WAGNERITES SCORNED:

Another Wagner's Debut, Turning the Plot Around (ANNE MIDGETTE, October 15, 2002, NY Times)

[Katharina] Wagner is 24. She's tall, blond and pretty, and before September she had never staged an opera. She's also the composer's great-granddaughter, and her father, Wolfgang Wagner, 83, who runs the Wagner summer festival in nearby Bayreuth, has been naming her for some time as his successor.

And she has just created a huge scandal. "The Flying Dutchman" is the story of a ghostly captain doomed to sail the seas forever unless he can find a woman willing to love him and dissolve his curse. Ms. Wagner did away with the supernatural: gone were the ghost ship, the eerie undead sailors and the final redemption. This "Dutchman" is played out in the underbelly of a German port.

Senta knew the Dutchman's picture from "Wanted" posters. The natty attire of the Dutchman and his men immediately branded them as misfits: helpless, trying not to attract attention, they incensed the lowlifes through their sheer otherness, and were beaten to a pulp.

Ms. Wagner's staging is particularly provocative because she is supposed to bear the standard of the Wagner family. Her father has been running the Bayreuth Festival for more than 50 years, and the conventional wisdom is that artistic stagnation has set in. His own board voted him out in 2000 in favor of his estranged daughter from his first marriage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, a seasoned opera administrator. Mr. Wagner, however, ignored the explicit demand for his resignation, pointed out that his contract was for life, and cited Katharina as the only family member he'd consider as a successor, an idea that seemed absurd, given her youth and lack of experience.

Conservative Wagnerites, however, adore Mr. Wagner. So it seemed that the Wurzburg chapter of the Richard Wagner Society had found a fitting way to celebrate its 20th anniversary: by donating nearly $20,000 and enabling the struggling Mainfranken Theater to mount a new Wagner production, it would offer a professional directing debut to Mr. Wagner's chosen heir. One can imagine the society members running for the exits. Storms of boos, alternating with bravos, buffeted the production team at the premiere. "The reactions were very violent," Ms. Wagner said. "One woman said to me, `I know how Richard Wagner meant it.' That would be a real sensation if she really did."

Those women are the most frightening part of going to a Wagner opera, as they reminisce about Bayreuth in '36 and how divine the Fuhrer looked. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2002 6:00 AM