He, who already in 1978 as an GDR director staged a sensational “Flying Holländer” in Bayreuth – famous for interpreting the story as Senta’s vision and nightmare, which kept the audience in compelling suspense until the finale, Senta’s leap from the window of her father’s house. Legendary, like the later staging of the “Ring” tetralogy in the congenial collaboration with Hans Schavernoch and Daniel Barenboim, in which, after discussions with Hans Mayer, he staged an open ending in his conception, “as it is also compositionally open with Wagner, but precisely with this principle of hope”. Unforgettable is the intensity of the character direction, which created a fusion of stage and auditorium and left no one in the hall uninvolved.
We bow before him, who wrote festival history, and to whom Bayreuth owes so much on the way to a modern, forward-looking Wagner reception, entirely in the spirit of Richard Wagner’s festival idea.