An evening without gods or heroes, for Cosima, Winifred, Gudrun and Katharina Wagner, many blue-clad maidens, a male choir and the festival orchestra's left-over trombones

Haus der Kunst is an important performance venue for the Bavarian State Opera and its accompanying Ring Themes programme during the 2012 Munich Opera Festival. The first climax of this event series dealing with Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen will be the musical theatre happening Wagnerin. Ein Haus der Kunstmusik with Dame Gwyneth Jones in Sven Holm's production. The premiere is on 24 June 2012. In this production, Holm puts forward the fates of female characters in the Ring as a contrast to female succession strategies in the Wagner dynasty and in a surreal manner gathers Cosima, Winifred, Gudrun and Katharina Wagner in a future Wahnfried threatened with destruction.

"Since Wagner's work also always reflects current events and the family's own history, this attempt to shed light on the role and actions of women in the Wagner dynasty is particularly interesting. The myth is updated into the present and the parallels of power, fate and mutual dependence come to light in this project. It is, of course, precisely in Bayreuth's present circumstances that this theme has a particular charm", according to Nikolaus Bachler, general manager of the Bavarian State Opera.

Producer Sven Holm explains his approach as follows: "It has always been the strong women who reigned in Bayreuth and who to some extent battled each other to inherit the Bayreuth Festival. Our project deals with the absurdity that Wagner basically anticipated the conflicts of his own descendants in the Ring, but only did so in the male world of the struggle for gold. For that reason, we want to gather several generations of Wagner women together in Munich, subject them to an analysis and free them from their curse."

Wagnerin revolves around the world of the Ring. Götterdämmerung, which ends on 30 June with Andreas Kriegenburg's new production of Wagner's drama of the worlds plays a central role with its apocalyptic scenario: "We are acting out as fiction an impending demise of the Bayreuth Festival in the near future. The orchestra and the heroes have departed and only the trumpets remain. In the house at Wahnfried, four Wagner women are sitting and trying to save the Wagnerian idea ... The entire house is one surreal scene where Katharina Wagner pulls the female role-players out of their graves and tries to make the myth interesting once again: the stories of the female figures in the Wagner family as well as the female figures in the Ring. Crucial at all times is the dialectic between a Cosima and a Brünnhilde or a Katharina and a Sieglinde. The deeply lonely feeling of growing up in this self-centred atmosphere of the Wagner family and not being able to escape it", according to Holm.

One of the most important performers to play Brünnhilde in recent decades, Dame Gwyneth Jones, will in the role of Cosima Wagner sing, among other things, fragments from the Ring. Also on stage will be the singers Hanna Dóra Sturludottir (Katharina Wagner) and Ceri Williams (Gudrun Wagner) together with the actress Renate Jett (Winifred Wagner) and members of the Bavarian State Opera ensemble. The music has been taken from the jazz ensemble Vertigo Trombone Quartet that will improvise the Wagnerian motif system further and whose frontman Nils Wogram was the 2011 winner of the BMW Jazz Award.

Wagnerin. Ein Haus der Kunstmusik
An evening without gods or heroes, for Cosima, Winifred, Gudrun and Katharina Wagner, many blue-clad maidens, a male choir and the festival orchestra's left-over trombones
Sun., 24 June, 2012, 8 P.M.
Mon., 25 June, 2012, 8 P.M.
Haus der Kunst, Westflügel

Partner des Rund-um-den-Ring-Programms


June 12, 2012