Bayreuth Festival
August 2015

Berlin-based, avant-garde theatre director, Frank Castorf, arrived on the Green Hill in 2013 and made his Bayreuth début with this Ring cycle which celebrated Wagner’s bicentenary. The Ring offered him huge opportunities to explore, and his concept and direction explored them to the full, pouring plenty of new ideas and creative energy into the production. Nonetheless, it didn’t go down too well with Bayreuth’s traditionally-minded audience.

But change, I feel, is necessary at Bayreuth to ensure a healthy future for the festival. Clock back to the days of Wieland Wagner and you’ll find that he ushered in a new dawn on the Green Hill and started the controversy flowing that has never really stopped. He dumped the elaborate naturalistic sets and grand productions common in his grandfather’s day replacing them by minimalist affairs and came up against some forceful opposition in doing so.

Wieland’s Brechtian-influenced Parsifal in 1951 – the first Bayreuth Festival after the Second World War – was booed to bits in company with Patrice Chéreau’s politically-motivated centenary Ring in 1976. But today, surprisingly, they’re now hailed as masterpieces. Wieland was also derided for his 1956 production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Stripped of its pageantry,...