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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