Conductor Thielemann before returning to Bayreuth

Music - Conductor Thielemann before returning to Bayreuth

Star conductor Christian Thielemann is to return to the Green Hill. The Deutsche Presse-Agentur has learned that the Bayreuth Festival is planning to work with the 64-year-old again. This was announced at the most recent meeting of the administrative board of the Festspiel-GmbH. Thielemann "will return, yes", said Festival spokesman Hubertus Herrmann on request.

The designated General Music Director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden himself confirmed to dpa that he will conduct"Lohengrin".

The opera will return to the Richard Wagner Festival schedule in 2025 after a two-year break in the production by Yuval Sharon, which was actually canceled last year, with a stage design by the artist Neo Rauch. Thielemann was also the conductor of this Bayreuth production of "Lohengrin" until last year.

The star conductor's future on the Green Hill has been uncertain of late - even though he was inextricably linked to Germany's most famous opera festival for many years.

He made his Bayreuth debut in the summer of 2000 with the "Mastersingers of Nuremberg", and the longstanding festival director Wolfgang Wagner, who died in 2010, was more of a mentor to him than a boss. Since then, he has "shaped the festival every year with benchmark interpretations", as the festival website states.

Thielemann is regarded as one of the best Wagner interpreters in the world and is only the second conductor after Felix Mottl (1856-1911) to have conducted all ten Wagner operas performed in Bayreuth on the Green Hill.

He became musical advisor to the Festival in 2010 and Music Director five years later. However, he has been out of this post since 2020. There has been no real talk of an official post on the Green Hill for some time now.

This summer, the current chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, who had shaped the Festival musically for over a quarter of a century, was no longer even there - he is now set to return in 2025.

A new production of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is also planned for that year. Festival director Katharina Wagner announced Daniele Gatti as its conductor in the summer, who is to succeed Thielemann in Dresden in 2024.

In 2022, the last year of the Bayreuth "Lohengrin" production - for the time being - Thielemann and Festival Director Wagner had clashed over the question of whether the word "Führer" should be used in the opera at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, where Adolf Hitler once came and went.

After the dress rehearsal, Katharina Wagner asked the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, who sang the title role, to replace the word "Führer" with "Schützer" at the end of the opera about the Swan Knight - much to Thielemann's incomprehension.

"For me, it's always like this: the originally intended text is the original text and you stay true to it," he told dpa in the summer. "I don't change any notes - then I don't change any text and ask the artists in my performances to sing the original text. But everyone sees it differently and you have to accept that."

Bayreuth Festival