Merkel tops guest list at legendary Bayreuth Festival

BAYREUTH, Germany: German Chancellor Angela Merkel topped the guest list on Saturday of the gala opening of the Bayreuth Festival, one of the highlights in Germany´s cultural calendar.
The legendary month-long summer festival, dedicated exclusively to the works of composer Richard Wagner, was scheduled to begin at 1400 GMT with an eagerly awaited new production of “Tristan and Isolde” by the composer´s great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner.
Along with Merkel and her husband Joachim Sauer, regular guests in Bayreuth for many years, a long list of government ministers and regional and local politicians from the southern state of Bavaria were also on the guest list.
Tickets for Bayreuth are still among the hardest to come by in the world of opera and classical music, with the waiting list stretching to as many as 13 or 14 years for some productions, the festival´s commercial chief Heinz-Dieter Sense told journalists.
Of the 60,000 tickets on sale this year, around 45,000 were available to the general public, half of them online.
The other 15,000 were reserved for the Society of Friends of the festival, one of the main donors.
A lot is at stake this year for 37-year-old Katharina, who has been at the helm of the festival alongside her much older half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier since 2009.
Eva, 70, is stepping down at the end of the summer, leaving Katharina in sole charge, at least until her current contract expires in 2020.
It is only the second time that Katharina has directed in Bayreuth´s Festspielhaus — the opera house built to her great-grandfather´s own designs after “The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” a few years ago that was heavily panned by audiences and critics alike.
Classical music aficionados also suggest Bayreuth, more generally, could be losing some of its veneer. And Katharina´s critics lay the blame squarely at her door.