When the curtain rose Monday, half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier had been chosen to succeed their father, Wolfgang, at the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, bringing the verve of youth and steady hand of experience to an event legendary among opera connoisseurs.
The festival's board said Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier would be co-directors of the annual extravaganza in Bavaria, after last week's end to their father's 57-year run as overseer of an event that began in 1876.
The 24-member board sided with the half-sisters over their cousin Nike Wagner, who mounted a surprise bid just a week ago with renowned Belgian director Gerard Mortier, after a power struggle that stretched on like a Wagnerian opera but more closely resembled Shakespeare's "King Lear."
"It was an extremely stressful time," Katharina said Monday.
Their 89-year-old father, Wolfgang Wagner, has led the festival since 1951, when he revived it after a World War II hiatus with his brother Wieland — Nike's father.
Both Wolfgang and Wieland staged important productions of their grandfather's works, but it is Wieland who is remembered as a genius and is credited with helping to found the Regietheater movement. When he died of cancer in 1966, Wolfgang was left as the festival's sole director.
Wolfgang steered Bayreuth across the next four decades as the festival remained a cornerstone of opera culture. Today some fans wait seven years or more to purchase tickets to popular stagings.
In 2001, the festival's board — which includes officials of the German federal, Bavarian state and Bayreuth city governments — tried to force Wagner to step down by naming Eva, his daughter from his first marriage, to take over.
Wolfgang refused, arguing he held a lifelong contract. Then last November came the death of his second wife, Gudrun, whom many considered the festival's guiding light. In April, Wolfgang agreed to step down at the conclusion of Bayreuth's 2008 edition.
That moment came last week amid a blast of trumpets and thundering applause at the Festspielhaus, the venue that Richard Wagner designed himself to host the festival.
Bayreuth Mayor Michael Hohl, a board member, said Katharina and Eva will get a 5-to-7-year contract, and he expected it to be negotiated and signed before year's end.
"We will be absolutely sure not to make the mistake of a lifelong contract anymore," Hohl said.
For years Wolfgang had said he wanted Katharina, his 30-year-old daughter with Gudrun, to be his successor. Despite the momentum of that blessing, Katharina's Bayreuth debut, a bombastic staging of "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg" in 2007, was booed by the audience.
As her role at the festival increased this year, she helped introduce live filming, a public viewing and a new Web site that streamed a production of "Die Meistersinger" for the first time to paid subscribers. But she said she wasn't trying to overhaul the vision for the festival founded by her great-grandfather in 1872.
"It's definitely an improvement for Bayreuth, but I wouldn't call it something as lofty as a new path," Wagner said in an interview with The Associated Press in June. "You have to move along with advances in technology."
In the end, Katharina applied to run the festival jointly with her 63-year-old half-sister Eva, Wolfgang's daughter by his first marriage with Ellen Drexel.
Eva brings a rich resume to the festival. She is an artistic consultant at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France as well as the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Eva said she and her half-sister bring different talents to the partnership. "But in the end we will do everything collectively," she said.
Katharina and Eva made their presentation to the board Monday, as did Nike Wagner and her proposed partner, Mortier, who helped rejuvenate the Salzburg Festival in neighboring Austria and is to become general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera next fall.
Mortier felt the board did not give a fair hearing to the presentation he and Nike created.
"As everybody knew, the decision was already made for a long time, but it was interesting to see that a democratic way of election did not work," Mortier wrote in an e-mail to the AP. "They told me that the project was very interesting, but that they decided to stay with the Wagner family."
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Associated Press writers Brigitte Caspary reported this story in Bayreuth and Patrick McGroarty in Berlin. AP writer Ron Blum in New York contributed to this report
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On the Net:
Bayreuth Festival: http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de
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