Wagner’s project for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth also established ‘the Bayreuth idea’, in which festival visitors were to participate directly in the performances. Initially, an explicit separation of art and politics anchored this separation, yet later ideologies came to influences the Bayreuth circle, and in turn, the Festival itself. Two are examined in this chapter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (in relation to Cosima), and Adolf Hitler (in relation to Winifred), alongside the Festival in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The period from the inaugural production of the Ring (1876) to the bicentenary of Wagner’s death (2013) encompasses a variety of dramaturgical approaches. The tradition of naturalistic, illusionist theatre, to which Wagner was heir, was exposed within twenty-five years to the innovations of Alfred Roller and Adolphe Appia, then in turn to the austere iconoclasm of Wieland Wagner, the ideological revolutions of Bertolt Brecht and metatheater, and more recently to the radical theories of deconstruction and post-dramatic theater, all of which have come to constitute what is known as Regietheater. Wagner’s richly multivalent cycle also provided fertile territory for political, environmental and feminist interpretations, but this focus on ideological aspects of the work has developed alongside an emphasis on the theatrical dimension (including mime, dance, avant-garde design, video, and new technology). Indeed, it could be argued that the primacy accorded mime, gesture, and choreographed movement in recent decades represents a fidelity, in some respects, to the composer’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and that the apotheosis of the latter has been achieved only in the age of Regietheater.