© Bayreuth Festival
For its 150th anniversary in 2026, the Bayreuth Festival had planned to present eleven operas by Wagner. However, due to budget constraints, the festival has scaled back its ambitions and will finally settle for seven of the composer's works, including a new tetralogy.
In 2026, the Bayreuth Festival will celebrate its 150th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Katharina Wagner has promised a programme that will include all ten of Richard Wagner's major operas (from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal) and, for the first time, Rienzi, which the composer had excluded from the Bayreuth repertoire. In a press release, the festival says it has revised its plans: instead of the eleven works originally announced, only seven of Richard Wagner's operas will be performed in Bayreuth in 2026, due to budget constraints.
According to the press release, 'the current cost development poses great challenges for the Bayreuth Festival'. The festival's employees and seasonal workers are covered by public sector collective agreements, and because of the proportion of the event's total budget accounted for by personnel costs, the Bayreuth Festival will not be able to generate the necessary financial resources from its own resources to guarantee the programme originally planned - despite, according to the festival, "a still very high self-financing rate of over 55%". And given the current economic situation, the festival has indicated that it will not be able to raise the additional funds needed to complete its budget.
The seven Wagner operas chosen for Bayreuth 2026
As a result, the festival has been forced to make choices, and its programme for 2026 will focus on curiosities and the composer's most emblematic works. Katharina Wagner has chosen The Flying Dutchman, Wagner's mature work which the composer considered worthy of being performed in Bayreuth, as well as Parsifal, an opera composed especially for the venue and premiered there in 1882.
The Festival is also confirming a new tetralogy by Wagner, to echo the one that opened the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1876. For the time being, the festival is keeping this project under wraps, but the four operas from Der Ring des Nibelungen will be presented in a new production – the name of the director(s) has not yet been revealed. Finally, Rienzi will be staged for the first time in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus - an opera which Wagner described as his 'braggart' and which was deemed unworthy of Bayreuth despite its huge popular success when it premiered at the Dresden Opera in 1842.
The 150th Bayreuth Festival will also open with Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, conducted by Richard Wagner himself on 22 May 1872 in the Margravial Opera House, Bayreuth's other concert hall, when construction of the Festspielhaus had barely begun. If the 2026 Bayreuth Festival has to scale down its ambitions and sacrifice its productions of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, we can imagine that the anniversary will still be a memorable one.
free translation of our article first published in French
the 07 of December, 2024 | Print
Comments