Bayreuth Festival: Barry Millington on a new chapter in the history of Bayreuth

‘Do not disdain our Masters’, Hans Sachs exhorts the populace in his contentious peroration to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but rarely has the German intellectual tradition been presented in such an unflattering light as in Katharina Wagner’s iconoclastic new production, which opened this year ’s Bayreuth Festival. It’s a production that confronts head-on the baleful legacy of the opera, a work which became iconic in the Nazi appropriation of Wagner. Given that Bayreuth itself held a similarly emblematic status during the Third Reich, Katharina Wagner’s gesture has a highly symbolic signification.