Bayreuth Performance Reviews
WSWDC President Mark Golden attends the Bayreuth Festival every year. His reviews of their performances are insightful and thought-provoking. All reviews are here, or see below for individual operas.
Rienzi
Opening night, July 26,2026.
So by regie standards this was pretty tame. Put things in a mythical dystopian future version of the 14th century and you don’t have to explain the anachronisms between the text and the presentation: The large cast ubiquitously using cell phones and sending texts, the conflict between Rienzi and the nobles a high-tech modern political campaign and election, and so on. Read more.
Siegfried
Opening night, July 30, 2026.
Overheard in foyer during the interval: “So what do you think of the production?” “What production?”
And so it goes: the conductor, orchestra, and singers continue to deliver on the highest level. The AI generated imagery offers neither less nor more in the area of content that informs, provokes a response, or triggers an insight. There were a couple of graphic reductions of what I recognized as from Castorf’s Ring.
Das Rheingold
Opening night, July 27, 2026.
For the festival’s centennial, Wolfgang Wagner brought Pierre Chéreau to Bayreuth. His Ring sparked controversy and even outrage at first but grew in stature and is now considered a classic. Moreover, it established a whole new school of opera production that persists to this day.
For the festival’s 150th, Katharina Wagner apparently aspired to do the same, bringing Marcus Lobbes, the director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality at Theater Dortmund, to Bayreuth to “curate” the history of the Ring and present it in an entirely new way: singers placed within a visual setting entirely generated by artificial intelligence.
Götterdämmerung
Opening night, August 1, 2026.
Strength upon strength from the singers and orchestra. Our first chance to hear the chorus, who sounded amazing, although kept invisible. The familiar names (Nyland, Vogt, Mayer) were all fabulous, but it was a name entirely new to me who took the evening: Mika Kares brought a sonorous, beautiful instrument to Hagen.
Die Walküre
Opening night, July 28, 2026.
The exceedingly high musical standards continue: the ever-reliable Volle magisterial as Wotan, Vogt shifting from biting Loge mode to an intensely lyrical Siegmund. Elza van den Heever simply marvelous as Sieglinde. Thielemann in full command.
The production was also somewhat better.