Richard Wagner and his imprint at the Bayreuth German Opera Festival

With the particularity that this year the competition includes virtual reality as a complement, Heras-Casado appeared on the stage where the composer once dreamed of with his designs.

This is the first Spaniard to open the season of the Wagnerian Temple, in the Bavarian city where the composer built his theater, according to the Swiss website Swissinfo.

“Wagner is a whirlwind that captures you and does not allow you to separate for a second,” the artist stressed when referring to the greatness of the author of sublime works such as “The Valkyrie”, “The Ring of the Nibelung” or “Lohengrin”, the page quotes.

“It’s a crucial test I knew I was going to have,” said the conductor.

Heras-Casado added to the German press and European websites that the theater that Wagner promoted in a certain place to reinvent itself is “to be there when you find the key,” the maestro explained before the opening of the festival.

The only precedent was Placido Domingo, who directed a revival of “La Valquiria” in 2018, as a special guest, but “Parsifal” was the only opera Wagner composed to be performed strictly in his magical sanctuary,” he commented.

Heras Casado has indicated that the genesis of this last opera by Wilhelm Richard Wagner (poet, essayist, playwright, and romantic music theorist) was long.

“It was in his mind for a long time until he started writing it,” he recalled.

“Though it has the particular difficulty of its many textures,” he recalled, “with very slow times, within a very wide mystic and with a sonic weave of infinite colours.”

It was the director of the theater and the composer’s granddaughter Katharina Wagner who invited the conductor to Bayreuth, after his work at the Teatro Real Madrid, where he premiered “The Ring” in four different seasons, one for each piece.

Share this stage with midwives, like France’s Nathalie Stutzman, who debuted in Bayreuth with her “Tannhäuser”.

The Bayreuth Festival is a classical music event that has taken place every year since 1876 in that city and is dedicated to the representation of operas written by Wagner, who conceived and promoted the idea of ​​a unique show to showcase his own works, especially quartets.

The competition has its own orchestra and choir, selected from among the best musicians in the world and Wagner specialists.

rgh/dpm