2015

Merkel Tops Guest List at Famous Annual Wagner Festival

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel Surprised Many by Topping the Guest List Saturday Evening at the Gala Opening of the Bayreuth Festival

July 31st, 2015
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The famous month-long summer time festival, dedicated exclusively to the works, life and activities of renowned composer Richard Wagner was scheduled to begin at 3pm with an eagerly awaited new production of the historic "Tristan and Isolde" held by the composer’s great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner.

Along with Chancellor Merkel and her husband Joachim Sauer, regularly occurring guests within the Bayreuth area for numerous years, a long list of government ministers and regional and local politicians from the southern state of Bavaria were also present on the guest list to attend the event, with the special guest of honour.

Applying for tickets for Bayreuth are said to still remain among the hardest to come by in the world of opera and classical music field, with the entirety of the waiting list stretching to as many as 13 or 14 years for some productions, which the festival's commercial chief Heinz-Dieter Sense stated to the journalists.
Of the whole 60,000 tickets on sale this year in 2015, it is said around 45,000 were made available to the general public, and half of these were online. On the other hand whilst the other 15,000 were reserved for the Society of Friends of the festival, one of the main donors of the prestigious annual event.

Ever since the festival's beginnings in 1876, the composer's descendants have torn each other apart in bitter feuds for control of Bayreuth, whose guests traditionally include royalty and even the political and social elite of the day. For example, even Adolf Hitler was a fervent Wagnerian and was well known to regularly attended the festival, additionally even in peacetime Germany many heads of government and state have attended the annual event. This year marks the 150th anniversary since "Tristan and Isolde" had its world premiere. Katharina Wagner's will be only the 11th production of the work at the Bayreuth Festival, and she has recently insisted in an interview that she does not let such pressures daunt her or even go as far to intimidate and disrupt her work. She states to the press "I'll never be able to fulfil people's expectations of me if those expectations are super-human, "where she told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
   
The Bayreuth Festival runs until August the 28th with 30 performances of seven different operas  "Tristan and Isolde", "Lohengrin", "The Flying Dutchman” and the "Ring" comprising “Rhinegold", "The Valkyrie", "Siegfried" and even "Twilight of the Gods”.
 

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References and Links

News from Berlin
Ella Fleming, Berlin Global