Visions from the Green Hill: Matthew Rye gives a personal assessment of a much-discussed decade of Bayreuth Festival productions

Review of The Bayreuth Edition: Der fliegende Holländer, directed Gloger, conducted Thielemann, Bayreuth, 2013; Tannhäuser, directed Baumgarten, conducted Kober, Bayreuth, 2014; Lohengrin, directed Neuenfels, conducted Nelsons, Bayreuth, 2011; Die Walküre, directed Dorst, conducted Thielemann, Bayreuth, 2010; Tristan und Isolde, directed Marthaler, conducted Schneider, Bayreuth, 2009; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Katharina Wagner, conducted Weigle, Bayreuth, 2008 (Opus Arte, 12 DVDs).

July 2016, Volume 10, Number 2, 64–8.

The Bayreuth Edition brings together in a single box half a dozen of the most recent recordings of festival productions in Opus Arte’s catalogue. Of these, only one – the Holländer – is still in rep as of summer 2016. As a document of the past decade at Bayreuth the set is missing Stefan Herheim’s iconic Parsifal, which sadly never made it to DVD in the first place (I’m glad I caught the 2012 TV broadcast during its brief existence on YouTube), and of Tankred Dorst’s Ring only the Walküre was ever filmed, so the selection inevitably feels a little incomplete and thrown together. All its offerings have been covered in these pages in previous years, whether in live performance (four of them most recently by Tash Siddiqui in 2012) or in these very DVD recordings, which have simply been boxed together in their original packaging. But it’s useful to be given the sense of the festival’s ethos and practice at a particular time in its history and in a single span. This is the era of effluent digesters, rats and cyborgs, of a low-point in Ring productions, a studiedly virginal Tristan, and a paint-splattered Meistersinger that upset a century of that work’s production history at Bayreuth: it was a decade in which the Regietheater that the festival originally spawned came back with a triumphant vengeance.