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When Artificial Intelligence Meets Wagner—and Loses Bayreuth
Festspielhaus
08/01/2026 - & August 9, 16, 2026
Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung
Anna Kissjudit (Erste Norn), Alexandra Ionis (Zweite Norn), Magdalena Hinterdobler (Dritte Norn), Camilla Nylund (Brünnhilde), Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegfried), Michael Kupfer‑Radecky (Gunther), Mila Kares (Hagen), Jochen Schmeckenbecher (Alberich), Magdalena Hinterdobler (Gutrune), Christa Mayer (Waltraute), Katharina Konradi (Woglinde), Natalia Skrycka (Wellgunde), Marie Henriette Reinhold (Flosshilde)
Chor der Bayreuther Festspiele, Thomas Eitler‑de Lint (chorus master), Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele, Christian Thielemann (conductor)
Marcus Lobbes (AI curator), Wolf Gutjahr (Sets), Pia Maria Mackert (Costumes), Andri Hardmeter (Dramaturgy)
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)
By the time Götterdämmerung brought Bayreuth’s anniversary Ring to its cataclysmic conclusion, the experiment in artificial intelligence had ceased to resemble an experiment and begun to look rather more like a punishment. Eleven hours of visual improvisation had taught the machine remarkably little about Wagner, dramaturgy or the elementary principle that an image on stage ought to have some reason for being there. The problem was not AI itself, but that Bayreuth had given it a Wagnerian vocabulary without teaching it the grammar.
The premise had been irresistible on paper. For the festival’s 150th anniversary, Wagner’s Ring—the work for which the Festspielhaus was built—became a laboratory for new theatrical technology: a semi‑staged cycle without conventional sets or props, animated instead by AI‑generated projections. Failure, we were told, was part of the experiment. Quite so. But anticipating failure does not constitute an artistic achievement.
In Götterdämmerung, the visual barrage was marginally less frantic than before, as though the machine had finally discovered moderation after exhausting the possibilities of irritation. Across the gauze floated blurred fragments of former Bayreuth productions, abstract colour, indistinct figures and historical cameos: Helmut Kohl, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hans‑Dietrich Genscher, Boris Yeltsin, Maastricht, reunification, Schengen, climate protests. One waited for the Norns to explain why Kohl had been invited to their apocalyptic knitting session. They did not.
The problem was not obscurity but banality. Wagner had lived through revolution, nationalism, industrialisation and political upheaval; Götterdämmerung itself offers no shortage of material concerning power, corruption, greed and the collapse of political order. Yet the production established no meaningful connection between these subjects. Instead, it resembled a historical PowerPoint prepared by a committee that had misplaced both the argument and the remote control.
The recycling of earlier Bayreuth productions was scarcely more illuminating. What was presumably intended as a dialogue with festival history became an enormous private joke, comprehensible chiefly to those possessing decades of Bayreuth archaeology. The supposedly democratic AI thus produced an oddly elitist spectacle: an insider’s game disguised as technological progress.
There were occasional flashes of genuine theatre. Hagen’s vassals emerging from the darkness possessed an eerie, primordial menace; some abstract projections generated atmospheric intensity. But these were exceptions. The gauze, projections and absence of sets frequently placed a technological veil between performers and audience, leaving even the most intense singing strangely remote.
The singers moved more naturally than in earlier instalments, and Hagen’s murder of Siegfried had real violence. Pia Maria Mackert’s grey, vaguely feathered costumes, however, remained an unfortunate contribution: uniformity may have been fashionable conceptually, but it flattened characters Wagner had taken considerable care to distinguish.
The boos for Marcus Lobbes and his collaborators were therefore hardly surprising. After four evenings of visual assault, the audience seemed less to be rejecting AI than reclaiming the theatre from it. The experiment promised a new relationship between human performance and machine intelligence; it delivered chiefly the discovery that machines can generate images much faster than human beings can invent reasons for them.
And perversely, the evening’s greatest revelation came when the technology disappeared. During the Rhine Journey and Funeral March, the projections fell away, leaving only Wagner, Thielemann and the Bayreuth orchestra. Suddenly the theatre became infinitely larger. The audience supplied its own images; the music supplied everything else. After eleven hours of AI telling us what to see, Wagner demonstrated the rather more sophisticated technology of allowing us to imagine it ourselves.
Musically, Götterdämmerung was in a different league altogether. Christian Thielemann once again demonstrated why, on the Green Hill, he remains in a category of his own. His command of the Ring was not merely encyclopaedic but instinctive. The four dramas had unfolded under a single architectural conception, and in Götterdämmerung that structure reached its greatest amplitude. The opening scene with the Norns was appropriately delicate and almost spectral; the Rhine Journey at the end of the Prologue was ravishing; Hagen’s summons to his vassals acquired a genuinely menacing weight; and the Vengeance Trio was driven with tremendous dramatic authority.
The performance grew markedly after the first act, when Thielemann seemed to shed an initial reserve and unleash the orchestra with greater passion. His reading was spacious without becoming flaccid, monumental without becoming ponderous, and richly upholstered without sacrificing dramatic momentum. The brass possessed the fabulous brilliance one expects from Bayreuth, while the strings and woodwinds contributed a wealth of finely articulated detail. There were blemishes—a less than immaculate opening woodwind chord and occasional questions of clarity—but these were minor blemishes within an interpretation of extraordinary cumulative power.
The Funeral March was magnificent. With the curtain closed, the orchestra was left to do what an orchestra ought to do: create the world. It did so with terrifying grandeur, and without the need for a single digitally generated image of a politician, a treaty or a climate protest.
The cast was, on the whole, remarkable. Klaus Florian Vogt, La Scala’s and last year’s Bayreuth Siegfried of astonishing stature, undertook the formidable task of singing all four tenor roles and gave a magnificent assumption of the title role. His lyric tenor had acquired remarkable body without sacrificing its radiance, while his intelligence transformed what might have been a vocal marathon into a compelling psychological journey. Siegfried in Götterdämmerung was a more complex creature than the exuberant hero of Siegfried, yet Vogt negotiated the role with seemingly inexhaustible technical security. It was a delight to hear so fresh and inherently lyrical a tenor confront this most taxing of dramatic parts without resorting to force. His voice carried effortlessly to the remotest reaches of the Festspielhaus, while his immaculate German diction rendered every word intelligible and emotionally inflected. Most moving was his farewell after Hagen’s fatal blow, the golden lyricism of the line made all the more poignant by its extraordinary effortlessness.
Camilla Nylund has long been, and remains, the pre‑eminent Brünnhilde of our day, as she demonstrated so memorably in her magnificent portrayals of the Valkyrie in Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at La Scala. In the present production, she once again proved an ideal Brünnhilde. Nylund remained a Brünnhilde of formidable stature, her innate nobility and profound identification with the character palpable throughout. Her soprano united incisive dramatic authority with an exceptional lyric refinement, capable of withdrawing into the most delicate pianissimi before rising with sovereign ease above Wagner’s orchestral tumult. In the final scene, she wisely eschewed the all‑too‑common temptation to reduce the Immolation Scene to an exhibition of vocal endurance. Instead, she invested Brünnhilde’s rage, grief and rekindled love with a quality of almost decadent beauty, allowing the voice to blaze without ever resorting to shrillness or brute force. The effect was all the more compelling for its refusal of mere histrionics: hers was a Brünnhilde whose grandeur resided as much in inward intensity as in sheer vocal amplitude.
The revelation of the performance was Mika Kares, a phenomenal singer and actor whose Hagen was formidable in every respect. I had first heard him in the role at Bayreuth the previous year, and was already convinced that this remarkable Finnish bass was destined to become one of opera’s leading Wagnerians. His performances here only strengthened that conviction. Finland, like neighbouring Russia, has long seemed a reservoir of exceptional basses—one thinks of Matti Salminen and the late Martti Talvela—and Kares now appears worthy of being counted among their successors.
His dark, virile and velvety basso possessed an authority that filled the Festspielhaus without ever requiring theatrical overstatement. What distinguished his Hagen above all was the refusal to equate menace with crude vocal barking, that tiresome caricature which too often passes for Wagnerian characterisation. Kares’s Hagen was dangerous precisely because he did not need to advertise his evil. His menace arose from sheer vocal authority, tonal opulence and penetrating musical intelligence. Beneath the sonorous surface, moreover, one sensed the torment and intelligence of a profoundly damaged man, lending the character an unsettling psychological complexity.
This was particularly evident in his call to the vassals, which acquired an almost primordial menace, and in the fatal encounter with Siegfried. Kares darkened the atmosphere simply by singing, requiring no assistance whatsoever from the production’s artificial intelligence. Indeed, the contrast was almost embarrassing: where the AI laboured to manufacture ominousness through visual effects, Kares achieved it through the oldest and most sophisticated technology of all—the human voice.
His Hagen also confirmed the extraordinary versatility he had displayed elsewhere at Bayreuth. As Fasolt in https://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17739>Das Rheingold, Kares had brought sonorous amplitude and an innate nobility of utterance to the giant; as Hunding in Die Walküre, he had wisely eschewed the barking caricature so often inflicted upon the role, allowing menace to emerge instead from vocal authority, tonal opulence and penetrating musical intelligence. The same qualities made his Hagen so compelling: the voice was naturally authoritative without needing to sound conventionally evil, while the actor beneath the singer gave the character a disturbing sense of inward suffering. It was an exceptional performance, and one that made increasingly difficult to doubt that Kares belonged among the great basses of his generation.
Michael Kupfer-Radecky offered a finely judged Gunther, his pleasant high baritone contrasting effectively with Kares’s darker sonority. He captured the weakness of a supposedly powerful man who had discovered too late that he was hopelessly out of his depth. Magdalena Hinterdobler, meanwhile, made far more of Gutrune than the role’s limited opportunities might have suggested. Her fresh voice acquired unexpected delicacy in the final scene, where she seemed to transform into a woman suddenly destroyed by a catastrophe she could scarcely comprehend. It was an impressive Bayreuth debut.
Jochen Schmeckenbecher was a characterfully malevolent Alberich, and the Norns and Rhine Maidens were well chosen. The Chor der Bayreuther Festspiele, however, did not possess the legendary homogeneity and richness associated with its earlier incarnations. Christa Mayer’s Waltraute was the principal disappointment. Her dramatic experience remained evident, but the excessively broad vibrato and increasingly harsh top compromised the great encounter with Brünnhilde, one of the opera’s most concentrated and beautiful scenes.
And so Bayreuth’s great anniversary Ring ended in a curious paradox. The festival had attempted to celebrate the future by giving Wagner to artificial intelligence. Instead, the machine repeatedly demonstrated the limitations of its own vocabulary, while the human beings on stage and in the pit demonstrated precisely what technology could not replace: vocal personality, psychological intelligence, dramatic instinct, musical memory and the infinitely mysterious capacity of a live orchestra to make an audience imagine what it cannot see.
The irony was almost too perfect. The Ring had been surrounded by artificial images, yet its most powerful moments occurred whenever those images disappeared. The less the production showed, the more Wagner revealed. And when the Rhine finally reclaimed its gold, one could not help wondering whether the machine had learned anything from the evening. The audience certainly had. It had learned that artificial intelligence may be able to produce an infinite number of images. What it still cannot reliably produce is one good reason to look at them.
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