BERLIN (AFP) — The Bayreuth Festival's ruling body was to pick Monday which of Richard Wagner's descendants will run the annual summer fest devoted to his music in the latest act of a bitter, decades-long family saga.
The festival was founded by the composer in 1876, and for the past 57 years it has been run with an iron fist by his grandson Wolfgang Wagner, 42 of them in sole charge.
But Wolfgang turned 89 on Saturday and earlier this year the white-haired patriarch decided it was time to stand aside and place the running of the world's oldest and most prestigious summer festival in younger hands.
It is not just up to Wolfgang to decide who will fill his shoes, however.
That is left to the all-powerful Stiftungsrat, the decision-making body of the Richard Wagner Foundation set up in 1973 to administer Wagner's artistic legacy and balance the books.
The Wagner family has four seats, the other 20 votes being held by the local, regional and federal authorities that heavily subsidize the festival, as well as the the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, the most important donor.
Until recently the choice looked easy after Wolfgang's daughters by different marriages -- Katharina Wagner, 30, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63 -- teamed up to to launch a joint leadership bid.
It is a combination of youthful ideas and experience. Eva works as artistic consultant to the Aix-en-Provence opera festival, has worked at opera houses all over the world and was even senior artistic advisor to The Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Katharina masterminded the first-ever live Internet broadcast of an opera from Bayreuth this year, as well as a popular free public viewing. She has also promised opera for kids, a special academy for young talent and fresh efforts to come to terms with Bayreuth's Nazi past.
But it is far from a done deal thanks to a rival bid for the job by Wolfgang's 63-year-old niece Nike Wagner and the Belgian opera impresario and Paris Opera chief Gerard Mortier.
Nike runs her own festival, the high-brow "Perelinages" in Weimar, and Mortier cut his teeth as head of the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels before taking over at the renowned Salzburg Festival in Austria in the 1990s.
Mortier, 64, also founded the ambitious Ruhrtriennale music and theatre festival in western Germany, and is due to take up a new position of general director of the New York City Opera next year.
Eva and Katharina are still tipped to win, but even if they do it may not be a recipe for harmony and might not mark the start in a new chapter of warm, family relations.
They certainly do not have a happy past. Eva stopped talking to Wolfgang when he divorced her mother Ellen Drexel in 1976 to marry Gudrun, mother of Katharina.
When the Stiftungsrat nominated Eva as the new festival broom in 2001 Wolfgang dismissed her as incompetent and vowed to hold on to his life-long tenure -- at least until Katharina was old enough to succeed him.
Gudrun's unexpected death last November redrew the battle lines, with the shock and Wolgang's ailing health making him more open to a reconciliation with Eva.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
