Eyes Wide Shut: In a round-up of some of Austro-Germany’s summer Wagnerian offerings, Matthew Rye finds that the musical aspects so often eclipsed the visual ones

Reviews of Parsifal, directed Audi, conducted Kirill Petrenko, Munich, 2018; Parsifal, directed Schüler, conducted Soddy, Mannheim, 2018; Tristan und Isolde, directed Müller, conducted Trinks, Kassel, 2018; Rienzi, directed Reitmeier, conducted Beikircher, Innsbruck, 2018.

November 2018, Volume 12, Number 3, 88–92.

More than those of many other composers, Wagner’s stage works seem to have a magnetic pull for visual artists seconded as stage designers, whether because of their epic nature or for their perceived abstraction in terms of ideas. Only last autumn Achim Freyer’s vision of Parsifal was launched in Hamburg (reviewed in TWJ, March 2018), and indeed, Pierre Audi’s previous production of the Bühnenweihfestspiel, in Amsterdam, had been a collaboration with Anish Kapoor. For his new staging at the Bavarian State Opera, Audi has called upon the services of one of Germany’s leading artists, Georg Baselitz, a man who, it soon becomes apparent, has his own interpretative needs, such that, as is often the danger in such situations, Audi’s direction seems less a guiding hand for the visuals than a by-product of them, and certainly not an integrated part (something that Freyer avoided by being his own director).