Philip Oltermann in Berlin 

Scandal and outrage at Germany’s Bayreuth opera festival

Festival is becoming more notorious for its scandals than its music after second year of boos, jeers and insults
  
  

A smiling Angela Merkel arrives at the Bayreuth opera festival
A smiling Angela Merkel arrives at the Bayreuth opera festival safe in the knowledge her presence would be unlikely to overshadow events on the stage. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images

Long considered the embodiment of German high culture, Bayreuth's opera festival is becoming more notorious for its scandals than its music after one performer this week complained he had never come across "an audience with so much hatred".

When the chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid her annual visit with her husband Joachim Sauer, for a performance of Wagner's Siegfried, she must have felt safe in the knowledge that her presence in the audience would be unlikely to overshadow events on the stage.

Director Frank Castorf's radically deconstructed production of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung was met with boos and jeers when it premiered at Bayreuth last year, culminating in a 15-minute standoff between director and audience. And this year's shows received a similarly vicious response.

Lance Ryan, the Canadian opera singer who plays Siegfried, told Germany's news agency dpa: "I have never come across an audience with so much hatred, so much anger, such a thirst for revenge. They take everything personally. It makes you a little bit scared, and it's really quite terrifying."

Castorf, an experimental east German director drafted in after the film directors Lars von Trier and Wim Wenders declined invitations, has updated the four operas that constitute Wagner's Ring cycle from the familiar world of Norse mythology to an alternative version of the present where, in Siegfried, the third of the four operas, Mount Rushmore displays not the heads of US presidents but those of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Siegfried finishes off the dragon Fafner not with a blow from his sword but with a burst from his Kalashnikov, while Wotan, king of the gods, is a pimp who receives oral sex from Erda, the earth goddess. In one scene, giant plastic crocodiles crawl across the stage and eat one of the singers.

Berliner Zeitung's reviewer wrote that the performance was perfectly bearable as long as one kept one's eyes closed. Merkel's office refused to comment on whether she had enjoyed the show, though given the notoriety of last year's production, she would certainly have known what to expect.

Castorf, who again came face-to-face with the audience during his only curtain call on Friday, has made no secret of his frustration with the festival management over the past year. In an interview with Der Spiegel last week, he complained that the festival's finances had shrunken to "caricature levels", that his key singer had been deliberately axed for the second run of the show, and that the "fear, caution and willing obedience" in Bayreuth reminded him of the theatre scene in the former East Germany. In passing, he even mentioned that he and his lawyer, the leftwing politician Gregor Gysi, were considering suing the festival.

Defenders of Castorf's engagement point out that the Bayreuth festival, now in its 138th year, has never been scared of pairing tradition and the avant-garde: both Wieland Wagner's Brechtian 1951 production of Parsifal and Patrice Chéreau's politicised 1976 take on the Ring cycle were greeted with boos before being hailed as classics.

And it doesn't look like the Wagner clan will lose its appetite for provocation in the near future.

In 2016, there is to be a Parsifal production directed by Jonathan Meese, the enfant terrible of the German art scene who was last year taken to court for performing the Hitler salute during one of his performances.

• This article was amended on 6 August 2014 to clarify that Angela Merkel attended a performance of Siegfried, rather than the entire Ring cycle.

 

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