Richard Wagner Theater, Bayreuth, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, adheres to the pleasure principle. It can take years to get tickets to the Festspielhaus, the purpose-built Festival Theatre on a Green Hill (more of a slope) on the outskirts of town. Those who manage to do so must then sit on hard seats without cushions, which Wagner feared would hurt the acoustics. The operas tend to be epically long and there are no subtitles, in German or otherwise. The opera house itself is so hot that patrons regularly faint. And then there’s the sticky appeal of der Meister himself, whose visionary musical greatness is marred by his unapologetic antisemitism, and later co-opting by Nazism. Wagner, who died in 1883, was a nineteenth-century man—“furrowed by all the century’s features, burdened with all its drives,” per Thomas Mann—but few prefigured twentieth-century German nationalism like he did. Hitler (born in 1889) idolized Wagner and made his music the soundtrack to Nazi rallies.

Despite and maybe because of all this, I’d been dead set on attending the Bayreuth Festival since the spring of 2025, when I spent a day in the Wagner Museum’s archives. Outside of festival season, the town seemed like a coiled serpent, with its tiny Wagner statues, the far-off Festspielhaus, and the composer’s peerlessly odd villa all portending some great, and possibly terrible, event. Last fall, I talked about experiencing Bayreuth’s hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary so many times that a dozen others, from three countries, decided to come too. By July, the group became so large that we commandeered every room and some sofas of a crumbling sixteenth-century castle in Franconian Switzerland, a region so-called because it reminded Romantic poets of Swiss scenery. (In truth, the limestone-riddled landscape was less Zermatt, more Eureka Springs.)

Statue of Richard Wagner, Bayreuth, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Why? No one could quite explain. I’m a garden-variety opera enthusiast, but I had seen only two Wagner operas in my life. The others weren’t obvious Wagnerians, either; for one thing, the group was two-thirds Jewish. Only two people were German, and only one of them was Christian, probably the intended audience for works like Parsifal, Wagner’s final, sublime opera, based on the legend of the Holy Grail. On some level we were just amazed that the event had survived this long. And any opera fan can appreciate that Wagner revolutionized the form, his mature works forgoing conventional arias for “endless melody,” and his experiments with harmony and chromaticism foreshadowing twentieth-century atonality. Wagner was also, to an unusual extent, a writer’s musician. He slaved over his own libretti, incorporated Schopenhauer into the later works, penned countless essays, and theorized his own “music of the future” and “total work of art.” He guaranteed, in other words, that he would be debated and analyzed forever. 

An enduring problem for the Wagner estate (and fan base) is that some of those words took the form of tracts like his anti-Semitic 1850 essay, “Jewishness in Music.” The organizers have tried to denazify the festival; after World War II, Wagner’s grandsons experimented with minimalist, abstract stagings in a bid to inaugurate a “New Bayreuth.” More recently, the Jewish Australian director Barrie Kosky foregrounded the anti-Semitic subtext of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Bayreuth, turning the final act into a Nuremberg-esque trial of Wagner himself. Nevertheless, one couldn’t escape the feeling that denazification was never quite finished in these parts. While antiquing in downtown Bayreuth, we encountered a number of Nazi artifacts for sale, the swastikas covered lightly with stickers. 

Today, the plight of Bayreuth (now led by Wagner’s great-granddaughter) goes beyond the need to reframe Wagner’s complicated legacy, as the festival must also contend with declining attendance and budget cuts. The latter forced them to cut four operas altogether from this year’s jubilee. Not long ago, it would have been impossible for a group of our size to get tickets at all. But Bayreuth no longer sells out, and thanks to a friend’s months-long epistolary romance with the ticket office, tickets were released to us right through July. Budget cuts were also a salient backdrop to the most striking element of this year’s program: “For the first time in the history of the Festival,” the website informed us, “Artificial Intelligence will take part on stage—not as a character, but as an image-generating force.” 

Ring 10010110: From Myth to Code—10010110 is 150 in binary—would be an experimental staging of Wagner’s four-part, epic music drama based on Norse and Germanic myths, Der Ring des Nibelungen. These crown jewels of the Wagner repertoire would be presented in a concert format, with the singers—playing Valkyries, gods, et al.—essentially standing on stage, surrounded by AI-generated imagery. The AI Ring (or KI Ring, to Germans) sounded awful. As our trip approached, we wondered just how awful it might be.  

***

Schloss Plankenfels. Photograph by Reinhold Möller, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Our home for our week at the festival was perched directly on a limestone cliff. Schloss Plankenfels was sturdy and practical with tiny windows, steep roofs, cool stone floors, and two wings that radically diverged in style and color—echoing the history of a village that had, like in that old joke about L’viv, belonged to the Franconian Imperial Knighthood, the Kingdom of Bavaria, Nazi Germany, and the American Zone of Allied-occupied Germany. Inside, the peeling blue brocade wallpaper and superabundant candelabras produced the unsettling atmosphere of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story. Oil portraits of obscure ancestors peered over wall-mounted deer skulls, and one bedroom was in the exact shape of a grand piano. 

When we arrived, the Schloss became a Wagner boot camp. The realization that we’d be tyros among true believers—exacerbated by the general tendencies of a group composed largely of writers and academics—meant that we’d spent much of last winter and spring studying. We’d pored over Wagner scores, stories, and libretti, which are many, and Wagneriana, which is limitless; four of us gifted one another Wagnerism, by a New Yorker music critic, for our birthdays. Days before his flight, Alex had announced that Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner was “a must!” This self-inflicted state of Wagner psychosis stoked, in me, a mimetic desire so powerful that I wrote a chamber play: a retelling of the Faust legend, based on my friend Daniel, that pastiched Goethe, Mann, and Tár. But the other preparations became so intense that, when I tried to stage a table read, Daniel shut himself up with the upright piano, screaming, “I have to study the score!” Only belatedly would we understand that much of this was pointless.  

Photo by Krithika Varagur.

The realization started to dawn on some of us during our first collective outing, to The Flying Dutchman, about a ghostly sea captain cursed to sail the open seas unless he finds a woman who will be faithful to him until death. We trudged up the Green Hill to the brick-colored Festspielhaus, following streets named after Wagner characters: Tristanstraße, Wotanstraße. To walk up that hill is to have current events erased from your mind. Among the Wagnerians’ spangled jackets, tuxedos, cravats, costume jewelry, and occasional Bavarian Tracht, it could have been any year of the last century. The theater’s climate control had not advanced much since Wagner’s era. Men’s bow ties flopped loose and countless paper fans flapped like hummingbirds. A ripe aroma filled my nostrils whenever I dared to stop fanning. Daniel was chided for fidgeting by a neurasthenic type who seemed air-lifted from a sanatorium.  

Photograph by Krithika Varagur.

But there had been some concessions to the times. Thin corduroy now lined even the orchestra seats, and the higher-up seats were almost plush. The present impinged more aggressively through the endless AI-manipulated visages of Wagner, who sipped an Aperol spritz in “Richard’s Spritz Lounge,” next to Wotan’s sushi bar and a Rienzi trattoria. Dutchman, presented with no intermission, was staged in a modern, depressing Norwegian town, with lighting design reminiscent of a Pixar movie. Several early scenes took place in a dive bar; Senta, the heroine, was recast as a sullen alt girl with pink hair and a hoodie. Her final sacrifice was eliminated from the plot, and the story recast as a revenge drama. There was no ship. Still, it was hard not to love this appealing opera, the earliest Wagner work in the Bayreuth canon, with its jaunty sailor’s chorus and an outstanding Senta in the Norwegian soprano Elisabeth Teige. When it ended, we stomped our feet vigorously on the wooden floorboards—the Bayreuth supplement to applause. 

Dutchman’s brash modernity turned out to be almost subtle compared to the Bayreuth Parsifal, set in an apocalyptic future, rather than the mystical past, in a maximalist, LED-filled production directed by an MIT professor. The Grail knights wore highlighter-yellow skirts, and our hero wore a ripped white T-shirt, the back of which read: REMEMBER ME. The first act unfolded against a slow-motion, close-up video of a wound being stitched—animating King Amfortas’s spear wound with technology that, one had to admit, was simply not available to Richard Wagner. A frocked Catholic priest sitting two seats down from Lukas walked out after the first act. He fared better than a delicate young man near me, who wilted, and was carried out. 

Act two, set in the evil sorcerer Klingsor’s lair, looked inexplicably like the Barbie movie, with him and his flower maidens all dressed in pink and several of the latter in blond wigs. In the final act, the Grail was smashed to pieces—a twist that prompted audible gasps. “It’s about the climate,” we concluded; Parsifal’s final gestures suggested that solar energy might help redeem humanity. In spite of so much insistent silliness, even tawdriness, I was transported by those musical moments in late Wagner—“sound made absolute,” per Adorno—in which you feel you’re losing your mind, and after which all conventional opera sounds stale. 

We were still only halfway through the week, but I felt we were all coming a bit undone. Daniel demanded cream puffs daily and stopped answering to his name, ordering me to call him Siegmund. Someone slipped and broke a rib on the Schloss steps, and was informed by the doctor that it could not be treated directly—a wound that would not close, we marveled, just like in Parsifal! At the brewery where we had most of our meals in town, we spotted a Wagner doppelgänger tucking away at a currywurst. It emerged that someone’s aunt had been born after several hours of labor during a production of Parsifal. Another had an ancestor sang at Bayreuth before fleeing Nazi Germany, and he was one of the Jewish musicians memorialized in the sunken garden near the Festspielhaus, overseen by an enormous bronze bust of Wagner by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. And this is all to say nothing of the AI Ring. 

***

Festspielhaus on the Grüner Hügel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wagner built the Festspielhaus, in large part, for the Ring, a fifteen-hour tetralogy that took him twenty-six years to complete. It narrates a battle between gods, giants, dwarves, and mortals for a gold ring that grants absolute power, and ends with Valhalla, the gods’ home, burning down in flames. The whole cycle premiered at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Many of the opera house’s innovations, like the hidden orchestra pit and clear sight lines from every seat, were specifically designed for his Ring ambitions—ambitions that were vaporized on July 27 with the premiere of Ring 10010110. 

We had succumbed to our curiosity and requested some tickets for the AI Ring, which is how I attended Das Rheingold, its first and shortest segment. Expectations were low, but nothing could have prepared me for the hallucinogenic screen saver that comprised most of the production. The singers wore gray, sparsely feathered costumes, like plucked pigeons, and stood behind a translucent screen, onto which was projected a rapidly mutating slideshow. 

The production’s curator has said that the “so-called AI models” were trained on “the libretto, music, contemporary history, and visual material, as well as dramaturgical reflection.” But I saw bits of the Horsehead Nebula and Saturn Devouring His Son, while Daniel was sure he spotted a famous photo of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. I didn’t believe him, but I changed my mind in coming days, as friends returned from successive Ring installments with astounding reports of the images on view: “the JFK assassination,” “anime figures making out,” “a boat of refugees,” “the Euro,” “the 1973 oil crisis,” “Léa Seydoux morphing into Angela Merkel.” When Siegfried died, reported Alex, the screen flashed the words: “There is no Planet B.” 

“Was the AI Valkyrie good?” I asked him, after the second installment.

“It’s way beyond good and bad,” he said, with a far-off look. Some time later, he added, “I thought the AI was painterly.”

Bayreuth is locked into a sadomasochistic relationship with its attendees: reinterpreting Wagner is both the central imperative of any new Bayreuth production and certain to disappoint the festival audience, which craves nothing more than the now-impossible traditional staging. By the end of the six-hour Twilight of the Gods—the fourth and final installment where, at last, the artistic directors were forced to appear onstage—a lone woman stood up and let out what Alex described as a “plaintive” boo. She seemed to have unlocked something in the agitated crowd, who soon joined her for several minutes of cathartic collective booing.

Yet none of the five who attended from the Schloss said it was bad, per se. Daniel called it the “most sublime aesthetic experience of my life,” though, by this point, it was admittedly hard to pin down his tone. But even professional critics agreed that the conductor Christian Thielemann’s orchestra was stupendous. Perhaps the stupidity of the AI staging, and the ambient sadness of the diminished jubilee, was overcome by the greatness of the music. Or perhaps being dommed by the AI Ring impressed upon us, even more than a good production would have, the colossal ambition of Wagner, which had, after all, brought all of us here, together. 

***

Something had certainly happened to me. Just a week prior, I had been unsure if I even liked Wagner. But by the third of August, the morning before my departure, I woke up awash in gratitude that we had six more hours of him left. The group had dwindled, and just six of us were staying on for the next performance—my fourth, others’ fifth, and the final Bayreuth opera for all of us. Would it even be enough? I wanted to wring my ears out like a towel. Had I undergone, to use a Wagnerian word, a transformation? Or just exposure therapy? Or maybe I had finally, as Freud once said about paintings, sloughed off my barbarism and begun to admire.

Rienzi curtain call, Bayreuth 2026. Photograph by Krithika Varagur.

We were seeing Rienzi, an early work not in the traditional Bayreuth canon and, infamously, Hitler’s favorite. This was supposedly the only year it would ever be performed on the Green Hill. After the exertions of Parsifal and the AI Ring, we went into Rienzi cold, knowing only that it was about a populist leader in medieval Rome and that its music was in the maximalist style of composers like the Jewish Giacomo Meyerbeer, whom Wagner later repudiated. Our ignorance lightened the mood, as did the commemorative T-shirts reading RIENZI: I WAS THERE, sold by the sausage purveyor Wahnfood, whose name riffs on Wagner’s Bayreuth villa, Wahnfried.

We were, indeed, “there” for the wacky, kitchen-sink production that followed, staged in a contemporary, pan-Western democracy, with a Brutalist set and an enormous cast of extras wearing French press badges and holding protest signs in American English. Rienzi doesn’t sound at all like the music of the future; it’s a French-style grand opera in five acts, with a huge chorus and sprawling, historical plot. Doubtless this added to our transgressive enjoyment. The act two ballet was reworked as a vaudeville mashup of other Wagner operas, performed in a mini-Festspielhaus, faithfully reproduced on stage, complete with mini-Wahnfood and “conducted” by an eight-year-old girl dressed as a live Wagner statue, spray-painted from head to ankle in gold. 

It was hallucinogenic, and cathartic, letting air into a sometimes-airless room.  Everyone laughed, and the unfamiliar sound of Festspielhaus laughter made us laugh more. There was a rare standing ovation, which turned into rhythmic clapping in unison—slightly unnerving, even if it was, as Anna said, a Central European tradition. 

We drove to the Munich airport the next day, listening to Tannhäuser. Wagner had been right, declared Max, about the subtitles: we didn’t deserve them. “We can’t know too much so soon.” 

Krithika Varagur is the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project and an editor of The Drift and Equator.