ring"
   there from 2006.  "We are good friends," Mr Thielemann says of
   Katharina - a phrase that, in this case, almost certainly means no
   more than it says, despite rumours that the pair are all but wed.

   Can it be that a troika is shaping up for Bayreuth before long, with
   Katharina as director, Mr Schultz as manager and, as what amounts to
   house conductor, good friend Mr Thielemann? There are precedents for
   a set-up very like that, both in the era of Cosima Wagner (Richard's
   widow) and in Winifred's.  Eva and Nike are already in their late
   50s and neither, thanks to Wolfgang, is getting any practical experience
   at Bayreuth.  If you were sitting on the foundation's board in, say,
   2006 and were faced with the succession issue, how would you decide?
   No wonder that old fox Wolfgang is having a good chortle.

Janos Gereben/SF
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