The Bayreuth Festival needs fresh accents – you can already see them in the new «Meistersinger»

Germany's new Chancellor was there, as were the Bavarian state government and many well-known faces from politics, culture, and business. The Bayreuth Festival is apparently once again a suitable stage for Germany's celebrities. This was different over the past three years: Olaf Scholz sent his Minister of State for Culture to ensure the theater, but he himself was nowhere to be seen on the Green Hill. Friedrich Merz's change of stance now carries a double message: He is not only following the practices of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, who is one of the most loyal visitors to the Wagner Festival (and who also attended this time). With his visit, he is also clearly acknowledging the importance of the festival, which is nothing less than a cultural flagship for Germany.

However, the festival needs more than just symbolic support. It requires planning security and an efficient management structure. Both of these issues have been fought over for years, both in front of and behind the scenes, and at times, it feels like a beer tent. Because of the complicated shareholder structure, with the federal government and the Free State of Bavaria as the most important sponsors, there have long been more self-appointed experts involved than is good for a cultural institution. This has been evident for years in the wrangling over the long-overdue renovation of the Festspielhaus. It will likely be a major construction site even by its 150th anniversary in 2026 – not to mention the dilapidated charm of the surrounding functional buildings. And just in time for the festival opening on Friday, the discussion about the festival's future budget has heated up again.

First, Bavaria's Minister of Culture, Markus Blume, raised hopes with the demand: "There must be no further cuts at the Bayreuth Festival." Then his counterpart at the federal level, the new Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, immediately dampened the debate with vague hints: "We are confident that we will find sensible solutions." Strictly speaking, the size of the budget in question does not justify such high-profile showpieces: It was most recently 28 million euros, slightly more than that of the Lucerne Festival. The public sector contributes 35 percent of this, or around 10 million. Outside of the cultural sector, other sums are currently at stake in Germany.

In addition, efforts are underway to further increase the festival's financial viability by appointing a new "General Manager" – and thus, ideally, make the political accompaniment superfluous. Above all, Matthias Rädel, currently Deputy Director and Controller at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, will be tasked with relieving Festival Director Katharina Wagner of administrative duties, allowing her to drive forward the recently stalled process of artistic openness and modernization.

The already abridged 2026 anniversary season, which was presented in detail on Thursday, at least gives us a glimpse of where things might be headed. A new "Ring" cycle under the direction of Christian Thielemann will, for the first time, explore the tetralogy's changing reception history in Bayreuth with the help of AI-generated visualizations – a truly original replacement for the scrapped new production to mark the 150th anniversary of the premiere. Also saved from the budget cuts was the local premiere (!) of Wagner's early work "Rienzi," which is not normally part of the canon of operas shown at the Festspielhaus. And with Bernhard Lang's new musical theater piece "Brünnhilde Burns," the series of meta-operas based on Wagner material, which began promisingly in 2018 with the Lohengrin paraphrase "The Disappeared Wedding Man," is finally being continued.

With her choice of director for this summer's opening premiere, Katharina Wagner already demonstrates that she is also interested in bringing fresh perspectives to the festival productions. Musical expert Matthias Davids is clearly tasked with freeing "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg" from the interpretive baggage with which Wagner's comedy about false art and true love has been burdened, especially at this venue, most recently by Barrie Kosky and Katharina Wagner herself.

Davids, on the other hand, relies entirely on meticulous work on the clever and ambiguous libretto, Wagner's best opera text. It's a shame that Bayreuth still refuses to add additional subtitles, because here, literally, every nuance counts. Especially since the director truly derives every stage action from the text during the dense, uninterrupted four-and-a-half-hour running time.

The "Meistersinger" can thus once again be a genuine play opera, a kind of companion piece to Kleist's "The Broken Jug." This is indeed refreshing. The familiar questions—whether the main character, Hans Sachs, isn't actually a disguised demagogue, and whether the critic, Sixtus Beckmesser, is perhaps an anti-Semitic caricature—are only touched upon in passing by Davids; they are not the main focus of the production (as they were recently with Kosky). Davids thus takes the pressure off the piece. The playful character is further underscored by Andrew D. Edwards's garishly colorful set, which reveals its scenery as well as a certain resemblance to the relevant early evening television shows.

The fact that one never fully trusts the illusion of great lightness is thanks to the exceptionally harmonious cast of this premiere. The singers give the characters depth, but, like the direction, only ever glimpse the Wagnerian abysses briefly. Georg Zeppenfeld masterfully achieves this balance, transforming the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs into a wise, yet precisely for that reason doubtful, artist. Zeppenfeld's voice, meanwhile, sounds noticeably brighter; any Sarastro-like heaviness has given way to an agility derived, as it were, from the natural delivery of the work.

At least equally impressive is the immediacy of musical and linguistic expression of the two non-native speakers Michael Spyres and Christina Nilsson, who make their Bayreuth role debuts as Stolzing and Eva. Their radiant, yet not overly heavy voices harmonize perfectly: It's immediately clear that nothing and no one can separate the artistically gifted knight and the freedom-loving bourgeois daughter—neither an outdated master's rule nor a rival.

That Beckmesser tries anyway earns him blows and a bloody nose, simply because he prioritizes adherence to rigid artistic rules over life. Michael Nagy doesn't turn the critic into a caricature, but rather into an oddball who, with his adherence to principles, primarily gets in his own way. The goal of a modern interpretation is to laugh at this strange behavior, but not at the man himself. Nagy fulfills this goal brilliantly, not least by suppressing all clumsy slapstick moments. After all, he knows that the music will, in all likelihood, unmask his character far more maliciously than any staged gag.

Daniele Gatti, conducting the excellent Festival Orchestra, clearly loves these moments when he can develop his own narrative. He reads Wagner's score primarily as a symphonic narrative, which sometimes puts the singers under pressure. But he also discovers colors and blends of sound that point astonishingly far into the 20th century, all the way to Mahler and Puccini.

Classic Wagnerian pathos is less Gatti's style, and it would hardly fit the ironic approach of the director. The director has saved a dig at the political debate surrounding Wagner for Hans Sachs's pompous final address: Beckmesser summarily pulls the plug on the uncomfortable German nationalism. This, however, also extinguishes all the splendor of the previously colorful festival grounds. Only the music isn't so easily silenced.