Bayreuth is still very much in the spirit of Richard Wagner

Mention Bayreuth and you think of Richard Wagner. In that city stands the Festspielhaus, a theatre where only his music is performed; a venue that the composer had built between 1872 and 1876, according to his precise specifications. In summer, there is the Bayreuther Festspiele, the festival that attracts an international audience – thousands of ‘devotees’ who, like devoted pilgrims, make their way up the small green hill to the north of the German town. The Festspielhaus, the festival’s home, is built of dark, austere bricks – a seemingly unremarkable building that comes to life thanks to a ritual which, for one hundred and fifty years, has followed a precise liturgy. The brass section on the balcony invites the audience gathered in the garden to return to the auditorium at the start of each act. Inside, the darkness is almost total, broken only by the soft light from the ‘orchestra pit’, which is hidden beneath the stage so as not to disturb the listening experience. Outside, on the lawn, during the intervals, people tuck into sausages with potato salad and glasses of champagne, whilst in the second-hand bookshops on Richard-Wagner-Straße, regulars who have known one another for decades exchange views, gossip and rare scores. In the world of music, there is nothing quite like Bayreuth.

From the very beginning, that festival was the personal project of one man alone. Wagner conceived the Festspielhaus according to a wholly original vision; he raised the funds by organising charity concerts and soliciting donations; he wrote not only the music but also the librettos; he personally selected the singers and orchestra members and, in fact, also directed the productions. As his second wife, Cosima Wagner, noted: “The three of us will do everything: Richard, Richter (the conductor Hans Richter, ed.) and I. No director, no one else, just a treasurer.”

It was 13 August 1876, and in the stalls sat Kaiser Wilhelm I, a young Nietzsche, and fellow composers: Bruckner, Liszt, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. The festival opened with Beethoven’s Ninth, which Wagner had already conducted four years earlier, laying the foundation stone of the edifice: a symbolic gesture, almost a founding act that preceded the true beginning. That very evening it was the turn of "Das Rheingold", followed within a few days by "Die Walküre", "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung": for the first time, the entire "Ring des Nibelungen" was performed as a single cycle. Six years later, "Parsifal" made its debut, with a contractual clause that prevented it from being staged in other theatres for some thirty years.

These are curiosities that will fade into the background once the festival has passed into the hands of the heirs. Cosima held it firmly in her grasp for a quarter of a century: no cuts to the scores, Jewish artists kept off the stage – though not out of the orchestra pit, where the conductor Hermann Levi, son of a rabbi, remained for two decades. When Winifred arrived, matters took a turn for the worse: her friendship with Hitler was no mere formality – the Führer was a regular visitor to Villa Wahnfried for years – and that theatre on the green hill became a fully-fledged symbol of the regime. In April 1945, Allied bombs razed much of the town to the ground. The theatre miraculously remained standing, but all productions came to a halt for six years. It was Wieland and Wolfgang, Winifred’s sons and Richard’s grandsons, who got things going again. Bayreuth changed its style; the sets were stripped back, the horned helmets were done away with, and an attempt began to modernise the interpretation of Wagner’s operas. In 1976, to mark the centenary, the then 31-year-old French director Patrice Chéreau staged a production in which the gods were dressed as 19th-century capitalists and the Nibelungs as proletarians, set amidst factories and railways. The premiere was universally panned, but in the years that followed, opinion was turned on its head: the final performance, in 1980, received a forty-five-minute standing ovation, and that Ring rightfully took its place among the definitive productions.

The festival has had to tackle two fundamental issues: on the one hand, distancing itself from the links between Wagner and Nazism; on the other, relaxing certain rigid traditions to keep up with the times. The number of guest artists has increased, including those of colour – Grace Bumbry being the first, in 1961 – and the role of conductor has also been opened up to women. The darker themes of Wagner’s operas have been explored in greater depth, to the point of addressing Germany’s Nazi past, as in the production of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg", directed by Katharina Wagner.

This 150th edition of the festival is embracing innovation wholeheartedly, presenting a Ring production in which artificial intelligence takes centre stage. “‘Ring 10010110’ (150 written in binary), conceived by Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter, features sets generated by artificial intelligence, trained on the entire iconographic history of the Ring productions staged in Bayreuth over the last 150 years; an image – a collective memory – that reassembles itself, contradicts itself and is constantly changing. Curator Marcus Lobbes is tasked with ‘feeding’ the artificial intelligence so that the machine generates, by its own admission, ‘a visually vibrant cosmos of light, texture, history and associations’, amidst projections that unfold, constantly transform and merge into one another. The idea is to turn the stage sets into a sort of surface that reflects a narrative spanning a century and a half, where national myth, socio-political upheavals, artistic explosion and romantic utopia converge. The procedural generation of the set design ensures that every performance is unique, as the images and associations are never fixed. Thus, there will be five distinct ‘Rings’: the national myth, social upheaval, the subversive force of art, romantic utopia, and the shadow that remains when all else has decayed. Here, the eternal nature of Richard Wagner merges with the ephemeral nature of digital transformation. The stage becomes a laboratory of perception, a place where musical theatre is performed and explored in all its nuances. “Ring 10010110” presents itself as “an invitation to contemplation, reflection and curiosity. A production that poses questions without offering answers”. The programme prepared for the season is also intriguing, clearly stating that ‘ChatGPT-4 engaged in dialogue with Andri Hardmeier’, the production’s playwright. Over the course of 150 years of history, such materials have been prepared by philologists, musicologists and Wagner’s direct heirs. Now, AI takes centre stage.

But this is not the first time the Bayreuth Festival has embraced technological innovation. In 2022, Valentin Schwarz’s Ring cycle was conceived as “a Netflix series”. Then there is the 2023 production of Parsifal, which utilises augmented reality, providing glasses to just 330 spectators out of a total audience of 1,925. The man behind it is Jay Scheib, an American director and lecturer at MIT, whom Katharina Wagner commissioned to stage the production alongside technician Joshua Higgason. Five years of work, a university seminar dedicated to the project, a laser scan of the entire auditorium to calibrate the perspective seat by seat – and there you have it: the pierced swans, the flying skulls, the phosphorescent flowers in Klingsor’s garden. The original idea was far grander. It envisaged everyone wearing glasses, synchronised in real time with the orchestra. Then came the financial calculations. This led to a clash between the director and the chairman of the board of directors, Georg von Waldenfels. Sponsors in revolt, headsets scrapped… The result? Those left without headsets see a stripped-back, almost sparse production, with the set design reduced to the bare essentials to make way for the projection. The others, however, see snakes and skulls floating in the air whilst trying to hold on to their wayward headsets with handkerchiefs or in their hands. Many then decide to take them off and watch the ‘real’ performance – the one without swans or skulls. To attend the premiere on 25 July, audience members paid between 15 and 459 euros. Angela Merkel is also in the stalls. Parsifal wears a torn raincoat over a bulletproof vest. Gurnemanz wears a yellow sarong. The young women, dressed in bright pink, look as though they’ve stepped out of a Barbie advert; perhaps the effect is intentional, perhaps not – no one explains it. When Parsifal grasps the sacred spear, anyone not wearing glasses can’t see a thing. Just a gesture into the void. Someone laughs in the auditorium. Six hours, with two one-hour intervals. At the end, fifteen minutes of applause and a few boos, whilst outside on the lawn people are still eating sausages with potato salad and drinking champagne, as they have done there for a hundred and fifty years. The more cautious reviews speak of confusing images, of insects and explosions that have little to do with what is happening on stage. One detail, however, recurs frequently in the reviews. The glasses do not allow the audience to see the on-stage video feeds – precisely those needed to follow the action up close. In Bayreuth, where distractions are not on the cards, this is a major drawback. German critics are divided. Some extol Scheib’s genius, whilst others speak, in no uncertain terms, of the most expensive flop in the festival’s history.

The 2023 production of "Parsifal" in Bayreuth is not an isolated case. There are many attempts around the world to bring opera and new technologies together. One famous example is the project that ‘brought Maria Callas back to life’ via a hologram. Her voice was recreated – by cleaning up and reassembling the original recordings – by a Texan company, BASE Hologram, now renamed BASE Xperiential, the same firm that also has Roy Orbison and Whitney Houston in its catalogue. The ‘ghost’ sings, accompanied by a live orchestra. She made her debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris back in 2018, and has been touring the world ever since. More recently, she performed in Dallas on 31 October 2025 – the very city where ‘La Divina’ made her debut in 1957 – and returned to Madrid on 2 May this year. In Bologna, the Teatro Comunale has just staged the world premiere of "Olympia" by Nicola Campogrande, which tells a love story set in the age of artificial intelligence, drawing inspiration from Hoffmann’s "Tales", specifically the one in which an engineer falls in love with his own automaton. The librettist, Piero Bodrato, had begun writing it in the summer of 2022, before ChatGPT even existed, and found himself, whilst composing, playing catch-up with current events rather than anticipating them. In Rome, the Teatro dell’Opera has entrusted the visual identity of its entire 2025/2026 season to Elena Manferdini, an artist who works with artificial intelligence, straddling the line between photorealism and fantastical distortion. Oliver Mears, director of the Royal Opera, launched RBO/Shift just a few weeks ago – the institution’s first-ever festival dedicated to exploring just how far artificial intelligence can go in redefining the boundaries of opera. His words serve as a sort of manifesto: “Opera,” says Mears, “has a reputation for often being rather backward-looking, traditional and dusty, yet it has always been at the forefront of technological progress.” He cites Handel, who in the 18th century created flying dragons, enchanted islands and apparitions on stage using stage machinery as complex as that of a blockbuster film. “Artificial intelligence is here to stay, whether we like it or not,” he says. “We can act like ostriches and bury our heads in the sand, or we can truly ride the wave of progress.”

Different approaches to the same problem: enabling machines that generate voices, images and even plots to ‘speak’, within a genre that traditionally relies on physical presence on stage and unamplified voices. No one, as yet, has found the right formula. Meanwhile, in Bayreuth, on that hill, the brass resounds, with the auditorium in darkness, Wagner’s music and all the rest. The ‘pilgrims’, who have travelled there from all over the world, will, as always, sit in reverent silence for hours, and the miracle will be repeated once again.