Wagner Festival Turns . . . Well, Wagnerian

The talent is fleeing, the offspring are fighting, and a costly new staging of composer Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelungen” has failed to impress.

But it’s just another year at the Wagner Festival 2000 here, where the cultural world’s most dysfunctional family annually offers up as much entertainment offstage as it does for those who have waited for years to buy tickets.

The millennium edition of opera’s longest and most demanding works has gotten off to a start that even festival spokesman Peter Emmerich concedes is “not pretty.” Two of the most prominent performers have quit in a huff, leaving the festival director, the composer’s grandson Wolfgang, fuming and sputtering the equivalent of “You’ll never get work in this town again.”

The 81-year-old Wagner kicked off the 89th five-week festival in his late grandfather’s honor with the disconcerting news that he intends to stay on as director until he is convinced that his vision for the festival’s future will live on. That means he plans to cling to his lifetime contract until and unless the board of directors of the Richard Wagner Foundation decides to name his second wife, Gudrun, as his successor.

And that, according to festival insiders, will happen when Valhalla freezes over.

The standoff appears to be having little influence on the festival’s popularity, with organizers continuing to boast that they get 9.7 applications for every one of the 50,000 or so tickets available each season.

But the uncertainty at the top may be taking its toll on the creative side: The dust-ups that drove out soloist Hans Sotin and soprano Waltraud Meier reflect the strains imposed on the festival by the unresolved family feud over who will follow in Wolfgang Wagner’s footsteps.

Wagner, who has run the festival since it resumed in 1951 after World War II, had been expected to announce his retirement at the start of the season that runs through Aug. 28. But once it became clear that the board was leaning toward his estranged daughter instead of Gudrun, Wagner tied the foundation’s hands by saying he had reconsidered.

“High Noon at Bayreuth!” Berlin’s daily Tagesspiegel screamed in a headline. Even some of Germany’s tabloids have conveyed snippets of the backstage gossip and histrionics for those more likely to have heard “The Ride of the Valkyries” in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (“Kill the Wabbit! Kill the Wabbit!”) than from the orchestra here.

Wolfgang Wagner’s reluctance to embrace major change has the next generation griping that the festival has become stale.

This year’s opening performance of “Parsifal,” the now-12-year-old staging that Wolfgang Wagner introduced himself, was booed mercilessly, as was the concluding fourth part of the nearly 18-hour “Ring” cycle, “Gotterdammerung.”

While bad reviews and sparse applause are far from unfamiliar to those brave enough to take on Wagner’s notoriously long-winded works, the discord now dominating the festival has seldom spilled into the professional arena as it has this year.

Hours before the opening performance, soloist Sotin stalked out of the theater and his role as Gurnemanz in “Parsifal,” citing “irreconcilable differences” with conductor Christoph Eschenbach. With 29 years at the Bayreuth event, Sotin was the festival’s senior soloist.

Wagner reacted with a damningly cryptic comment that Sotin’s sudden departure was “regrettable.” He was moved to more effusive anger when Meier--one of his own discoveries 17 years back--quit a week later and accused Wagner of personally driving her out.

“Waltraud Meier may suffer from a false self-estimation if she is of the view that the whole Bayreuth festival is going to revolve around her personality,” Wagner said in a statement dripping with what, in the polite opera world, constitutes venom.

Meier suggested to the Nordbayerischer Kurier--the local newspaper through which the unhappy artists and director take verbal snipes at each other--that Wagner had threatened to blacken her reputation and claimed that her “Valkyries” partner, tenor Placido Domingo, was also making this his last year at Bayreuth.

“Placido Domingo made clear from the very beginning that he would be here this year but not any longer. His plans have nothing to do with Frau Meier’s decision, and I don’t understand her presentation of the situation,” contended festival spokesman Emmerich, describing the world renowned soprano’s departure as “overly emotional.”

Meier announced that she is quitting as soon as she fulfills this year’s obligations. She also accused her onetime patron of resting on the festival’s laurels.

“To rely on the fact that every ticket can be sold 10 times over is not the way to approach the job,” Meier fumed. “Bayreuth needs to get off its high horse.”

The embarrassing departures have encouraged the warring Wagner descendants to reiterate their views that it’s time for new blood.

Nike Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter and niece of the current director, has been most outspoken about the dangers posed if Gudrun Wagner is chosen to succeed her husband and maintains the “ossified” status quo. Nike Wagner has proposed staging lesser-known Wagner operas, adding works by Wagner contemporaries to the repertoire and extending the season.

She also has proposed drumming up money for new productions by inviting corporate sponsors--a taboo in the stuffy German art ranks.

While members of the foundation board have been publicly respectful toward the current director despite his on-again, off-again plans to step down, the whispering in the Festspielhaus wings contends that increasing pressure is being applied to the composer’s grandson to make way for a new generation.

Juergen Flimm, who produced the new “Ring” cycle, observed amid the flutter of critical reviews after his work’s debut that Wolfgang Wagner has committed his life to the festival and should be taken aside by board members for a respectful tete-a-tete.

“You can’t just throw him out and change the locks,” Flimm observed, making clear that he, too, sees value in a fresh wind.

There is nothing in the foundation agreement compelling the board to choose a Wagner heir to run the festival, and foreign luminaries such as Daniel Barenboim had earlier been seen as being in the running. But the outside contenders have all backed out of the protracted succession struggle, and the board reportedly is quite partial to Wolfgang Wagner’s daughter by his first marriage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier.

Like Gudrun and Nike, Wagner-Pasquier is in her mid-50s and has been involved in the festival from an early age. But she has far more extensive experience running high-profile music events, from her current position as a foundation director in Salzburg to previous stints with London’s Covent Garden Opera, the Paris Bastille Opera and music theaters in Houston and Aix-en-Provence, France.

She also worked several seasons at Bayreuth alongside her father until his 1976 divorce from her mother and marriage to Gudrun. Father and daughter have rarely spoken since.

Amid all the personnel strife, this year’s Wagner Festival had been expecting a cheering boost from the new “Ring” cycle, which sets the mythical scenes of love, greed and damnation in a modern factory instead of the heavens.

The first performance of the marathon tetralogy, “The Rheingold,” indeed had the house on its feet in a wild ovation for several minutes. But “The Valkyries” and “Siegfried” openings were met with as many boos as bravos, and “Gotterdammerung” was said by critics to have set a new standard for denunciation.