The Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth reopens – The Herald

The Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth reopens, coinciding with the start of the opera season in the city of Bavaria, as a unique place to explore the composer’s life and his heirs relations with Nazism.

After five years closed for renovations, today he was again the Wahnfried House, the town to which he moved to live musician for 60 years with his wife Cosima, built in 1872 thanks to the patronage of Ludwig II Bavaria, King Loco, and where both spent their descendants as special guests, including Adolf Hitler.

“The confrontation with figures and ambivalent works are part of our culture and our tradition,” said the minister German Culture, Monika Grütters during the presentation to the media, prior to its official reopening on Sunday.

The day will be released Tristan und Isolde , which opens production opera season in Bayreuth, whose stage direction is provided by Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer and current director of the Bavarian festival traditionalist.

Do not try to install in the city a kind of ‘Disneyland’ for Wagnerian ” said the museum’s director, Sven Friedrich, to that amplified so from 1970 was a display area devoted to Wagner in its many facets, both through its permanent collection, temporary exhibitions and version.

Friedrich and responsible for the content, historian and musicologist Verena Naegele Sibylle Enrismann not raise the Wahnfried House as a theme park for fans of Wagner, in July and August, attend the Bayreuth festival.

It is true that after a redevelopment of that cost 20 million euros ($ 21.9 million), expected up to 50,000 visitors a year to the museum, which abound in the interest of the provincial town of 72,900 inhabitants

But. the great challenge for the museum is to deepen the life, work and meaning of a composer at the crossroads of the most magnificent and terrible of German history.

say, an opera production that raises passions-and rejections, living with the rabid anti-Semitism he expressed in his manifesto “Judaism in Music” and became Richard Wagner (1813-1883), decades after his death, in the . composer idolized by Nazism

The new Wagner Museum consists of three distinct parts: one dedicated to the composer’s life and his descendants, some of them as turbulent as the personality of the musician; another, on the history of opera festival; and third, specifically focused on the relationship of his successors with Nazism.

The House Wahnfried exhibits several of the original pianos on which he composed Wagner and runs the figure of some of the women who made almost as much like him a household name.

The first female protagonist is obviously Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt, Richard and second wife, a widow, director of the Bayreuth Festival that he founded in life composer.

It is followed Winifred, the British who married his son Siegfried and fervent follower of Hitler to beyond ideology, Bayreuth put at the foot of the Third Reich.

The children of this, Wolfgang and Wieland, corresponded them reestablish the festival after the fall of Nazism, in its first phase under the tutelage of the Allies, while she was still living in the house Wahnfried, surrounded by her devotional Hitler.

The set is a path from the historical to the legend, between original objects and reconstructions, most famous scenery of the opera universe, with special prominence for tetralogy of Ring des Nibelungen and a Tristan , the part that morning released a new version of his great-granddaughter Katharina.