At Wagner’s Festival, New Technology Reveals a Leadership Rift
The American director Jay Scheib was looking at a bank of monitors inside the Bayreuth Festival Theater on a recent afternoon.
He was rehearsing his new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,”which opens the storied Bayreuth Festival on Tuesday, and as performers circled a large metallic monolith onstage, the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through blank space — psychedelic animations that will come to life for audience members who see them with augmented-reality glasses. ...
Scheib’s production is one of the most ambitious, and high-profile, attempts to incorporate augmented reality into opera performance. But it also caps months of tumult at Bayreuth, after plans to outfit nearly 2,000 audience members with the glasses for each performance were downscaled because of an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial leadership. The compromise, in which only 330 attendees will be provided with the glasses to experience the production’s signature flourishes, has left many fuming, and concerned that internal conflicts at one of the most important events in opera were undermining its relevance. ...
The use of the technology, Scheib said, was in keeping with Wagner’s own way of approaching opera. “He carried out so many innovations, with lighting and architecture,” he added. “Ultimately, he wanted the theater to completely disappear.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/arts/music/parsifal-augmented-reality-bayreuth-rift.html
