Bayreuth Festival
“Ring” director Schwarz returns on Green Hill
“It’s not about contortions or concessions to taste”: director Valentin Schwarz. photo
© Daniel Vogl/dpa
Loud boos for the director are not unusual at the Bayreuth Festival. But those for “Ring” director Valentin Schwarz were violent. Now he wants to make it a little easier for the audience.
When Valentin Schwarz sits down on a park bench for an interview with the German Press Agency, construction workers are working on scaffolding at the venerable Festspielhaus. “Bayreuth workshop” he says and laughs.
He also wants to continue working on his own work. After an impressive storm of protests from numerous spectators last year, he is with his very controversial interpretation of the “Ring of the Nibelung” now back on the Green Hill.
“I sense a great desire to create in everyone. That’s the famous workshop in Bayreuth, which is also about understanding the “Ring” as a process, not as an unchanging work – just a search, not a standstill,” he says in an interview. “This work on the “Ring” is a communicative process.”
Black: Very cathartic moment
This communicative process also includes a storm of protest, which is unusual even for the Bayreuth audience, which is open to discussion and booing. He met Schwarz when he stepped in front of the curtain and an angry audience last year after the fourth part of “Ring”, “Götterdämmerung”.
“It’s almost part of my job to face it and take responsibility, both positively and negatively,” he says a year later. “Personally, I found this moment very cathartic, like a kind of purification; to experience how the audience first has to agree among themselves – or stay divided. I found that exciting, this conflict.”
In the second year, however, he wants to “offer additional understanding aids,” he announces. “We’re looking at it again, and that’s resulting in a lot of smaller changes,” he says.
“Less Question Marks, More Exclamation Marks”
“It might need, figuratively speaking, an additional spotlight on one or the other scene so that – like in the film – you create a stronger focus and at these moments there are fewer question marks and more exclamation marks.”
Critics had complained, among other things, that a common thread was missing in the production, which was sometimes referred to as the “Netflix Ring”, because Schwarz builds up Richard Wagner’s four-part opera as a kind of drama series and provides the characters with background stories, for example. Or that staging ideas come to nothing.
“For me, the ‘Ring’ is a drama of the here and now,” says Schwarz about his production. Intergenerational justice is an important topic for him – and a central one in his production. “I think this question – what world are we leaving behind – is uncomfortable for many people because it involves a good deal of self-criticism.”
“If you try to please everyone, you’ve already failed”
In his view, it is not possible to respond to the world’s multiple crises with simple, easily understandable answers. “We cannot sit back and send out a message X that simplifies everything and pretends that there is a half-baked panacea for the complex problems of our time. Their density and urgency tend to overwhelm us. And so do the characters in the “Ring “.”
The concept of his staging will remain the same in year two. Because: “It’s not about contortions or concessions to taste. If you try to please everyone, you’ve already failed.”
As every year, the grand opening of the Bayreuth Festival is scheduled for July 25th. Then there is a new “Parsifal”. The first part of Schwarz’ “Ring”, the “Rheingold”, is back on the schedule for July 26th. This year, the originally planned conductor Pietari Inkinen will be there again, who in 2022 dropped out shortly before the premiere due to corona and was replaced by Cornelius Meister.