AI-Assisted Staging at Richard Wagner Festival Draws Boos as Audiences Reject Machine-Generated Visuals

AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

BERLIN (AP) -- An experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the central German town of Bayreuth drew boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused. Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening's performance of "Götterdämmerung," German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann. Festival organizers said ahead of the performance that it would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event, "not as a character, but as an image-generating force." They said that singers would be "the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amidst projections that erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another." The AI-assisted projections included scenes from previous performances of Wagner's "Ring" cycle and historical themes, and drew from images pre-selected by Lobbes, the director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, and his team. The collage that the technology projected on stage puzzled the audience, dpa reported, with images including former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the towers of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and a special postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990. The festival website said that "every performance will be unique -- because the images and associations never stand still." Two more performances are scheduled.

AI made its debut at Wagner's Bayreuth festival. The crowd booed it and cheered the humans.

Bayreuth asked what happens when the stage itself begins to think. For its 150th birthday it let AI help stage Wagner's Ring, and the audience booed. The Bayreuth Festival has spent 150 years guarding Richard Wagner's music on a Bavarian hill. For its anniversary it tried something new and let artificial intelligence help stage the show. The crowd's verdict was blunt. It booed the machine and cheered the humans. The production, pointedly titled "Ring 10010110," put AI on the festival stage for the first time in its history. At Saturday's Götterdämmerung, the curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were met with boos and whistles at their bow, the Associated Press reported. The singers and conductor Christian Thielemann got warm applause. The music was fine. The machine was the problem. Organisers had framed it as a grand experiment. "What happens when the stage itself begins to think?" the festival asked. AI would appear "not as a character, but as an image-generating force," trained, it said, on countless images, voices, documents and past productions of the Ring. The ambition was real. Rather than one staging, the machine would conjure many. It drew on the national myth, the political upheaval, the romantic utopia and the deconstructed shadow. These were the ways Germany has read Wagner over 150 years. In practice, the projections merged into a collage the audience struggled to follow. That collage is where it lost the room. Among the shifting images were former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the World Trade Center towers after 9/11, and a postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990. The cultural memory was there, in theory. The link to Wagner's gods was harder to find. A very old stage, a very new backlash The timing sharpens the sting. This is Bayreuth's 150th anniversary, and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, opened it by praising the festival's "courage to renew itself." Handing the visuals to an AI, led by the digital artist Roman Senkl, was exactly that. The audience answered with whistles. It also lands in a wider mood. Audiences and platforms have spent the year pushing back on machine-made culture. A German court found Suno broke copyright, ChatGPT stopped imitating living authors, and LinkedIn added a button to flag AI slop. Big Tech has been quietly retreating from features it rushed out, as new EU rules force it to label synthetic content. Bayreuth's experiment is not over. The festival says every performance is different, because the images never stand still, and two more are scheduled, on 9 and 16 August. That gives the machine two more chances to win the room. On opening night's evidence, it may collect two more rounds of boos.

AI-Driven Ring Cycle Sparks Boos at 150th Anniversary Wagner Festival

BAYREUTH, Germany (AP) -- Richard Wagner likely would have appreciated the cutting-edge technology, if not the reaction. Scenery selected by artificial intelligence sparked boos at the 150th anniversary performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle from an audience frustrated that software could integrate images but not drama. Called "10010110" -- the number 150 in written in binary -- the staging is subtitled "From Myth to Code" and was intended to portray the history of "Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)," a series of four operas about the destruction of gods by humans, giants and dwarfs. It was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the full cycle's premiere from Aug. 13-17, 1876, at the Festspielhaus theater built to Wagner's specifications atop a Bavarian hill. Curator Marcus Lobbes developed the concept with Nils Corte and dramaturge Andri Hardmeier, feeding computers about 1,000 images culled from the 15 prior Bayreuth Ring productions. They did not intend to produce a cohesive drama and suggested minimal blocking. "We always communicated that it's an experiment, it's not stage-directed," Lobbes said. Disgruntled by 19th century standards, Wagner demanded his own theater of innovation. Bayreuth's 239th Ring Cycle was an encyclopedia of interpretations rather than a new one. The audience also responded with a 17-minute ovation Singers stood between two 20-by-60 meter (33-by-66 foot) screens, often not moving, for 14 1/2 hours over four nights. About a dozen AI models were combined and Stable Diffusion was used to start each act with 1876 scenery designed by Gotthold Brückner and Max Brückner from sketches by Josef Hoffmann, then select images based on text and music. After Saturday night's concluding "Götterdämmerung," conductor Christian Thielemann and the cast were greeted with a 17-minute ovation that wrapped around 30 seconds of boos and whistles when the production team joined for their bows. Many Bayreuth productions are initially jeered, such as Patrice Chéreau's centennial staging in 1976 that moved the action to the Industrial Revolution, then cheered years later. That production's final appearance in 1980 ignited a 45-minute ovation. "I know the ritual," said Lobbes, director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund. He was approached in February 2023 to stage an AI Ring for the sesquicentennial by Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer and current festival director. Wagner composed the Ring over 26 years. Coders divided it into about 250 scenes of two to six minutes and loaded images from past performances and topical moments to a pair of custom-built Tower PCs with NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics cards. Singers led by Michael Volle (Wotan), Camilla Nylund (Brünnhilde) and Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegfried) wore birdlike costumes of wire mesh with black backing and laser voile designed by Pia Maria Mackert, Lobbes' wife. The outfits shimmered in brilliant colors depending on the lighting, with gold and red most prominent. As the narrative moved forward, so did AI's projections. An image of Theodor Herzl, a key figure in modern Zionism, appeared in "Das Rheingold," and one of Adolf Hitler in "Die Walküre." A sign that read: "Sorry, no gas today" flashed in "Siegfried" as the timeline reached the 1973 oil crisis and Brünnhilde awakened to sing "Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht! (Hail to you, Sun! Hail to you, Light!)" "Every year of the 150 years, we have an answer from artificial intelligence what she thinks that the audience of Bayreuth would have said is the main political topic of this year or this summer," Hardmeier said. Many of the images provoked director name-checking in viewers' minds -- Was this from Wieland Wagner in 1951? From Frank Castorf in 2013? From Valentin Schwarz in 2020? At other times, AI picked forms that shifted like a giant Etch A Sketch into images evoking works by Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Original plans for 2026 envisioned performances of the final 10 of Wagner's 13 operas plus the Festspielhaus debut of the composer's third, "Rienzi," until now deemed not worthy of inclusion. The AI Ring was to be presented once to coincide approximately with the original premiere dates, but budget cuts two years ago caused four operas to be scrapped and replaced by two additional Rings, the first from July 27 to Aug. 1. Singers were together for just one nine-hour rehearsal over a four-day period in which the directing team worked with cast members in small groups. "I would wish that with a certain openness people will find some interesting correlations and will see things that maybe others don't see," Hardmeier said. "I hope that people go out with a very fruitful irritation -- not irritation in the sense of 'What was this about' but more sort of, 'Hey, interesting.'" Beethoven's 9th starts festival Thielemann conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to open the festival. Wagner led the work at the downtown Margravial Opera House after the Bayreuth cornerstone ceremony in 1872 and it has been repeated on special occasions, such as the 1951 resumption after World War II. A speech the following day by Michel Friedman titled "Silenced Voices" addressed Wagner's antisemitism and his family's support of Hitler and the Nazi party. 'Rienzi' a success in Bayreuth Festspielhaus premiere A striking staging with Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, updated to post-modern dystopian times, was greeted with extended applause when it opened on July 26 in the first of nine performances through Aug. 26. Tenor Andreas Schager gave the title role charisma and vocal beauty, telling the story of 14th century Italian populist Cola di Rienzo. Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann made a convincing case for an unwieldy composition whose autographed score was given by Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifried, to Hitler and lost in the destruction that ended World War II. The ballet became a hilarious parody of Wagnerian cliches as a cartwheeling child wearing sneakers with rainbow lights and dressed in gold, resembling statues of the composer, presided in front of a faux Bayreuth proscenium. A procession of characters, some in winged helmets, performed silent camp references to Wagner's renowned roles.

AI-assisted staging: AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening's performance of "Gotterdammerung," German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann. An experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the southeastern German town of Bayreuth drew boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused. Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening's performance of "Gotterdammerung," German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann. Festival organizers said ahead of the performance that it would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event, "not as a character, but as an image-generating force." They said that singers would be "the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amidst projections that erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another." The AI-assisted projections included scenes from previous performances of Wagner's "Ring" cycle and historical themes, and drew from images pre-selected by Lobbes, the director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, and his team. The collage that the technology projected on stage puzzled the audience, dpa reported, with images including former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the towers of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and a special postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990. The festival website said that "every performance will be unique - because the images and associations never stand still." Two more performances are scheduled.

AI-Assisted Staging Draws Boos at the Richard Wagner Festival in Germany

BERLIN (AP) -- An experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the southeastern German town of Bayreuth drew boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused. Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening's performance of "Götterdämmerung," German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann. Festival organizers said ahead of the performance that it would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event, "not as a character, but as an image-generating force." They said that singers would be "the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amidst projections that erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another." The AI-assisted projections included scenes from previous performances of Wagner's "Ring" cycle and historical themes, and drew from images pre-selected by Lobbes, the director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, and his team. The collage that the technology projected on stage puzzled the audience, dpa reported, with images including former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the towers of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and a special postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990. The festival website said that "every performance will be unique -- because the images and associations never stand still." Two more performances are scheduled.