You can smile amicably when Christian Thielemann calls out to a growing colleague at the master class in Bayreuth during the bridal chamber scene from “Lohengrin”: “You can be more exuberant.

Don't conduct it as if you were already having a golden wedding! ”You can nod silently, but still amicably, when Jonathan Livny, son of a Holocaust survivor, quotes his grandfather, who said of Richard Wagner:“ He was a hideous person who wrote heavenly music. ”And you can, more secretly, do something together with the butcher's wife Ulrike Rauch from Bayreuth, who - while her husband Georg describes the overwhelming waves in Wagner's music in a refreshingly independent language - drastically in between the sentence: "You must be crazy in your head."

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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But the most important sentence of this film falls casually.

And it comes from the American music journalist Alex Ross: "In the summer, Bayreuth will become a Disneyland for 'old culture' that gives a minority the feeling of being in the majority for a short time." Bayreuth Festival is called, in view of the 7.9 billion people in the world that is vanishingly little.

And this film by Axel Brüggemann wants to be global, after all, it's called “Wagner, Bayreuth and the rest of the world”.

Touchable for this music

It cannot be denied that the Bayreuth Festival, in terms of its history and its reach, is only a matter of the heart of an extremely small, but radiant minority, which repeatedly gives rise to debates of envy. In times when the demands of popular culture are articulated louder politically, they are more dependent than ever on a broad consensus that their existence is worth supporting. Like royalty in constitutional monarchies, they live on the benevolence of parliaments and the electorate.

The film understood just that. And what he wants is very clear: arousing and sharing a fascination for Bayreuth and Richard Wagner's music, documenting the diversity of enthusiasts and thus proving that Bayreuth is fundamentally accessible to everyone. We not only come across professional Wagner interpreters like Thielemann, Piotr Beczała or Barrie Kosky, butchers and hoteliers from Bayreuth, but also a Japanese mechanical engineering student who conducts Wagner performances in his spare time as a conductor with his fellow students; of a young Israeli bassoonist who plays excerpts from “Tristan und Isolde” as if in a trance above the roofs of Tel Aviv, music that is still taboo in Israel because of Wagner's extremely serious anti-Semitism; to a black Baptist preacherwho performed the “Ring des Nibelungen” in Newark only with black performers open air; and on the culture minister of Abu Dhabi, who with the greatest expertise historically paralleled the emergence of Wagner's music with the emergence of academic oriental studies.

These encounters are amazing enough in and of themselves.

And of course they prove that people can be touched for Wagner's music if, regardless of their origin, they have not been trained to be fundamentally open to it.

Your own educational efforts are certainly added.

As an aside, Brüggemann also sketches a portrait of the current festival director Katharina Wagner, under whose leadership the company has clearly gained in lightness, cheerfulness and philanthropy.

Once she said: “The pleasure of being a Wagner is limited.

You have to keep fighting against prejudices and clichés. ”This film, which will be released on Thursday and available on DVD, tries to dispel some of them.