Bayreuth Festival: Elsa prefers to flee with horn and ring

"Faithfully guided" in front of the transformer's bridal chamber: "Lohengrin" by Richard Wagner – and costume design by Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch at the Bayreuth Festival 2018. (Image: Enrico Nawrath / Bayreuth Festival)

One thing must be left to her: she has her house under control. Now, finally, after almost a decade at the head of the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. This was not necessarily predictable, as the beginning of Katharina Wagner, who brought back in 2008 for this exceptional position a bit more than her big name, was bumpy and was judged accordingly by the critics with malice and sometimes brutality. . After the long and long period of his father Wolfgang, the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, forty years old, did exactly what each festival director expected: she always has the The most traditional and the most singular opera festival in the world. open communication, in media marketing, also in terms of accessibility and broad impact.

The Wagner Festspielhaus on the Green Hill seems little more than the place of hermetic art for the initiates, as the orthodox Wagnerians, this delicate species, have long seen. The Festival – as necessary as it is inevitable for its continuation – has arrived in the present. It is true that, more than ever, there is a clearly defined lack of dramaturgy and a decidedly clean aesthetic that differentiates Bayreuth from the mainstream of other major stages of the world. However, Katharina Wagner has put strong emphasis in her youth work with the hugely successful project of a "children's opera", which is also entering its tenth year. This season is now another building and a milestone added: For the first time in 146 years since the premiere of Wagner's "Parsifal", Bayreuth will be premiered.

New Nebenspielstätte

Due to the strict Festspielsatzung, the Festspielhaus In the works of the master, however, the execution of the work commissioned by Klaus Lang, "the marriage disappeared", was to take place at the cultural center "Reichshof". The significant and planned cooperation with the Margravial Opera, recently proclaimed World Heritage Site, had already failed due to monument protection issues – unimportant. But with the "Reichshof", an old cinema in the old town, bursting with atmospheric patina, the festival is invaded by an extremely attractive game (with adequate acoustics), which should certainly be kept for other projects.

Klaus Lang for his piece of a hundred minutes act inspired by a legend of Gösental in Lower Austria, which – surprisingly enough – is a parable without teaching. It tells archaic, sometimes biblical images of guilt and salvation and the disappearance of a man, three days after marriage, in time and in memory. When the man – and us with him – the loop of images and time wakes up, no one knows him in his village. Three hundred years have passed, and the renegade wedding shatters into dust: "What we are like dust in the wind," is the last sentence of Lang's written booklet.

Lang composed a music up to the ambiguous event that is thus not coordinated by a conductor, but by digital metronomes on auditorium screens. Miraculously, one does not notice all the underlying construction with sophisticated number proportions and mirror axes when listening. Lang's neo-tonal music, reminiscent of both New Age and Renaissance sounds, develops a cautious but more intense attraction, a kind of meditative flow of consciousness that transports listeners into a trance-like balance of successful performance. of Parsifal.

The Staging of the Congenation

Paul Esterhazy's truly sympathetic staging, which places the palindromic plot with the videographer Friedrich Zorn in a captivating and unreal space, plays a key role in this suspense deeply relaxed. Both make use of an old theater trick, which came in as "Pepper's Ghost" in the prop box. It uses a transparent sheet to make video projections appear in such a real, three-dimensional way in the room as if they were real.

Esterhazy plays a virtuoso game with the projected doppelganger figures of the wedding man, who meets several times. merges with itself. And he even pushes to the extreme by evoking a real doppelganger of Jiří Bubeníček, the interpreter of marriage, after the eventful turn of the play, as time begins to turn back, namely his twin brother Otto . The two longtime soloists of the Hamburg Ballet Company are perfect in such double roles, because they look so close to each other, that you do not know soon who is who? Here, the two are distinguished by the colors of the costume, but that only breaks the attraction and the potentials at the same time. The result is less an illusionistic confusion of the senses than an enchantment of the eye, heart and ear – the best thing that an opera evening can achieve for the spectator.

The Goose That Was Forbidden to Ask

A little more of this would have been desired for the first opening, the new production of Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Festspielhaus. The production was already a topic of conversation in the world of opera thanks to the couple of artists Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch, involved as duo of outfitters, as well as to several notable refusals, including the original director Alvis Hermanis who had retired prematurely with a politically hidden explanation. , Anna Netrebko for the role of Elsa and tenor Roberto Alagna, who reportedly failed to learn the title role, especially in the language. That too, however, talks about the experience of Katharina Wagner in the direction of the festival: that she knows how to master such blows in the office during this time, not impressed by the usual crises of the industry .

Piotr Beczała as Lohengrin. (Photo: Bayreuth Festival)

Piotr Beczała, well known in Zurich, also had a lucky hand – he was probably the best choice for the title. In the first act, visibly affected by nervousness in all those involved, Beczała still lacks shine in the waist; However, the more the director draws the figure of the sword knight of the Fiihrer and the Redeemer, the more he gains in brightness in his exposed position around the tense upper A, especially in the Grail narrative of the third throwing.

Anja Harteros as Elsa. (Photo: Bayreuth Festival)

Beczała goes through a vocal development similar to that of Anja Harteros who deliberately pursues her creativity: she sings Elsa first with a singularly hard, broken sound in the register changes girl's voice and lets the proverbial goose forbid questions, only in the bridal chamber to the sure-of-self woman to bloom – who can survive right here at the end and with ring and horn in the bag looking for the extent

Excessive world of the image

Yuval Sharon, the second savior in need some other ideas of this kind in the quiver; Of course, apart from Loy and Rauch's awesome imagery, they barely have a chance to develop theatrical coherence. Fortunately, Bayreuth is spared from the debacle that the Bavarian State Opera recently made with the "Parsifal" illustration of Georg Baselitz. But there can be no question of a connection between the seemingly deeply thoughtful scene, enriched with all sorts of romanticism and symbolism of colors, and the dreadfully upright standing theater for a long time before the big stage.

Waltraud Meier as Ortrud. (Photo: Bayreuth Festival)

The festival choir, decked out by Eberhard Friedrich for outstanding textual clarity, remains awkward in two half-rows of the same order as in the days of Wolfgang Wagner. Waltraud Meier, who is celebrated as a returnee of Bayreuth, is trying to save with her vocal performances as an ortrud, at least what can be saved by an authentic theatrical tension. And Christian Thielemann opposes the highs and lows of the stage to a subtle and subtly shaded interpretation of the timbre with the Festival Orchestra. A coherent whole is not everything, not to say here the "Gesamtkunstwerk" so obvious. In Bayreuth we were already on it.