Baumgarten blames lack of rehearsal time on Tannhäuser Boos? Bayreuth 2011

Tannhäuser fights for his "morals" - in his pants

Really? It takes Baumgarten, according to an interview today, years to rehearse and prepare his productions? He might be in the wrong business. But of course, that explains the reason this production is getting such a bad press - doesn't it?.

DW - World looks at the opening of that festival.

Bayreuth Festival opens among mixed reactions

The 100th Bayreuth Festival opened on Monday evening with a new staging of Richard Wagner's romantic opera "Tannhäuser." But many audience members were shocked at its modern and unusual interpretation.


Boos from the audience are almost a standard occurrence with every new production that kicks off at the Bayreuth Festival. This year's opening on July 25, featuring the new production of "Tannhäuser" directed by Sebastian Baumgarten and conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock, was no exception. Still, the reaction in the audience - which included German Chancellor Angela Merkel, some of her cabinet members and an array of celebrities - must have been hard to swallow, even for the most experienced in the director's team.

A pregnant Venus, an Elisabeth who enters a recycling center and allows herself to be disintegrated, main character Tannhäuser in his underwear, video projections displaying digestion processes and the fertilization of an egg, copulating animals in a cage - and in the midst of it all, members of the audience sitting on the stage. All that can be found in the production and has little to do with romanticism.

An art installation by stage designer Joep van Lieshout reveals a world unto itself: an industrial plant which takes care of various human needs, from eating and drinking to sexual satisfaction. In a perfect cycle of sustainability, even human excrement is collected here and used to generate energy.

Thought-provoking?

"I'm used to doing Brecht theater," director Sebastian Baumgarten told Deutsche Welle in an interview. "I'm interested in systems that are intricately connected and how various figures act within them. We are trying to implement this form of performance here."

However, according to Baumgarten, there was not much time for rehearsals. He explained that it usually takes years to create the right level of intensity in a piece of this sort and to direct the cast as effectively as possible.

"If you only rehearse for seven, eight weeks, you're not at the level that you're used to reaching as a director," said Baumgarten.

That is perhaps a way of explaining or excusing any directing glitches. Singer Michael Nagy also seems to feel a need to explain things.

"This production poses many questions and gives few answers," said Nagy. "A lot of the work is left to the viewer. I find that this is exactly the right process on the path of authenticity."

In any case, "Tannhäuser" provides the audience with a lot of drama. It tells of a singing contest in the Middle Ages, in which the main character violates societal values with his profane songs.

A trend for the new and different

Despite its 100th anniversary, the Bayreuth Festival - which runs through Aug. 28 - will not celebrate in any special way this year. But a new feature this time is a performance by the Israeli Chamber Orchestra in Bayreuth's town hall on July 26. It is the first performance of this kind, as Wagner's music is frowned upon in the Jewish community due to the fact that he was admired by Hitler and other Nazi officials.

At the press conference preceding the festival, Katharina Wagner - the event's co-director and Wagner's great-granddaughter - announced that the director of the 2013 staging of the epic "The Ring of the Nibelung" operas would be Hans Castorf. Known for his provocative productions with embedded political critique, it will be no surprise if Castorf also manages to fan the flames of controversy. However, one thing is certain: the plot of the operas will not be changed, as official regulations prohibit this.

Author: Rick Fulker / ew
Editor: Louisa Schaefer

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Bayreuth 2011: Tannhäuser - A Picture Feature. Watch while you listen

So, Sebastian Baumgarten's unveils his new production of Tannhäuser. If you are listening to this but cannot see it, I present a Special direct from Bayreuth: Sebastian Baumgarten's Tannhäuser - a feature in Pictures. Now if you recall a few weeks ago I mentioned that this would be a Tannhäuser in red pants? Well, ok he changed the colour but the pants are still evident (he likes Tenors in pants does our Seb). Remember, you heard it here first.


(All images copyright Bayreuth)

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Sebastian Baumgarten: Tannhäuser in red pants? Bayreuth 2011

A little more about Sebastian Baumgarten, making his Bayreuth debut this year with his new production of Tannhauser. And do they look a little like giant white mice?

Sebastian Baumgarten was born on 31 January 1969 in East Berlin. His mother was a singer, his father a doctor, his grandfather artistic director of the Staatsoper unter den Linden. Three years after starting school, he transferred to the Georg Friedrich Händel Grammar School, which specialised in musical education. In 1989, after completing hisAbitur (school-leaving certificate giving right of entry to university) and military service in the National People’s Army, he began a course in directing at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music. 

From 1990 on, Baumgarten was employed as an assistant to Ruth Berghaus, Einar Schleef and Robert Wilson. He worked at theatres in various cities, including Hamburg, Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, and started directing plays on his own account in 1992. From 1999 to 2002, he was senior director of drama and deputy director of opera at the Staatstheater Kassel. From 2003 to 2005, he was director-in-chief of the opera and theatre companies at Theater Meiningen. In 2002, Sebastian Baumgarten was awarded the Götz Friedrich Prize for his production of Puccini’s Tosca at the Staatstheater Kassel. In 2006, he was named Opera Director of the Year.

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Portrait: Sebastian Baumgarten: from the Goethe Institut

Anyone who has worked as an assistant director to Ruth Berghaus, Einar Schleef and Robert Wilson is going to be either an opera director or theatre director. Sebastian Baumgarten has become both, but the early stages of his career were very different from those of colleagues like Jossi Wieler or Sebastian Nübling. Baumgarten began by directing operas, which was an obvious step given that his whole training was concerned with musical theatre and he seemed destined to be an avowed opera director. However, his attitude to opera is just as unusual as his route into the theatre. To the present, Baumgarten questions the traditional aesthetic of the opera and looks to drama for the freedoms that opera denies. This too is an obvious move from his current standpoint. After all, Baumgarten is one of the intellectuals among German directors and has a strong interest in discussing political and historical conditions when he translates his directorial ideas into reality.

For example, when he directed Goethe's Egmont in Mannheim, he cut the historical epic down to its plotline and explained historical contexts by inserting new passages of text that set out the background to the play in the calm diction of an encyclopaedia, which gave Goethe's text a tighter focus. Baumgarten brought this tale of the 16th-century Dutch wars of religion into the modern world by interspersing it with quotations from Giorgio Agamben and highlighting the disturbing condition of our democratic political systems. Baumgarten advocates an advanced concept of directing, but does not stand for a theatre of deconstruction. He seeks to foster historical and political reflection on the stage and relies on his audience allowing itself to be seduced into thought. By taking this approach, he is letting himself in for some pretty harsh criticism. When he adapted Lars von Trier's Europa for the stage at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus in late 2007, he was accused of not having exploited the full dramatic potential of the original and merely creating "a theatre of critical political footnotes".

His directing career shows that he looks for materials that give a director freedom. At the same time, he likes to adapt films that are based on moral and philosophical issues and, as he says, deal with "the dark sides of the enlightenment". Apart from Lars von Trier'sepidemic and Europa, he has tackled the third part of Kristof Kieslowski's Decalogue sequence, Thou Shalt Honour Thy Father and Mother. It is also remarkable that Sebastian Baumgarten avoids premieres of contemporary theatrical texts, preferring to devote himself all the more intensively to the classics. He has engaged with Goethe again and again - for instance at the beginning of the 2007/2008 season, when he directed Faust at the Schauspiel Hannover. He assumed his audience were familiar with the text and turned it into a cabaret-style research seminar. The result was a "freely associative Faust discourse", which nevertheless held a "powerful sensuous attraction" (Süddeutsche Zeitung).

Sebastian Baumgarten once said in an interview that he is only satisfied once the stage material has emancipated itself from the text on which it is based. In his words, one could hear the theatre director who occasionally rails against the narrow limits of the opera and brought the two streams of his work together in one of his recent productions when he staged a musical spoken theatre version of Tosca at the Berlin Volksbühne. He not only drew on the libretto of Puccini's opera, but also on Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca, while simultaneously blurring the borderline between drama and opera. He will carry on experimenting in this direction. However, it remains to be seen whether he will some day take on senior managerial duties again as he has in the past at Kassel and Meiningen, where he was responsible for both theatre and opera as senior director of drama and director-in-chief.
Jürgen Berger

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