Festival and residency offer up an opera feast

Three-year plan to celebrate German composer by presenting his works, with educational and children's activities, Wang Xin reports.

With the Bayreuth Festival coming to Shanghai for the first time, the city will host the festival's only residency program in Asia. It is staging three masterpieces by notable German composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) from 2025 to 2027 and offering audiences an opera feast.

The Bayreuth Festival and Shanghai Grand Theatre unveiled a three-year plan on Dec 10. "Bayreuth in Shanghai "will present Wagner's three major works — Tristan and Isolde, Die Walkure (The Valkyries) and Tannhauser — as well as a series of educational activities and special editions of operas made for children.

Launched by Richard Wagner in 1876, the Bayreuth Festival is one of the top summer art festivals in Europe, focusing on presenting the composer's last 10 works including The Flying Dutchman and Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). Taking place in July and August at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in Germany, which the composer helped to design, the festival has been continuously drawing classical music fans from across the world to its 112 editions.

"We are very happy and honored to cooperate with Shanghai Grand Theatre and Shanghai Opera House, both top world institutions. China has a big market for operas and Shanghai has impressed me a lot as one of the most beautiful cities in the world," says Katharina Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter and art director of the festival. "Our partners' and the city's professionalism and passion for art have convinced us to make Shanghai the destination (to carry out the three-year plan)."

She points out that the three works that will be performed represent Richard Wagner in different styles and periods. Among them, director Roland Schwab's 2022 production of Tristan and Isolde will debut in the metropolis at the Shanghai Grand Theatre from July 4 to 6 next year.

Based on the Celtic legend of Tristan and Iseult and inspired by the poetic novel adapted by Gottfried von Strassburg, one of the greatest medieval German poets, this autobiographical work premiered in 1865 under the baton of Hans von Bulow. Its writing reflects on Richard Wagner's affair with Mathilde Wesendonck and is deeply influenced by Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) written by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

It is also worth noting that the opera's renowned Tristan chords, chromaticized harmonies and endless melodies have influenced Romantic period (late 18th to early 19th centuries) music and laid the foundation for the development of classical music in the 20th century.

Katharina Wagner notes that Schwab's production of Tristan and Isolde is refreshing and presents dramatic scenes. Blending the original work with modern stage designs and projection technology, it explores love and death against the backdrop of futurism.

The stage is set in a huge oval room with an open ceiling, with the floor representing a psychological dimension, where the music and story development remain in tune with nature.