What happens to a production when it ends?
With its last performance on August 24, this festival season’s current production of Meistersinger von Nürnberg is scheduled to end. Katharina Wagner’s controversial staging was performed on the Green Hill for five years – now the stage design and costumes are being “dismantled”. Reason enough to take a look behind the scenes and ask: What actually happens to a production in Bayreuth when it’s no longer needed?
At the Bayreuth Festival, elements of stage designs are only kept in exceptional cases. As a rule, the entire stage design of a production is dismantled and disposed of once the run is over. For a complex stage design, at least four weeks must be planned for this. Karl-Heinz Matitschka certainly considers Tilo Steffens’ Meistersinger stage design to be among the more technically complex ones. As Technical Director of Bayreuth Festival, Matitschka is responsible not only for the creation, assembly, and disassembly of the stage designs, but also for their disposal.
The stage designs for the production have a total weight of 50 tons. “For example, the construction for the festival meadow in the third act must support 200 choir singers and extras with a total weight of approximately 17.8 tons and must be correspondingly stable. It has a dead weight of about 3 tons. This includes the construction for the understage, as the stairs are ultimately moved mechanically”, Matitschka explains. Once such a production has finished its run, sorting begins, separating reusable elements on the one hand, and materials on the other. “Our goal is primarily to salvage expensive elements of the stage mechanics, such as rollers and wheels, as well as costly lighting and electronics that are permanently installed in the stage design. These parts go into a stage technology inventory and can then be used in other productions”, says the Technical Director. Regarding materials, the goal is to produce as little special waste as possible – because disposal is expensive, and materials like wood and metal can certainly be recycled elsewhere. So everything is dismantled, separating iron, wood, and the laminations, which often consist of rubber milk or latex. Rubber and latex, in particular, require special disposal. Only particularly elaborately crafted elements go into a small collection for selected pieces. “For example, we keep the baby dragon from the 1976 Chéreau Ring. It’s simply too beautiful to throw away”, says Karl-Heinz Matitschka. However, nothing from this can be reused due to copyright reasons.
The situation is different for costumes: Since they require less space, they can be stored in the historical costume collection, which is managed by Head of Design Monika Gora. It consists of a central, three-story room as well as various rooms within the Festspielhaus, which primarily house choir costumes and accessories. It is out of the question that the historical costumes – even in parts – will be used again for another production: The costume designers also hold copyright on their designs, even if the costumes themselves belong to the Festival. The works of .Rosalie (Ring, 1994), Jürgen Rose (Tannhäuser, 1972 and Der fliegende Holländer, 1990), Yohji Yamamoto (Tristan und Isolde, 1993), for example, and other renowned costume designers are archived so that at least this part of Bayreuth’s staging history is also materially documented. The Bayreuth workshop concept is also taken into account here: Different variants of a role costume within a production are preserved, as are the costumes for different casts of a role. Labels still make it easy to trace which singer a costume was made for – this information, by the way, is always sewn into the costume.
Even more so than when storing for the season break – or when a production takes a season off – it is important here to ensure optimal storage. And so, after thorough cleaning, the Meistersinger costumes by Tilo Steffens and Michaela Barth, including the different variants for the changed soloists’ casts, are optimally packed and protected from moths, moving into the historical collection.
You can learn more about the preservation of equipment outside of the season in our next background report.