Thus Spake the Profit Motive: Tash Siddiqui is stimulated by an anti-capitalist ‘Holländer’ and other productions at Bayreuth

Reviews of Der fliegende Holländer, directed Gloger, conducted Thielemann, Bayreuth, 2012; Tristan und Isolde, directed Marthaler, conducted Schneider, Bayreuth, 2012; Lohengrin, directed Neuenfels, conducted Nelsons, Bayreuth, 2012; Tannhäuser, directed Baumgarten, conducted Thielemann, Bayreuth, 2012; Parsifal, directed Herheim, conducted Jordan, Bayreuth, 2012.

November 2012, Volume 6, Number 3, 60–66.

If anything could be said to unify this year’s diverse offerings at Bayreuth, it is that they all use the Wagnerian artwork to investigate the nature of modern humanity, and the consequences when the human animal fails to retain its human values under pressure from within and without. This is perhaps fitting in Wagner’s Festspielhaus, given his life-long concern for the ‘purely human’; not so much bioethics laboratory, more a social and political lecture series which does not stop short of confronting Germany’s descent into bestiality and the possibility of a future redemption.