{"id":174997,"date":"2026-09-11T11:40:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T15:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174997"},"modified":"2026-09-11T12:22:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T16:22:01","slug":"richard-wagners-opera-festival-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/11\/richard-wagners-opera-festival-in-the-age-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Kiss The Ring<\/em>: Richard Wagner\u2019s Opera Festival in the Age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Richard Wagner Theater, Bayreuth, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, adheres to the<\/span> 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\u2019s the sticky appeal of <\/span>der Meister <\/span><\/i>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\u2014\u201cfurrowed by all the century\u2019s features, burdened with all its drives,\u201d per Thomas Mann\u2014but few prefigured twentieth-century German nationalism like he did. Hitler (born in 1889) idolized Wagner and made his music the soundtrack to Nazi rallies. <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite and<\/span> maybe<\/span> because of all this, I\u2019d been dead set on attending the<\/span> Bayreuth Festival since the spring of 2025, when I spent a day in the Wagner Museum\u2019s archives. Outside of festival season, the town seemed like a coiled serpent, with its tiny Wagner statues, the far-off Festspielhaus, and the composer\u2019s peerlessly odd villa all portending some great, and possibly terrible, event<\/span>. Last fall, I talked about experiencing Bayreuth\u2019s 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.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Statue of Richard Wagner, Bayreuth, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Why? No one could quite explain.<\/span> I\u2019m a garden-variety opera enthusiast, but I had seen only two Wagner operas in my life. The others weren\u2019t 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 <\/span>Parsifal<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Wagner\u2019s final, sublime opera,<\/span> 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 \u201cendless melody,\u201d and his experiments with harmony and chromaticism foreshadowing twentieth-century atonality. Wagner was also, to an unusual extent, a writer\u2019s musician. He slaved over his own libretti, incorporated Schopenhauer into the later works, penned countless essays, and<\/span> theorized his own \u201cmusic of the future\u201d and \u201ctotal work of art.\u201d He guaranteed, in other words, that he would be debated and analyzed forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201cJewishness in Music.\u201d The organizers have tried to denazify the festival; after World War II, Wagner\u2019s grandsons experimented with minimalist, abstract stagings in a bid to inaugurate a \u201cNew Bayreuth.\u201d More recently, the Jewish Australian director Barrie Kosky foregrounded the anti-Semitic subtext of Die Meistersinger von N\u00fcrnberg <\/em><\/span>at Bayreuth, turning the final act into a Nuremberg-esque trial of Wagner himself. Nevertheless, one couldn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the plight of Bayreuth (now led by Wagner\u2019s great-granddaughter) goes beyond the need to reframe Wagner\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s program: \u201cFor the first time in the history of the Festival,\u201d the website informed us, \u201cArtificial Intelligence will take part on stage\u2014not as a character, but as an image-generating force.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ring 10010110: From Myth to Code<\/span><\/i>\u201410010110 is 150 in binary\u2014would be an experimental staging of Wagner\u2019s four-part, epic music drama based on Norse and Germanic myths, <\/span>Der Ring des Nibelungen.<\/span><\/i> These crown jewels of the Wagner repertoire would be presented in a concert format, with the singers\u2014playing Valkyries, gods, et al.\u2014essentially standing on stage, surrounded by AI-generated imagery. The AI <\/span>Ring<\/span><\/i> (or <\/span>KI<\/span> Ring<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>to Germans) sounded awful. As our trip approached, we wondered just how awful it might be.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"

Schloss Plankenfels. Photograph by Reinhold M\u00f6ller, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2014echoing 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<\/span> over wall-mounted deer skulls, and one bedroom was in the exact shape of a grand piano.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When we arrived, the Schloss became a Wagner boot camp. The realization that we\u2019d be tyros among true believers\u2014exacerbated by the general tendencies of a group composed largely of writers and academics\u2014meant that we\u2019d spent much of last winter and spring studying. We\u2019d pored over Wagner scores, stories, and libretti, which are many, and Wagneriana, which is limitless; four of us gifted one another <\/span>Wagnerism<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>by a\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> music<\/span> critic, for our birthdays. Days before his flight, Alex had announced that Nietzsche\u2019s <\/span>The Case of Wagner <\/span><\/i>was \u201ca must!\u201d 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 <\/span>T\u00e1r. <\/span><\/i>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, \u201cI have to study the score!\u201d Only belatedly would we understand that much of this was pointless.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photo by Krithika Varagur.<\/p><\/div>\n

The realization started to dawn on some of us during our first collective outing, to <\/span>The Flying Dutchman<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>about a ghostly sea captain cursed to sail the open seas unless he finds a woman who will be faithful to him until death.<\/span> We trudged up the Green Hill to the brick-colored Festspielhaus, following streets named after Wagner characters: Tristanstra\u00dfe, Wotanstra\u00dfe. To walk up that hill is to have current events erased from your mind. Among the Wagnerians\u2019 spangled jackets, tuxedos, cravats, costume jewelry, and occasional Bavarian <\/span>Tracht<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>it could have been any year of the last century. The theater\u2019s climate control had not advanced much since Wagner\u2019s era. Men\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph by Krithika Varagur.<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u201cRichard\u2019s Spritz Lounge,\u201d next to Wotan\u2019s sushi bar and a Rienzi trattoria. <\/span>Dutchman<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>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\u2019s chorus and an outstanding Senta in the Norwegian soprano Elisabeth Teige. When it ended, we stomped our feet vigorously on the wooden floorboards\u2014the Bayreuth supplement to applause.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dutchman<\/span><\/i>\u2019s brash modernity turned out to be almost subtle compared to the Bayreuth <\/span>Parsifal<\/span><\/i>, 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<\/small>. The first act unfolded against a slow-motion, close-up video of a wound being stitched\u2014animating King Amfortas\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Act two, set in the evil sorcerer Klingsor\u2019s lair, looked inexplicably like the <\/span>Barbie <\/span><\/i>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\u2014a twist that prompted audible gasps. \u201cIt\u2019s about the climate,\u201d we concluded; Parsifal\u2019s 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\u2014\u201csound made absolute,\u201d per Adorno\u2014in which you feel you\u2019re losing your mind, and after which all conventional opera sounds stale.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014a wound that would not close, we marveled, just like in <\/span>Parsifal<\/span><\/i>! At the brewery where we had most of our meals in town, we spotted a Wagner doppelg\u00e4nger tucking away at a currywurst. It emerged that someone\u2019s aunt had been born after several hours of labor during a production of <\/span>Parsifal<\/span><\/i>. 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\u2019s favorite sculptor. And this is all to say nothing of the AI <\/span>Ring<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Festspielhaus on the Gr\u00fcner H\u00fcgel, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Wagner built the Festspielhaus, in large part, for the <\/span>Ring, <\/span><\/i>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\u2019 home, burning down in flames. The whole cycle premiered at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Many of the opera house\u2019s innovations, like the hidden orchestra pit and clear sight lines from every seat, were specifically designed for his <\/span>Ring <\/span><\/i>ambitions\u2014ambitions that were vaporized on July 27 with the premiere of <\/span>Ring 10010110<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We had succumbed to our curiosity and requested some tickets for the AI <\/span>Ring<\/span><\/i>, which is how I attended <\/span>Das Rheingold<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>its first and shortest segment. Expectations were low,<\/span> 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<\/span> a rapidly mutating slideshow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The production\u2019s curator has said that the \u201cso-called AI models\u201d were trained on \u201cthe libretto, music, contemporary history, and visual material, as well as dramaturgical reflection.\u201d But I saw bits of the Horsehead Nebula and <\/span>Saturn Devouring His Son<\/span><\/i>, while Daniel was sure he spotted a famous photo of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. I didn\u2019t believe him, but I changed my mind in coming days, as friends returned from successive <\/span>Ring <\/span><\/i>installments with astounding reports of the images on view: \u201cthe JFK assassination,\u201d \u201canime figures making out,\u201d \u201ca boat of refugees,\u201d \u201cthe Euro,\u201d \u201cthe 1973 oil crisis,\u201d \u201cL\u00e9a Seydoux morphing into Angela Merkel.\u201d When Siegfried died, reported Alex, the screen flashed the words: \u201cThere is no Planet B.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWas the AI <\/span>Valkyrie <\/span><\/i>good?\u201d I asked him, after the second installment. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s way beyond good and bad,\u201d he said, with a far-off look. Some time later, he added, \u201cI thought the AI was painterly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bayreuth is locked into a sadomasochistic relationship with its attendees: <\/span>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 <\/span>Twilight of the Gods<\/span><\/i>\u2014the fourth and final installment where, at last, the artistic directors were forced to appear onstage\u2014a lone woman stood up and let out what Alex described as a \u201cplaintive\u201d boo. She seemed to have unlocked something in the agitated crowd, who soon joined her for several minutes of cathartic collective booing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet none of the five who attended from the Schloss said it was bad, per se. Daniel called it the \u201cmost sublime aesthetic experience of my life,\u201d though, by this point, it was admittedly hard to pin down his tone. But even professional critics agreed that the conductor Christian Thielemann\u2019s 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 <\/span>Ring <\/span><\/i>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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014my fourth, others\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Rienzi <\/span><\/i>curtain call, Bayreuth 2026. <\/span>Photograph by Krithika Varagur.<\/p><\/div>\n

We were seeing <\/span>Rienzi, <\/span><\/i>an early work not in the traditional Bayreuth canon and, infamously, Hitler\u2019s favorite. This was supposedly the only year it would ever be performed on the Green Hill. After the exertions of <\/span>Parsifal <\/span><\/i>and the AI <\/span>Ring<\/span><\/i>, we went into <\/span>Rienzi<\/span><\/i> 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<\/small>, sold by the sausage purveyor Wahnfood, whose name riffs on Wagner\u2019s Bayreuth villa, Wahnfried.<\/span><\/p>\n

We were, indeed, \u201cthere\u201d 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. <\/span>Rienzi <\/span><\/i>doesn\u2019t sound at all like the music of the future; it\u2019s 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 \u201cconducted\u201d by an eight-year-old girl dressed as a live Wagner statue, spray-painted from head to ankle in gold.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was hallucinogenic, and cathartic, letting air into a sometimes-airless room.\u00a0 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\u2014slightly unnerving, even if it was, as Anna said, a Central European tradition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We drove to the Munich airport the next day, listening to <\/span>Tannh\u00e4user<\/span><\/i>. Wagner had been right, declared Max, about the subtitles: we didn\u2019t deserve them. \u201cWe can\u2019t know too much so soon.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Krithika Varagur\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project\u00a0and an editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Drift\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Equator.<\/span><\/p>\n

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