Alexander Grassauer

The Bayreuth Festival's annual new production is one of the most eagerly awaited events of the operatic calendar, and in 2025 Matthias Davids brings his experience as a multi-award-winning director of musical theatre to Wagner's only mature comedy, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. This highly anticipated staging is matched by a superb musical line-up, with Daniele Gatti conducting an international cast including Georg Zeppenfeld as Hans Sachs, Michael Spyres as Walther von Stolzing and the young Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson as Eva. All in all, it promises to be a fresh and revitalizing take on this most inspiring of Wagner's works, which asks fundamental questions about art, inspiration and what it means to be truly creative.

‘Someone must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.’ This is the famous opening line of Franz Kafka’s novel Der Prozess (The Trial). Gottfried von Einem’s opera of the same name also begins with this mysterious arrest. Josef K. suddenly finds himself in a world he cannot understand, faced with an accusation of which he knows nothing but which seems perfectly clear to everyone else and yet remains inexplicable; with an absurd court case that nevertheless follows strict rules; with an arrest that appears to have no effect on his life yet still leads to his death. Is Josef K. the victim of a conspiracy, or is his belief in a conspiracy the only chance of explaining an incomprehensible world?