Bayreuth to fete Wagner Bicentenary with radical ‘Ring’

FRANKFURT (AFP) ― All eyes in the opera world are on Bayreuth this week where the curtain rises on the most anticipated event in this year’s Richard Wagner Bicentenary.

Frank Castorf, the 62-year-old iconoclast and “bad boy” of German theater, is staging Wagner’s sprawling four-part “Ring” cycle, the Mount Everest of opera.

And the production’s popular and critical success could prove crucial for the very future of the Bayreuth Festival itself, the month-long summer music fest dedicated exclusively to Wagner’s works.

But Castorf played down expectations for his production in a magazine interview at the weekend, complaining that he had not had sufficient time.

“I’m not looking to come with a ‘Ring of the century,’” Castorf told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel in excerpts of an interview released ahead of publication.

“I’d be happy with a ‘Ring of the year,’” he said.

It has been unusually quiet so far in the legendary Festspielhaus, the theater built to Wagner’s own designs that sits atop Bayreuth’s fabled Green Hill.

There have been no tantrums, scandals or walkouts, so far at least, unusual for a festival which is almost more notorious for the behind-the-scenes machinations and bitter infighting among Wagner’s many descendants than for any of the productions on stage.

Last year, the Russian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, cast to sing the title role of “The Flying Dutchman,” quit over an alleged Nazi tattoo on his chest.

But this year there has been nothing, aside from a storm-in-a-tea-cup over Jonathan Meese, the notorious German painter, sculptor and performance artist, who will direct a new production of “Parsifal” in 2016.

Meese is facing charges of making a Nazi salute in public during one of his theater performances, but the affair has gone almost totally unnoticed outside Germany.

Strictly speaking, it won’t be Castorf’s first-ever foray into opera or even Wagner.

He staged a version of “The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” at Berlin’s Volksbuehne theater in 2006. But he used actors instead of trained opera singers and interspersed Wagner’s text with a play by Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller (1893-1939).

In Bayreuth, Castorf has been contractually banned from any such tinkering with the text of Wagner’s monumental “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the “Ring.”

Until the interview with Der Spiegel, both he and his conductor, Russian rising star Kirill Petrenko, had resolutely refused to talk to the press.

But tiny tantalizing details have managed to filter out, nonetheless.

Castorf and his stage designer Aleksander Denic have decided to stage the “Ring” as a tale of globalization and the rush for oil.

The staging, rumor has it, includes a gas station on Route 66 and the Rhinemaidens as Anita Ekberg lookalikes in the Fontana di Trevi in Rome.

For Bayreuth’s current management ― Wagner’s great-granddaughters Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner ― the success of the new “Ring” could prove crucial.

The two half-sisters took over the running of the festival in 2009 and their contracts are up for renewal in 2015.

But their aesthetic choices have never been very popular among the conservative circles who attend the festival year after year.

Katharina’s own staging of the “Mastersingers,” which ran from 2007 until 2010, was critically panned.

And she was also responsible for choosing Germany’s Sebastian Baumgarten to direct the current staging of “Tannhaeuser,” which is so unpopular that it is being withdrawn early at the end of this year’s run.

Katharina has long been at loggerheads with the powerful Society of Friends of Bayreuth which puts up huge chunks of the funding for the festival.

Castorf’s punkish, anarchic theater is anathema to them, as well as to the hundreds of Wagner societies around the world, whose ultra-conservative membership also contributes to Bayreuth’s funding.