Wagner X Freyer

Achim Freyer is celebrating the premiere of an extraordinary artistic project in April 2026 at HELLERAU. In a specially developed visual dramaturgy, he will present large-format digital projections of his own paintings and visual worlds in the Great Hall of the Festspielhaus - a complex of works that is one of the most striking and idiosyncratic manuscripts in the European art landscape.music from Richard Wagner's “Ring des Nibelungen” can be heard, whose monumental sound spaces are given a new, visually charged resonance by Freyer. In cooperation with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Grzegorz Nowak and composer Jeffrey Ching, a multi-channel recording of an abridged and purely instrumental version of the Ring cycle will be created, which will convey a special spatial auditory impression with a complex sound system. The projections and the immersive soundscape open up a disturbingly poetic cosmos, characterised by radical reduction and exuberant fantasy - a dense fabric of image, music and imagination.

Born in Berlin in 1934, Achim Freyer has been shaping the international theatre world as a director, painter and set designer since the 1960s and has influenced generations of artists. He has staged numerous classics and world premieres in musical theatre around the world. In 1988, he created an acclaimed version of “Einstein on the Beach” for the Stuttgart State Opera, while his productions of Richard Wagner include “Tristan und Isolde” (Brussels 1994), “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (Los Angeles 2009) and “Parsifal” (Hamburg 2017). With “Wagner X Freyer”, Freyer opens up his painterly universe for a rare, immersive encounter - a Gesamtkunstwerk in the original sense, which does not illustrate Wagner's music, but transforms it into an independent artistic dialogue.