Christian Thielemann says goodbye. Not from art, but from the idea of having to be a respected music functionary as a famous conductor at the same time. On this Tuesday his “Parsifal” by Richard Wagner can be heard in Bayreuth, in a concert version without direction and without interaction between the singers. It is Christian Thielemann’s only appearance this summer on the Green Hill, and he will no longer have the title of “Music Director”, as he did between 2015 and 2020. The common future? That will probably be beyond Thielemann’s commitment for 2022, but what it looks like remains open. “Positions, titles and designations are really of secondary importance at the moment,” assured the 62-year-old Berliner on Monday with the greatest possible nonchalance.
He obviously doesn’t want to step down the career ladder as a broken hero, and neither, not again, as angry. Too often his employment relationships have ended in a rupture, in mutual disappointment, less about Thielemann’s understanding of music, but more about his, as it is reported, sometimes rigorous way of driving conflicts to extremes and wanting to know everything better.
He lives music, Wagnerian, intense, to the limits of what is bearable
This time, however, a burden really does seem to be relieved from him. He is obviously looking forward to the new freedom of no longer having to take institutional considerations into account, to be able to devote himself completely to music. He lives it like a Wagnerian, intensely and sensitively to the limits of what is bearable: “I have to get away from music every now and then, because otherwise it would eat me up,” he once told him SZ magazine. Now it is his own power that he has to get away from. Not because he would have decided that himself, he didn’t. But since that’s the way it is, he is calm in public, downright relieved.
It is not just his artistic adopted home Bayreuth, where he is still welcome, but suddenly no longer counts in the inventory. And although he is only the second conductor to have conducted all ten Wagner operas performed in Bayreuth in the narrow orchestra pit, he has 179 performances. Even his contract as artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival was not extended beyond 2022 after a lost power struggle with managing director Nikolaus Bachler.
Far from the end of his art
And finally there was the excitement of the year in the classical music business: In May, the Saxon Ministry of Culture announced that Christian Thielemann’s contract as director of the Dresden Staatskapelle would expire in the 2023/24 season. One wishes for a new beginning. It soon emerged that this was not just a political decision, but that the orchestra should also have stipulated the possibility of changing bosses at an early stage. Some, including Thielemann’s ex-antipode Bachler, complained about a “drawing board decision” with which a world-class conductor was dumped. Others, including the head of the German Orchestra Association Gerald Mertens, pondered that the “time of the desk gods” was over.
The severely parted Thielemann polarizes, it was always in the life of this spirited musician who was able to immerse himself in the piano and viola for days as a child. But nobody questions his extraordinary talent, his zeal for work, his aesthetic sense, his intellectual acuity or his work knowledge and musical learning ability. He has just performed Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Salzburg Festival, with full physical effort and the ability not to contain the drama of human emotions, but to reveal them. Christian Thielemann is far from the end of his art, on the contrary.