Bayreuth: You'll love Wagner with your eyes closed

As far as one can understand, people no longer go to the Bayreuth Festival to experience aesthetic catharsis or to surrender, as the ancients did, to the intoxication of Wagner. They go to learn. To be re-educated. To receive, with all the solemnity that the case demands, a lesson in emotional composting and ecological collapse. A few notions of feminism. A conscience in solidarity with the sins of the world. The music remains , yes, but as if floating—guilty, disoriented—in a conceptual dumpster. And as if the scene were conspiring against it.

He hasn't quite succeeded, because this year's Bayreuth Festival has handed the keys to the pit to wizards of substance and stature. Daniele Gatti redeemed The Mastersingers , Semyon Bychkov preserved the sonic mystery of Tristan , and Christian Thielemann has used his Wagnerian idiosyncrasy to rescue Lohengrin from the anti-machista pamphlet.

Wagner continues to sound in the mystical abyss, but he does so as if the time he inhabits doesn't belong to him. His music endures, not because it's invulnerable, but because it has already survived everything. Revolutions, dictatorships, conceptual productions. This year's is just another, though it's particularly insipid. Not because of what it omits, but because of what it imposes.

And here it's worth pausing. It's not modernization that impoverishes Wagner. Nor daring. It's presentism. The obsessive need to interpret each work as if it had been written this morning, with the aim of urgent editorial and corrective pedagogy. Art can no longer suggest. It must teach. Not move, but inform. Enigma, symbol, excess have been abandoned in favor of a moral clarity that ends up emptying everything. As if the viewer were no longer capable of feeling without being guided by the hand.

Wagner's music endures, not because it is invulnerable, but because it has survived everything.

It would have been better to come to Green Hill with your eyes closed, and entrust yourself to the emanation of the pit, the earthly sound, and the skill of the singers. Including Piotr Becazala, the successful architect of Lohengrin despite the dramatic confusion of Yuval Sharon.

The American director arrived in Bayreuth like someone arriving late to a costume party only to discover the evening's theme had changed. He agreed to replace Lithuanian stage director Alvis Hermanis when there were already painted sets, cut costumes, and even a Lohengrin dressed as an electrician. In theory, Sharon was going to inject a political, modern, even feminist interpretation. In practice, he had to adapt to the bluish chromaticism of Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy, a pair of German artists who seem to have been hired by Pantone and who tyrannize the dramaturgy.

The result was one of those productions in which everything seems to make sense... for who knows which one . The setting was reminiscent of an album illustrated by William Blake on a bad day. The characters wore blue. The wigs were blue. The insect wings were blue. Lohengrin appeared in the uniform of a maintenance technician with an evangelical vocation . And instead of a swan, he brought a spark. The message is this, or so it seems: electricity is the metaphor for progress in contrast to the feudal obscurantism of torches. In other words.

Musically, however, there was something true. Something even moving. Christian Thielemann was conducting at home . Not in the literal sense—although that's also true—but in the most intimate: Bayreuth is his sentimental homeland, his promised land, the place where he has constructed a way of understanding Wagner that is profoundly his own. Here, he doesn't need to justify anything. Here, he doesn't interpret: he remembers.

And that memory translates into a fluid, flexible, yet meticulous baton . The prelude was a miracle of transparency: barely an orchestral sigh that, rather than alluding to the distant epic of the Grail , seemed to describe a nearby nostalgia. In the love duet of the third act, the sound became "Tristanesque," almost sensual, as if Lohengrin and Elsa were not about to separate, but rather to recognize each other in a final truce.

The setting was reminiscent of an album illustrated by William Blake on a bad day.

Thielemann doesn't need to dramatize what is already dramatic . He prefers textures, hidden colors, long silences. He knows when to let the singers breathe and when to envelop them with the orchestra. He doesn't command. He sustains. He doesn't exhibit. He protects. He doesn't impose. He is .

And in that feeling— so un-American, by the way —lies much of the evening's excitement. Thielemann's direction was the true counterbalance to a stage production that, at times, seemed written by a committee of psychedelic decorators.

The Polish tenor Piotr Beczala , as we said, sang with elegance and sweetness. More than an epic Lohengrin, he offered a repentant Lohengrin. His In fernem Land was less a revelation than an excuse. Elza van den Heever, ethereal and well-tuned , embodied an Elsa rather removed from the conflict. And Mina-Elsa Varela, on the other hand, wanted to make herself noticed in Bayreuth. Her Ortrud, with insect-like wings and a murderous gaze, was a cross between Maleficent and the Minister of the Interior.

The political message Sharon intended to sow— Elsa's rebellion, patriarchy as an oppressive structure, the orange backpack as a symbol of liberation—failed to germinate. Perhaps because it couldn't. Wagner doesn't facilitate dissent . The feminine in his work never escapes the spell. And the attempt to turn Ortrud into an enlightened heroine was as forced as dressing Lohengrin as a union electrician.