It was the most eagerly anticipated event in this year’s German cultural calendar, set to make or break a young woman’s career.
But following a cascade of boos and the comparison of her production of Die Meistersinger to a ”top-heavy pizza with a thick topping on a thin base”, things were not looking too rosy on Thursday for Katharina Wagner.
The 29-year old director, great-granddaughter of the German operatic genius Richard Wagner, had her debut — a baptism of fire — on Wednesday night at Bayreuth, the festival in southern Germany which is a living shrine to the 19th century composer’s works.
But her interpretation, which turned the original plot on its head — Richard Wagner danced in his underpants and topless dancers took to the stage — proved too much for the traditionalists, who made up the bulk of the audience, at the same time as irritating the iconoclasts.
While the critic from Stern magazine praised the ”irreverence and humour” she displayed towards her forefather, he condemned the fact that she had failed to separate the work, a discourse on art, from its nationalist trappings as she had promised, calling her efforts ”limited”.
It was hard to find ”a clear dramatic thread” running through the performance, he said. ”Instead Katharina Wagner lets a bizarre panopticon unfold, in which great-grandfather Richard dances in his underpants, someone jumps naked out of a box and the production team is set on fire.”
Spiegel called it ”top-heavy and although impressive, a flat Wagner pizza — a thick topping on a thin base”.
While praising the fact that she had come ”armed with many ideas”, it said she had mistakenly ”tried to realise all of them” at once.
The enfant terrible of German theatre, director Christoph Schlingensief, delivered a harsh verdict on Deutschland Radio, saying it felt like she had set the opera in a ”fitness studio or a porn shop”.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Bayreuth regular, who was in the audience along with a line-up of presidents, politicians and business leaders, did not publicly express her views, but talked animatedly with the director at the end of the seven-hour extravaganza.
The jury was still out on Thursday as to whether the production would, as Katharina Wagner hopes, propel her to the top of the Wagner dynasty when her 87-year old father Wolfgang dies, or cause her to be consigned to Bayreuth’s history as a mere footnote.
If the large portion of the audience who booed her at length when she stepped onto the stage to collect a bouquet of flowers were anything to go by, her future looks bleak. But the young director was remaining stoical on Thursday. ”Being booed belongs to the job description of a director,” she said.
Support came from an unlikely source when Bild, the touchstone of popular German thought, offered Katharina its backing. ”The blonde crown princess can only take over from her father if her premiere is deemed a success,” it wrote, but ”if Bayreuth wants to reinvent opera, Katharina Wagner is the one to do it.”
Wagner has the firm backing of her father to take over the festival but is up against her cousin, Nike Wagner (62) and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, also 62, her step-sister from her father’s first marriage, both of whom have strong ambitions to lead it. – Guardian Unlimited Â