Without Molly and Brand everything is even more sad.

The two calf-sized, but very well-behaved, pitch-black dogs with whom Richard Wagner returned from walking to his Villa Wahnfried on August 13, 1875 at 12:45 at an outside temperature of 23 degrees Celsius, no longer stood for the resumption of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” this year to disposal.

“They're gone, unfortunately,” Barrie Kosky tells us during the break at the bratwurst stand next to the Bayreuth Festival Theater, “sold abroad.

We couldn't reach them anymore.

And because of Corona everything has become much more difficult anyway. "

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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Kosky's master production will be shown on the Green Hill for the last time this year.

It is difficult to say goodbye because you see this production differently every time you win.

At the premiere in 2017, the fast-paced burlesque of the first act, a confetti cannon full of amusing punchlines, showered the audience with laughter and then felt the second act as a hangover - up to the terrifying presentation of Beckmesser's Jewish caricature in the beating joint.

The third elevator, in jury court room 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, the site of the war crimes trials in 1946, then seemed to wind its way almost helplessly between the comedy and the tribunal.

Wagner tortured Levi, a Jew, with sadistic pleasure

In the meantime, because we already know a lot, the first elevator hardly seems strange anymore. One notes with trepidation how Wagner exposes the Jew Levi - played virtuously by Johannes Martin Kränzle, who had to let himself be represented singing by the dazzlingly agile Bo Skovhus due to vocal indisposition - by forcing him to kneel down during Christian home devotions. A Study in Wagner's Techniques of Social Sadism. Wagner's constant self-reproduction, the little Richards crawling out of the piano, is no longer funny either. Just as the lecture by Hans Sachs (in Wagner's costume) about real art in front of the Meistersingers suddenly appears in the first act as patronizing Bramar-based, as hard to bear as the self-obsessed prose of Wagner's theoretical writings.

But that is exactly what Kosky is about: he shows Wagner lovers that they are only too happy to find life in the work, when it comes to comical anecdotes. But as soon as the uncomfortable topics come up - anti-Semitism, eroticization of sacrificial death, worship of charismatic leaders - one quickly withdraws back to the separation of art and life. We can't get away that cheaply with Kosky. And now you realize that in the last elevator the flag-waving people are sitting exactly where the Nazi war criminals sat in 1946. Stolzing and Sachs, however, are not accused, but witnesses, even exonerating witnesses.

This shows Kosky's respect for the fact that there is more and more in Wagner's art than what can and must be the subject of a political tribunal. Wagner was Hitler's and the Nazis' cue in many things, but at the same time he was more than that, otherwise he would not be worth our art efforts today. The fact that this staging does both, exposure and clarification, that it is committed to an art that cannot be had in an unsullied way, is what makes it so valuable, not only for Bayreuth.