Markus Eiche

Anew production of Tannhäuser, which was premiered on 26 July 2019 and presented the Bayreuth debut of conductor Valery Gergiev, as well as the house debut of young soprano star Lise Davidsen. Tobias Kratzer’s staging presented Tannhäuser as a wildly contemporary parable of art and freedom which was praised as “novel” and “wrenching” (New York Times) and received exceptional press acclaim. hey were joined by mezzo soprano Elena Zhidkova’s Venus (“scene stealing”, according to Opera Today), baritone Markus Eiche’s Wolfram and Stephen Milling’s Landgraf.

"Oil is the equivalent of what used to be gold. A luxury that we cannot eat," explained director Frank Castorf in an interview, outlining one of the key ideas behind his production of the Ring at Bayreuth. In the final part of the tetralogy, the wild journey ventures to the Buna chemical plants in Schkopau and to New York's Wall Street, among other places. Inspired by the aesthetic of Hollywood B movies, the production was first met with disapproval but grew to gain many supporters over the years.

The French tale of a beautiful young woman destroyed by her conflicting needs for love and luxury.

Frank Castorf revolutionised German-language theatre in the post-Berlin Wall era, bringing to the stage intellectual and political acuteness, brash references and a not infrequent use of crude humour. He brought these qualities to the Bayreuth Festival where his production of the Ring ran from 2013 to 2017. This 2016 recording of Das Rheingold captures Marek Janowski's festival debut as conductor of this unique production, in which Castorf replaces the Rheingold with oil as the central commodity in a pre-capitalist society. The first night of the Ring cycle begins at a gas station off of Route 66, the main road connecting the East and West coasts of the USA, that played an important role in commerce in the 1920s.

Richard Strauss' last stage work is an opera about opera as an art form, depicting the creation of a music drama in a wise and witty way. Which came first the words or the music? That is the question Strauss and his librettist Clemens Krauss address through the story of a Countess torn between a composer and a poet.