O-Ton Wagner

In 2026, the 150th anniversary year of the Bayreuth Festival, HELLERAU is dedicated not only to Richard Wagner's pioneering ideas of the invisible orchestra and immersive theater and his unique influence on the development of film and theater art, but also to the darker sides associated with Wagner.

Wagner had already experimented with an orchestra pit for the premiere of “The Flying Dutchman” at Semper's Royal Court Theatre in Dresden in 1843, but it was not until the Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened in 1876 that he was able to have it designed in such a way that the orchestra - and, thanks to the darkened auditorium, “the theater” - remained invisible to the audience. The vision of the invisible orchestra and theater found decisive continuation in the 20th century in the development of cinema, but also in the revolutionary concepts of Adolphe Appia, one of the most influential theorists and practitioners of modern theater. His plans for a “New Bayreuth”, developed from 1891 onwards, were initially met with rejection. He was only able to realise them with his legendary stage concept in the festival theater opened in 1911 in Hellerau or his production of “Tristan and Isolde” with Arturo Toscanini at La Scala in Milan in 1923.

"O-Ton Wagner" presents artistic projects that illuminate and question Richard Wagner's artistic, cultural-historical and political legacy from very different perspectives, but with equally formative signatures. Achim Freyer creates a fascinating concept of the "Ring Cycle" as an abstract, immersive project for expansive image surfaces and spatialised orchestral recordings. Sergei Eisenstein will be presented with a special film-music version of his silent film classic "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), which premiered as a joint project by the Pet Shop Boys and the Dresden Symphony Orchestra in 2006 in the high-rise buildings on Prager Strasse. "Einstein on the Beach", developed by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass in 1976 and thus 100 years after the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as an equally revolutionary music theatre concept, can be experienced as a concert version in the Great Hall of the Festspielhaus Hellerau. Finally, the concert project "Mendele Lohengrin" by the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich poses the question of the fascination of Wagner's music in a critical but also entertaining way.