Corrina Weih

The Festival House from www.bayreuth-tourismus.de/en/

German Cultural Minister Claudia Roth has kicked a hornet’s nest by suggesting that The Bayreuth Festival, “should become more diverse, more colorful, and more youthful overall.” She suggested that other composers besides Richard Wagner should be performed and recommended Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel as a good place to start. The hornets, from all sides of the issue, have their stingers out. Some want to sting Roth while others want to sting Wagner into obscurity. 

Let’s try to find some perspective here. So far as performing composers besides Wagner, Wagner himself appeared to be fine with that. The very first Bayreuth Festival started with a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The ninth has subsequently been performed in 1951, 1953, 1954, 1963, and 2001. It was scheduled for 2020 as well but Covid shut it down.

Roth’s suggestion that Humperdinck be performed shows that she has some grasp of the history of Bayreuth. Humperdinck was involved in the festival in the early 1880s and tutored Wagner’s son in music. Hansel and Gretel is, of course, a fairytale and that is in line with the legendary topics of Wagner’s operas. Overall, that’s not a bad suggestion.

However, Roth reverenced diversity and youth and those terms have a heavy hand in the classical world. The festival is advertising that the 2024 edition will feature more female conductors than male. That should check the diversity box for now especially since Roth has made her career on the issue of women’s rights. For the rest of it, one commentator on the website suggested that Wagner is already diverse with sopranos, altos, tenors, basses, giants, dwarves, mermaids, dragons, gods, and orcs.

It should be noted that there are more female conductors this year because of a male conductor canceling and being replaced by a female.

So far as the Bayreuth needing to be more youthful, it will be. Some of the young are interested in Bayreuth. The rest of them will come around once they are old. This idea of audiences demographics being too old is a red herring. 

The fact of the matter is that people in their youth are not going to go to Bayreuth because Bayreuth is a destination music festival, kind of like Coachella. Part of the experience is the going, the pilgrimage. There might be seven or eight people in their 20s who would consider going but on the whole, Wagner doesn’t appeal to the young because he makes too many demands.

For those wanting The Bayreuth Festival to disappear completely, that’s fine with me. I have no desire to see the preposterous productions thrown up by the festival. I’d rather listen to the Keilberth Ring Cycle recorded at Bayreuth in 1955. There is plenty of recording examples of Bayreuth in its golden era. If it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

The 2024 Bayreuth Festival opens on July 24.