# Bayreuth 2016.....................



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

*Bayreuth 2015.....................*

I wonder what it will be like this year.
I'd appreciate any info or news. :tiphat:


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Itullian said:


> I wonder what it will be like this year.
> I'd appreciate any info or news. :tiphat:


Have you seen this one?http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/deutsch/spielplan_455.html

We applied but alas, no change this year


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

It seems there are still plenty of tickets to be purchased online for this year's Ring. I guess fewer and fewer are willing to pay over 1000€ for the enjoyment of being humiliated with inane crap.


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Couchie said:


> It seems there are still plenty of tickets to be purchased online for this year's Ring. I guess fewer and fewer are willing to pay over 1000€ for the enjoyment of being humiliated with inane crap.


By recent standards (i.e. Gergiev in Birmingham) these Ring cycles at Bayreuth seem good value. I went on the site and was in a position to purchase within a minute or two. It was very tempting to reach for the credit card... and then I remembered the stupid production design and decided to save my money for something else.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

The production design is actually one of the strengths of the current Bayreuth Ring. The stage direction however, is not merely bad, but purposely bad, and should be outlawed as criminally obscene desecration of a historical landmark.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Couchie said:


> The production design is actually one of the strengths of the current Bayreuth Ring. The stage direction however, is not merely bad, but purposely bad, and should be outlawed as criminally obscene desecration of a historical landmark.


And all of this in the very venue he designed for his work.


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## mountmccabe (May 1, 2013)

I really wish I could make it to Germany to see this Ring.

I will make, it, eventually!


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

One wonders what sort of person goes to Bayreuth these days. Do these people care what nonsense they are seeing on the stage? How unrelated it is to the composer they are supposed to be celebrating? That Wagner was an egomaniac is a fairly well attested part of history but at least he was a musical genius. What it doesn't need is other egomaniacs in and outside of the family to apply their less than genius 'talent' to his works in the hope of making a name for themselves!


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## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

Might I know what the ruckus is over the stage design? Too modern?


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Lord Lance said:


> Might I know what the ruckus is over the stage design? Too modern?


Just daft apparently. With crocodiles. One view:
"This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semiautomatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music, the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating. Looking hungry after sex, the squiggling reptiles, their jaws flapping, headed toward Siegfried and Brünnhilde, who were singing away.
"As the reptiles crawled closer, the Forest Bird, presented here as an alluring young woman (the soprano Mirella Hagen), burst upon the stage to save the day. Of course, the Forest Bird was not supposed to be in this scene, but who cares what Wagner wrote? This fetching Forest Bird bravely fought off one crocodile by jabbing a pole down its throat. But the other one opened wide and swallowed her whole. Throughout, Siegfried and Brünnhilde seemed only mildly concerned. But then, in Mr. Castorf's staging, they also seemed only mildly concerned with each other, a much bigger problem."

When Frank Castorf appeared on the Bayreuth stage at the end of this farce, he was treated to a ten-minute outburst of booing. He stood there, indifferent and perhaps satisfied. One of the joys of being avant garde in Germany is that one can insult the bourgeoisie who pay for the pleasure of being treated with such contempt.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

What a bunch of nonsense!


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Couchie said:


> It seems there are still plenty of tickets to be purchased online for this year's Ring. I guess fewer and fewer are willing to pay over 1000€ for the enjoyment of being humiliated with inane crap.


But that is the purpose of the whole plan - to turn people off Wagner, to make sure a next generation of his admirers does not appear, to eventually get people to forget the existence of other music and other culture than what is broadcast on MTV, and even if there is one, it has been turned into something ugly and nonsensical.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

SiegendesLicht said:


> But that is the purpose of the whole plan - to turn people off Wagner, to make sure a next generation of his admirers does not appear, to eventually get people to forget the existence of other music and other culture than what is broadcast on MTV, and even if there is one, it has been turned into something ugly and nonsensical.


It's not that. It's a perversion that certain modern directors have with trying their best to provoke the audience by outrageous productions. It happens with every composer, not just Wagner.


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## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

DavidA said:


> It's not that. It's a perversion that certain modern directors have with trying their best to provoke the audience by outrageous productions. It happens with every composer, not just Wagner.


Although, I personally do not mind people burning Wagner and his operas [I have a feeling I am going to call myself astoundingly dumb when I am forty - "Opera's wonderful, Wagner's one of the finest composers ever. How could I have ever disliked his works?"], changing the sword to rifle just seem modernization -- arbitrarily, might I add since the whole epic is a Norse mythology adaption - something which happened hundred and thousands of years ago -- but crocodile coitus just seems a way of testing the limits of the audience. "You love Wagner, don't ya? His operas are the greatest of them all? Life-changing music? HERE'S SOME CROCODILE HUMPING. How do ya like that?"

If they continue with the crocodile hump-fest, Wagner's Bayreuth may become the music community's laughing stock.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Lord Lance said:


> Although, I personally do not mind people burning Wagner and his operas [I have a feeling I am going to call myself astoundingly dumb when I am forty - "Opera's wonderful, Wagner's one of the finest composers ever. How could I have ever disliked his works?"], changing the sword to rifle just seem modernization -- arbitrarily, might I add since the whole epic is a Norse mythology adaption - something which happened hundred and thousands of years ago -- but crocodile coitus just seems a way of testing the limits of the audience. "You love Wagner, don't ya? His operas are the greatest of them all? Life-changing music? HERE'S SOME CROCODILE HUMPING. How do ya like that?"
> 
> If they continue with the crocodile hump-fest, Wagner's Bayreuth may become the music community's laughing stock.


I just read this post on my iPad and now realized that I shouldn't have looked!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Here's more on the _Ring,_ if you have the stomach for it:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...os-and-more-boos-greet-bayreuth-ring-director

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/arts/music/at-bayreuth-boos-and-dropped-jaws.html?_r=0

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7f47ccfa-fa97-11e2-87b9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3e7Icp8iA

http://www.wagneropera.net/Articles/Bayreuth-2013-Castorf-Ring.htm

Pierre Boulez notoriously suggested burning down the world's opera houses. But that was a long time ago, when operas were still being performed with respect for the conceptions of their composers. Where is Boulez, now that he himself is a veteran of Bayreuth? Will he call for an end to this sick perversity? Or is it all too obvious to him that this is his own spawn: the logical outcome of 20th-century Modernism's call for the destruction of the past?

A culture gets what it deserves. This is what ours deserves, and Castorf, smirking and pointing at the audience that boos him, knows it better than they do. They - or a goodly portion of them - should be booing themselves. If they really wanted Wagner, and not his mutilated corpse, they could get him. They are the ones lining up to fill the seats of Bayreuth, and the seats of all the opera houses in the world where great works of art are "deconstructed'" and the incoherent fragments thrown in their gawking faces.

But then, maybe they don't really want Wagner. Maybe they don't know what they want. Maybe our civilization is now so eroded and debased by a century of relativism, nihilism, and cynicism that beauty, nobility and greatness are no longer visible even to the eye of imagination. I think such thoughts quite often, and I always hope I'm wrong. But I've been watching the progressive rot for over half a century, and if this latest atrocity in Wagner's own home is any indication, the gods have truly gone home to await their end.

Maybe it's time to play the funeral dirge from _Gotterdammerung_, throw Wagner's corpse onto the stage, and torch the place. Boulez should be delighted to do the honors.


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## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

And the Wagner sisters permit this


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Here's more on the _Ring,_ if you have the stomach for it:
> 
> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...os-and-more-boos-greet-bayreuth-ring-director
> 
> ...


Yes, audiences really should vote with their feet but sadly too many people go to places like Bayreuth and La Scala because it's "the in place to be" particularly for the rich and famous with Van Gogh's ear for music.


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## arbiter elegantiarum (Jul 5, 2015)

Bayreuth 2016 will feature the new Parsifal staged by Jonathan Meese:









http://intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/2012/07/new-bayreuth-director-is-a-swastika-fan.html


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## mountmccabe (May 1, 2013)

No, it won't. That article is from 3 years ago. This one, from 8 months ago announced that Bayreuth canceled Meese's involvement.

Uwe Eric Laufenberg is now directing the new Parsifal, as noted on Wagner Opera's 2016 Wagner calendar. He has previously directed the Ring for Landestheater Linz, and a number of operas for Oper Köln. He recently became artistic director at Hessiches Staatstheater Wiesbaden.

Trailer for Götterdämmerung:


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## arbiter elegantiarum (Jul 5, 2015)

mountmccabe said:


> No, it won't. That article is from 3 years ago. This one, from 8 months ago announced that Bayreuth canceled Meese's involvement.


Thank you for the update.


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