Now 147 years on from its founding in 1876, the annual festival of Richard Wagner’s works in the bucolic Bavarian town of Bayreuth is going strong. Recent years have set records in the number of performances given, sellout audiences have returned after a COVID hiatus, and the festival continues to assemble top talent for its productions of Wagner’s ten “mature” works. Wagner proscribed his earlier works from performance in Bayreuth, but this year the festival announced that in 2026 it will produce one of those forbidden operas, Rienzi, for the first time. Reverence for the music and atmosphere continues unabated, even as access to tickets has increased, easing the legendary ten-year wait times of yore.
The history of Wagner and his works in Bayreuth is as dramatic as the operas that appear on stage. Such drama began in Wagner’s own eccentric lifetime, was amplified by an unfortunate episode involving the Nazis, and persists to this day with debates over matters of contemporary politics and the meaning of Wagner’s oeuvre. This year was no different. The American director Jay Scheib, who has worked extensively in Germany in both classical and popular media, elected to adopt “augmented reality” for his production of Parsifal, Wagner’s final opera, and the only work for which his Festival Theater in Bayreuth was specifically designed.
“Augmented reality” in this case meant graphic projections visible through a specially designed headset that looks like a pair of thick-rimmed sunglasses. Designing the projections took two years, demanded meticulous measurements of the performance space, and required the animation talents of a global team of digital illustrators working under the technical directorship of Joshua Higgason. Reportedly, a board battle raged over the expense of creating headsets for all 1,925 spectators, though according to some accounts the nature of the board’s opposition was aesthetic as well as financial. In the end, 330 were produced for this show. Those not equipped with the headsets would view the production in the conventional way. I was one of the favored few.
The technical requirements entailed more than one may have expected. Some weeks in advance, I was asked to send in my vision measurements so that my headset could be tailored to my eyesight. On the day of the performance, I had to report a few hours before the showtime for a fitting. Finally, thirty minutes prior to curtain, the “augmented” audience was invited to enter the theater for a brief tutorial on how the device works. Reactions during this tutorial recalled the befuddled Hollywood audience in Singin’ in the Rain after their exposure to an early demonstration of a “talking picture.” The experience naturally felt unfamiliar—it is nearly a first in opera, after all.
But in execution the endeavor was utterly worth it and succeeded to the point that this author is prepared to say that immersive augmented-reality systems may produce the next step in the evolution of opera. Perhaps the innovation could even help save the medium from the slow, painful death that less imaginative companies are inflicting on it. Purists may harrumph, but I can think of no reason why new technologies should not be incorporated into this great art form that already combines so many others.
This is not to say that what we saw in the visuals was perfect. Sometimes the imagery was too busy or moved too fast to allow for proper contemplation. At other moments, the projected objects obscured what was happening on stage, effectively blocking out crucial elements that the non-augmented audience could see without issue. When Parsifal is anointed King of the Grail Knights in Act III, for example, a large projected hand covers the ceremonial act. Removing the headset and beholding the interaction as a purely staged phenomenon was much more satisfying. But with far more consistency, the augmented reality was evocative and stimulating, a worthy visual companion to the musical impressions that Wagner’s leitmotifs impart with such great effect. When we meet the evil sorcerer Klingsor, a giant skull emerges and advances toward us with a flapping mandible while the character sings his malevolent lines. When he throws the Holy Spear at Parsifal, a digital spear arrestingly flew in my direction, stopping within inches of my throat. Throughout the performance, we see ruins, humanoid figures, and animals suggested by the plot, including such concrete images as the swan that Parsifal hunts just prior to his entrance.
Even apart from the new technology, Scheib definitely pursued a production concept in Bayreuth’s recent mold. He dwells on the central plot device of a wound that will not heal. That wound is an injury Klingsor inflicts on the Grail King Amfortas when the latter has fallen weak, due to the wiles of the eternally cursed Kundry, who, we learn, is the same woman who mocked Christ on the cross. Amfortas’s wound receives a close-up in a massive filmed depiction designed as well by Higgason. Scheib interprets the wound as a symbol of the wounds of our own time yet to heal. According to interviews, his thinking was inspired in part by the enormous social fractures America has suffered in recent years.
But he is concerned as well with a wound first inflicted closer to Wagner’s time: the aggressive Scramble for Africa and resulting exploitation of that continent for its resources, an abuse that continues to this day as the great powers jockey for control over strategic mining materials. Cobalt, an essential ingredient in many of our advanced technologies, is in nature an astounding dark blue. Such stones appear throughout the augmented presentation. They infuse the objects of the Grail Knight’s attention, meaning the knights’ mission is directed less by religious fervor than environmental exploitation. The knights require the minerals to survive, meaning their pursuit for the Holy Grail and Christian spirituality has been transmuted into a pursuit for the mineral. When Parsifal becomes king and ends the opera by carrying out his sacred rite, he smashes a block of the precious mineral on the ground, freeing the community from its dependency.
Spectators can quibble about the merits of such an approach. It recalls Harry Kupfer’s brilliant production of the Ring of the Nibelung staged here in the waning days of the Cold War, when the magic gold of the Rhine was recast as plutonium. Here, Mimi Lien’s sets are suitably desolate; Meentje Nielsen dresses the cast mostly in soiled workmen’s coveralls. The production, excluding a few odd moments, is coherent and faithful to the libretto.
The Austrian tenor Andreas Schager stood in for the originally scheduled Joseph Calleja in the title role. Schager headlined Parsifal’s last production here, which was set in a desolate Middle East, and only seems to have grown since in resonance and dramatic presence. His was a performance not to be soon forgotten. Equally accomplished was the showing of the stunning Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča, who made her Bayreuth debut this summer in the role of Kundry. The singer’s well-tempered instrument mastered Kundry’s music, captured the character’s seductive energy, and delivered her fractured psyche in one of the best portrayals in recent years. The acclaimed baritone Derek Welton sang Klingsor in the prior staging, but this summer he transitioned flawlessly to Amfortas, a part that sits just a bit higher in the range. This summer’s Klingsor, another debutant, the American baritone Jordan Shanahan (the self-described “Hawaiian baritone”) was menacing and took full advantage of Bayreuth’s acoustics to show it. Georg Zeppenfeld’s splendid legato and clear diction made for an authoritative Gurnemanz. Tobias Kehrer sang the role of Titurel, Amfortas’s father, who is usually offstage but came out into the open in this production to torment his son. Kehrer’s pronouncements were of such depth that one can imagine him as a splendid Gurnemanz in his own right.
The conductor Pablo Heras-Casado also made his Bayreuth debut in this production and scored a resounding success. Neither too fast nor too slow in his tempos, he maintained a balanced fluidity and invested the score with some alluringly dark timbres from the woodwinds. Under his firm but well considered hand, he drew a strong, solid performance alongside the Bayreuth stalwart Eberhard Friedrich’s masterful choral conducting.