Notes from the Bayreuth Festival: Camping Masterclass and Macbeth at the Foot of the Green Hill

Also published in Die Presse: Partystimmung bei „Macbeth“

Wagner-Light – and not even that much Wagner

The free-to-all Open-Air Festival Opener is a welcome opportunity to combine Green Hill Flair and camping gear.

The 149th Bayreuth Festival has opened, but eyes are already fixed on next year: 150 years of Bayreuth – though, strictly speaking, only the 113th actual Festival season (39 pre-, 74 post-1951). The grand plan? All ten canonical Bayreuth operas plus, for the first time on the Green Hill, Rienzi. Reality and the treasurer had other ideas. So now the plan is a bit more modest if still unique, thanks to Rienzi.

Is that a good thing? Bayreuth doesn’t have to offer “unique” – it is unique. Tradition, simply by being tradition, has value. In fact, that’s Bayreuth’s main draw. Yes, tradition is constantly subverted here (which is itself part of the tradition)– but the frame of tradition ought to be handled carefully. If the festival were to start putting Meyerbeer on the Bayreuth stage (as people sometimes – unwisely, inexplicably – suggest they do), it’d be the first step toward the festival losing the plot and surrendering to the arbitrary. Opening the Festspielhaus to Rienzi, meanwhile, does no harm nor need it be the ledge of a slippery slope. Incidentally, the staging is meant to be a one-off, performed nine times, before being passed on to other opera houses.

That the team of Magdolna Parditka and Alexandra Szemeredy orients its production more along the lines of Wieland Wagner’s 1957 Stuttgart Rienzi and the 1939 Karlsruhe version of the score, rather than attempting some Frankensteinian “complete” version, is heartening. That the other production will be a so-called “AI Ring”, visually drawing on all previous Ring-productions and fed by cues from the ‘staging’ (as opposed to “directorial”) team, can faze no true Wagnerian, especially with Thielemann conducting. Granted, it sounds like it will be more likely “interesting” than “good” but worst case: close your eyes and perk the ears. A lesson learned from Jay Scheib’s Augmented Reality Parsifal.

Back to the present: the third Festival Open Air served as a warm-up act. The Festival Orchestra, “almost voluntarily,” took to the stage for this open-access concert at the foot of the Green Hill – right between the stage and the VIP zone/champagne tent. A few trees are in the way (nothing a generously ambitious axe couldn’t solve in the coming years), but people adapt. The crowd? Plenty of youth, musicians’ families, locals, and some early-arriving festival-goers. Cherry tomatoes, cubes of cheese, bottles of Kulmbacher beer, and glasses of Aperol were the currency of the evening. Territorial skirmishes – already two hours before the concert – were managed politely, amid a display of Germany’s native talents for camping, picnicking, and spontaneous order.

Atmosphere was everything – as it should be. The acoustics? Well, like at similar open-air festival in Schönbrunn, Munich’s Odeonsplatz, Berlin’s Waldbühne: decent under the circumstances, but only loosely related to actual concert music. To pretend otherwise would be silly, just as it would be pointless to measure such an event by the standards of a concert-hall performance. Pablo Heras-Casado, this year’s conductor of the Parsifal , kept the mood lively. Gershwin’s Girl Crazy overture brought out a “SummerStage-in-Central-Park” vibe. Beethoven’s Fifth (the first movement) thundered along with delightful furiosity. That the strings struggled a little with the evening’s humidity could be overlooked – the important thing was the oomph.

Three excerpts from Verdi’s Macbeth fit the Meistersingerian festival motto (“Wahn, überall Wahn”) – though the work isn’t exactly most people’s idea of open-air party-time. For that, Johann Strauss’ Thunder and Lightning Polka (“ Unter Donner und Blitz was far better suited: an encore gratefully seized upon by an audience whose joints, after four hours of sitting on the ground, were celebrating their own 150th anniversary. “Next year, better bring a chair,” advised a nearby, seated lady from her enviably comfy-looking camping gear – in a tone part helpful, part pitying. You live and you learn.
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