Photograph by Enrico Nawrath

The 2022 Bayreuth Ring Cycle.

I paid 9.9 euros to watch the live stream of Götterdämmerung from this year's Bayreuth Festival. It was atrocious. I felt guilty for helping finance this production with my window’s mite. Austrian director Valentin Schwarz was responsible for this reprehensible shambles. Beyond that, Bayreuth itself was responsible. The festival started by Richard Wagner for Richard Wagner has deteriorated into the proving ground for the ridiculous.

There have been controversial Ring Cycles in the past but at least those stayed within the framework of the story Wagner penned. This Ring Cycle started with Alberich abducting a child instead of stealing the Rhine Gold in Das Rheingold. There was no sword, no tarnhelm, no dragon, and, believe it or not, no ring. Let that sink in. There was no ring in the Ring Cycle.

What was playing out on stage had nothing to do, whatsoever, with the text that was being sung. Consider going to see My Fair Lady where the words and music are what you expected but the staging and costuming were for Sweeny Todd. Imagine Eliza Doolittle singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” while she was making meat pies out of human flesh. Actually, that makes too much sense.

It would be more like the iconic opening of The Sound of Music being set in a sewer. Maria would then spend her time with random homeless people who sang and spoke the parts of the children while shooting heroine. The show would end with the entire von Trapp family singing as they dismembered cows in a slaughterhouse.

Do you think I’m going too far here? The “Immotaltion Scene” at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung had Brunhilde sitting in a filthy swimming pool with a bag of bloody body parts and the head of her horse, Grane, in her lap. However, Grane wasn’t a horse in this case but was her assistant or something. Nothing in the entire production was allowed to be what it is.

I would venture to say this was an extreme statement of nihilism or perhaps a statement of the absurd a la Camus but that would be to give far too much credit. Nihilism is dead. No one cares about what The Ring Cycle doesn’t mean or, to be more accurate, that it doesn’t mean anything at all.

I have long given up the idea of going to see a staged version of The Ring Cycle because of this very phenomenon. The Dallas Symphony is doing a concert version of The Ring in October of 2024. I have tentative plans to attend because I won’t have to deal with some Euro-trash asshole’s non-vision of Wagner’s masterpiece.