American director Jay Scheib watched a row of monitors at the Bayreuth Festival Theater one recent afternoon.
He was rehearsing for his new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” which opens Wednesday’s legendary Bayreuth Festival, and as performers circled the stage around a large metal monolith, the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through empty space – psychedelic animations that come to life for spectators viewing them through augmented-reality glasses.
Through those glasses, Scheib said, the flowers and other items will seem to float through the room during the performance. In keeping with the opera’s themes, he added, these moments are meant to give the audience “sacred visions” of “a world where wonder still exists.”
Scheib’s production is one of the most ambitious and high-profile attempts to incorporate augmented reality into opera performances. But it also caps months of turmoil in Bayreuth after plans to fit nearly 2,000 spectators for each performance were scaled back over an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial management. The compromise, under which only 330 attendees will be given goggles to experience the production’s signature flourish, has enraged many and worried that internal conflict at one of the opera’s most important events was undermining its relevance.
Founded by Wagner in 1876 as a showcase for his work, the Bayreuth Festival draws opera fans from around the world for a month each summer to hear a handful of the composer’s works in repertory – including a new production at the start of each edition. A major event on the German cultural calendar, the opening is usually attended by prominent political figures, including Angela Merkel, the country’s former chancellor.
The festival is cherished worldwide for the impeccable acoustics of the theatre, a hilltop opera house that Wagner co-designed, and for its connection to the composer: it has been run by a family member since his death in 1883. His great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner took over the creative direction in 2008 with her half-sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, before becoming sole artistic director in 2015.
In recent years, however, a new leadership structure has added another layer to the festival’s decision-making. In 2008, the budget came under the control of four members of an independent board representing outside shareholders who collectively account for about 40 percent of the budget: the city of Bayreuth, the state of Bavaria, the German federal government, and a group of private donors called the Association of Friends of Bayreuth, which currently chairs the board.
While it is intended that the financiers should not interfere with choices made by Bayreuth’s artistic direction, some in the media have argued that the decision to withhold the money for the purchase of 2,000 glasses was an attempt by shareholders to rein in Wagner’s approach to the festival and her great-grandfather’s work.
Since World War II, Bayreuth directors—including Richard Wagner’s descendants—have brought a modern or experimental sensibility to the composer’s works. In 2013, Katharina Wagner invited Frank Castorf to reimagine the “Ring” as an anti-capitalist epic about oil; the next ‘Ring’, Valentin Schwarz’s production, which premiered last year, recast the cycle as, in part, an allegory about the anxieties of aging.
Toni Schmid, a former senior Bavarian official who led the festival’s board of shareholders until 2020, said the decision not to fund the glasses was symbolic of the Association of Friends of Bayreuth’s “more conservative idea of what a Wagner opera should look like today”, which is at odds with Katharina Wagner’s vision.
The largely older members of the donor group, Schmid said, “would like to have the productions they saw 50 years ago when they were young — but that’s not art, it’s a museum.” He added that he wanted the shareholder board to be staffed by representatives “who know what they’re talking about” and described the decision not to fund the full number of glasses as “a joke”.
Manuel Brug, a German journalist and critic of Die Welt, said in a telephone interview that the current festival structure gives Friends of Bayreuth too much power. “The group is too old, with many people joining because it’s easier to get tickets,” he said, arguing that the donors should be excluded from the governing body in the future. Bavarian Art Minister Markus Blume said in an article in the Nordbayerischer Kurier on Thursday that the state of Bavaria could take over part of the donor group’s shares in the future.
Georg von Waldenfels, the chairman of the shareholder council and head of Friends of Bayreuth, disputed that he had interfered with Wagner’s decision-making, saying in a telephone interview that the decision to reduce the number of glasses was “purely a decision of the artistic direction.” He added that the shareholders had merely adhered to the business plan. However, Wagner said the original plan failed “because of funding and differing views on the goggles” and that the outcome was “unfortunate”.
This disagreement reflects a wider debate over Wagner’s legacy and adds a new chapter to the history of the festival of public arguments and reckonings. Winifred Wagner – the British-born wife of Richard’s son, Siegfried – who oversaw the festival from 1930 to 1944, was an outspoken fan of Adolf Hitler until her death in 1980. After World War II, the composer’s grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, re-opened the festival as something more apolitical.
More recently, the festival has been a subject of chatter, including longstanding rumors of a feud between Katharina Wagner and her former musical director, Christian Thielemann, who left his post in 2020. Last year, he publicly criticized her decision to replace the word “Führer” (“leader”) with the word “Schützer” (“protector”) in a production of “Lohengrin,” a change made out of sensitivity to Bayreuth’s previous associations with Nazism.
In a telephone interview, Thielemann denied any feud with Wagner, saying Bayreuth has long been plagued by gossip. “There’s something about Wagner that poisons people,” he added. “He is an intoxicant as well as a perfume.”
Wagner’s contract will be extended this fall, pending a vote by the festival’s board of directors. She said that if the offer were made, her acceptance would depend on changes in the organization of the festival. “You have to prepare this place for the future, and if some structural things don’t change, it’s impossible to do the job,” she said, though she declined to give details.
If she left the festival, it would likely mean the end of the creative leadership of the Wagner family: no other family member has publicly expressed interest in taking over.
Wagner said her pursuit of finding innovative ways to perform her great-grandfather’s work was necessary given the festival’s “limited repertoire”—Richard Wagner’s 10 mature works—and the global competition among high-profile theaters performing his operas. If Bayreuth just kept making old-fashioned productions, she added, “people could just watch a DVD.”
At the beginning of 2019, the idea arose to integrate augmented reality into “Parsifal”. One of the challenges was adapting the technology, which is designed to look at close objects in brightly lit spaces, for a large, darkened theater. Ultimately, Scheib’s team solved the problem by making a laser scan of the entire room, accurate to the millimeter.
Scheib said augmented reality would emerge during crucial scenes, which would include a giant floating tree and a flaming horse. When Parsifal naively kills a swan, some huge swan seem to fly near the ceiling of the hall and squirt blood.
However, this “Parsifal” can still be experienced without the goggles, with sets, lighting and costume design representing what Scheib described as a “post-human landscape where the last group of humans hold on and try to understand faith, forgiveness and belonging.” But, he noted, the uncertainty about the glasses was a “distraction”.
The use of the technology, Scheib said, suited Wagner’s own way of approaching opera. “He’s made so many innovations, with lighting and architecture,” he added. “In the end, he wanted the theater to disappear altogether.”