From augmented reality glasses. Photo by Joshua Higgason accompanying July 26 NY Times review by Zachary Woolfe.

The 2023 Bayreuth Festival started on Monday, July 24, and runs through Monday, August 28. This annual celebration of composer Richard Wagner used to have a ten-year waiting list for tickets. I registered to buy tickets online on Tuesday, August 8, just to see if any were available. There were limited tickets still available for Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. In other words, the entire Ring cycle was available individually. The Ring cycle ticket packages were sold out.

How is this possible? I thought Bayreuth wasn’t in the cards for me in this life but now, if I save my nickels and dimes, I could go to Bayreuth next year. I could make a musical pilgrimage up the green hill to the theater that Wagner himself designed to stage his operas. I could experience the stone orchestra enclosure that creates an acoustic unique and glorious. I could hear the orchestra that I have listened to for hours upon hours on recordings. I could hear some of the greatest opera singers in the world and I could do it all with my eyes closed.

I have no desire to see a Wagner opera at Bayreuth. I have a desire to listen to one in the theater but I’d have to gouge my eyes out if forced to watch one. Should I be offered an all-expenses paid trip to Bayreuth with the stipulation that I watch a production, I would refuse. This is no exageration.

The productions at Bayreuth have become more than just nihilistic. This year, they’ve become a gimmick with augmented reality goggles for Parsifal. ( See the July 26 New York Times review to see what I mean.)  When the character Parsifal shoots a swan with an arrow in the first act, audience members will see a virtual swan flying before gushing blood from a fatal wound to the neck. There will be floating flowers in the Act II “Flower Maidens” scene. That came as a surprise as I thought the creatives at Bayreuth would prefer the shit emoji or maybe the eggplant. Flowers are just too on the nose.

Speaking of creative leadership, the artistic director of Bayreuth is Wagner's great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner. She claims that new and different productions are necessary because otherwise, people would just watch DVDs instead of going to the festival. I am stunned by this sentiment.  One might argue that no one is interested in going to Europe since they’ve watched Rick Steves.

Bayreuth Festspielhaus interior circa 1970.

Since its inception in 1876, Bayreuth has been about musical pilgrimage. The theater is a temple of sorts. Bayreuth is, from what I’ve been told, about being there. It’s about being in the theater where, in 1876, Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Franz Liszt, witnessed the first Ring cycle.