HAVE GERMAN WILL TRAVEL FEST

"Bei uns ist immer was los!"

Bayreuther Festspiele / Bayreuth Richard Wagner Opera Festival (annual month-long summer music festival held in Bavarian town of Bayreuth summer, she will make her direc- from end of July to end of August) she used to ask her father why torial debut at Bayreuth with, of tive by hiring directors known as Wagner titled his opera "Lohen­ all things, "The Mastersingers of enfants· terribles like Swiss stoic grin" although the piece is about Nuremberg," perhaps her great- Christoph Marthaler ("Tristan"), the fact that nobody really knows grandfather's most difficult, most splatter film director and general the name or origin of the knight of encumbered opera. agent provocateur Christoph Sch- the Holy Grail. These days, she's The crux of the piece's problem lingensief ("Parsifal") and Danish busy trying to supply answers for is the final monologue, in which movie director Lars von Trier, who such purportedly nai've questions. shoemaker Hans Sachs places was supposed to direct the "Ring" Katharina recently said publicly Germany above anything else two years ago but eventually threw that she could imagine taking and criticizes France, in a speech in the towel and turned the job over the top job at Bayreuth, that is often central to the opera's over to writer Tankred Dorst. if the festival's governing board message - except in Bayreuth. Many of Katharina Wagner's approved her. So the pressure is Critics have compared the scene critics suspect that the goal of on. Her directorial debut there, to the Nazis' propaganda ral- these maneuvers is to preserve with "Mastersingers," will be lies. Wolfgang Wagner set his Bayreuth'ssovereigntyasthechief closely watched, with far more "Mastersingers" in a romantic interpreter of the German soul. She at stake for her than for any other Nuremberg of half-timbered maintains contacts with opera's Bayreuth director. houses, steering clear of the con- provocateurs. She's the only one For most directors, the chance troversial sections. who can move her pigheaded father to mount an opera at the festi­ "We can no longer do that these to experiment with modernism val is implicit recognition and days," said Katharina. "The topi- and she openly embraces Richard approval of their previous work. cal nature of tbe opera demands Wagner's admonition, "children, that we address the history of its create something new.,, But Katharina Wagner's Bayreuth venture is at the start of her career, interpretation. We can no longer Katharina has evolved from the and failure would be devastat­ finesse our way around the sec- baby of the family to its great ing. Expectations are high, with tions that Richard Wagner added hope. She likes to think, and she friends and foes alike watching to the score at the end, under likes to showcase her thoughts up to see if she succeeds in carrying pressure from his fanatic wife, on stage. The Bayreuth Festival on the Wagner tradition and using Cosima, as a kind of commentary was her nursery. As a young girl, on current affairs of that time. It's her "Mastersingers" as a public timP t" t<> k-P " ~t<>ntl " showcase for the German soul. She hasn't staged many operas but the ones Katharina has mounted have attracted a lot of attention. Her first, of course, was a Wagner, "The Flying Dutch­ man," which she set in a red-light district. Katharina's production of Puccini's "The Triptych" was a sort of expression of creed: She used the three one-act operas as parables of love, faith and abso­ lute hopelessness in a world that has lost all values. She works in the tradition of what Germans call "directors' theater," which involves politiciz­ ing and updating opera. Even her father, festival director Wolfgang Wagner, has proven open to those ideas. In recent years, he has shocked critics who call him a conserva-