Days after the Bayreuth Festival parted ways with the theatrical provocateur Jonathan Meese over his planned production of Wagner's Parsifal, the festival announced on Friday that Uwe Eric Laufenberg will be directing the opera, which Andris Nelsons will conduct in 2016.
The changes have been closely watched in international opera circles: The Bayreuth management officially stated that Meese's concept was not financially viable, but Meese, who uses Nazi iconography in his work and was taken to court in 2013 for making the Hitler salute (he claimed it was a "form of artistic expression" and was acquitted), has protested that the reasons were artistic. "The Bayreuth Festival is no longer concerned about art, but self preservation, power, and the battle against its declining relevance," Meese told the German weekly magazine Der Speigel.
On Friday, Meese released a "manifesto" in which he said that Wagner would be "turning in his grave," and Meese referred to himself as"Richard WagnerBloodhoundBaby."
Festivaldirector KatharinaWagnerpraised Laufenberg's replacement concept. Itoffers"a demanding yetcaptivatingtheatricalinterpretation of the work, which isorganizationallyand technicallyand financiallyfeasible," she said. Laufenberg, who is the Hessian StateTheater in Wiesbaden, Germany worked on Parsifalwhen he wasdirector of theCologne Opera.
Bayreuth has been a hub for provocative stage directors and a magnet for on- and off-stage debate for decades – an "eternal artistic battleground," as New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote in 2011. The festival has also grappled with how to handle Wagner's own anti-Semitism. In 2012, it fired a singer, Yevgeny Nikitin, after it discovered that he had a swastika tattoo on his body (Nikitin later claimed that it was a Norse symbol).
Parsifal premiered in Bayreuth in 1882 and was last seen at the festival in 2012.Guardian music critic Tom Service lamented Meese's departure. "We’ll never know what Meese’s Parsifal could have been," he wrote in part. "A shame, I think: whatever else, it sure wouldn’t have been stultifying or conventional."