Someone always posts it. Guaranteed. You can set the clock to it: ten minutes after you trumpeted your joy about the trip to the festival via Facebook, someone with Woody Allen comes around the corner. He lets his character Larry Lipton, played by the master himself, say in "Manhatten Murder Mystery": "I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland.” The sentence is just too beautiful not to write it down in the original. Roughly translated: Whenever I hear Wagner, I develop a desire to conquer Poland.
Yes / Yes. Wagner, (v)bitter anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer. As a schoolboy he saw “Lohengrin” and was struck by so much heroism. The dictator probably didn't understand the play much, because the hero's armor shines above all. The festival as a strength-through-joy propaganda show by the National Socialists. Daughter-in-law Winifred, whom Hitler called "USA" (Unser seliger Adolf) until her death. Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as brutal accompaniment to an air force attack on Crete in the "Wochenschau". However, much later also in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" - an anti-war film. Once the artist is dead, you can twist and turn his work as it suits you. Which doesn't have to be bad!
That is exactly the task of the Bayreuth workshop. Old-time Wagnerians may still not want to believe it, but the Green Hill has long since turned from a hotbed of estate administration and voluminous bodies and voices in fur and winged helmets to a director's theater metropolis. This year is Yuval Sharon's electro "Lohengrin" (designed by Neo Rauch) for the last time, and Tobias Kratzer's successful "Tannhäuser" is also still in the program. Anyone who sees it feels the urge to celebrate at a Pride parade rather than marching into Poland. Woody Allen would have liked Kratzer's Wartburg-Wollust-Varieté.
Mysterious, however, is the game plan this year. The premiere was already last Monday (with a celebrated romantic "Tristan"), then a side program for almost a week. The festival really doesn't start until this Sunday: with the new "Ring" by Valentin Schwarz, which extends over the second week of the festival (the author of these lines reports on it in a live ticker). A risk: the young Austrian has never directed Wagner. A chance: When festival director Katharina Wagner had former Volksbühne director Frank Castorf forge his “Ring” in 2013, this grandiose production also secured her contract extension. It is now pending again. Another brilliant "ring" would further strengthen her reputation as a woman with a golden touch for directors.
And also an armed hand. When several women recently reported sexual assaults at the festival, Wagner openly admitted to having experienced this himself. She knew how to defend herself. The debate will probably flare up again this summer.
