“Excuse me, but where are we going? Then you can change a lot more, the whole ‘Lohengrin’ is full of such passages – ‘for German land the German sword’, all that,” he said in an interview with “world” and speaks of a “leader scandal”. “That’s what it says in Richard Wagner’s score.” After this year’s dress rehearsal, Katharina Wagner asked tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, who sang the title role, to replace the word “Führer” with “Schützer” at the end of Richard Wagner’s opera about the Swan Knight.
“It’s a common substitute,” Wagner said on Wednesday. “A lot of houses use the word ‘protector’, and we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive because we have a special political background and therefore a special responsibility.” The Bayreuth Festival has a dark history: National Socialism and the Wagners – that was an unholy alliance at the time. Adolf Hitler was a permanent guest at the festival.
Thielemann clearly against deletion
Thielemann still goes too far with the deletion. He also sees other works of operatic literature in danger: “Then you can no longer play ‘Tosca’ with the attempted rape, murder and so on,” he said. “When I see the meticulousness with which this is being carried out, I would expect conservative politicians to say: Now let’s make sure that the country functions properly before we think about which works of world literature could be rewritten .”