For the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival, Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina decided not to mount a new production of the Ring des Nibelungen, but instead to have the operas illustrated by artificial intelligence. Under the title Ring 10010110 – From Myth to Code, the machine generated real-time projections drawn from 150 years of Festival history and from contemporary events. Cast onto enormous gauze curtains, the projections formed an artificial torrent of images against which the singers performed with refreshingly little fuss.
The AI drew on an extensive pool of uploaded images, historical festival footage, press photographs and visual gags, which it algorithmically recombined and processed into projections in real time. It responded to both the libretto and the score, as well as to the live music and singing of the performance.
Musically, the cycle was in the hands of the brilliant Christian Thielemann. Onstage were seasoned Wagnerians including Michael Volle as Wotan, Camilla Nylund as Brünnhilde, Wagner all-purpose weapon Klaus Florian Vogt as Loge, Siegmund, and Siegfried, and Mika Kares as Hagen.
Katharina Wagner opted for the AI experiment after Valentin Schwarz’s previous Ring production flopped and an elaborate new staging appeared financially out of reach. But the production went down like a lead balloon with the audience: curator Marcus Lobbes and his team—Digital and AI Storytelling, Creative Code, Visual Art—were greeted with a thunderous chorus of boos and whistles. Lobbes was reportedly visibly shaken. The musicians, by contrast, were ostentatiously cheered. The press was scarcely more forgiving: the Neue Zürcher Zeitung spoke of “beauty without meaning or interpretation”, the Süddeutsche Zeitung of an “image salad”, and the Financial Times went so far as to call the production a “screensaver”. The Frankfurter Rundschau complained that while AI had mastered the visuals, it had nothing to say, while Vienna’s Die Presse saw the production as a “foretaste of missed opportunities”. Bernhard Neuhoff commented on Bavarian broadcaster BR-Klassik: “At best, the projections are decorative. Mostly, they are simply annoying”. And the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung concluded that the audience had been “exhausted by being underchallenged through sensory overload”.
The production went down like a lead balloon with the audience.
The audience and the critics, however, were not being particularly fair. Granted: charging full price for what was essentially a semi-staged performance was brazen, especially since Bayreuth ticket prices have risen painfully in recent years. Beyond that, though, the outrage had more than a whiff of wounded petulance about it. What exactly had people expected? The torrent of AI images—admittedly of varying quality—contained plenty that was impressive. One might even have appreciated the opportunity to experience Wagner’s Ring for once without some relentlessly didactic interpretation. But decades of Bayreuth conditioning had apparently weaned the audience off such innocence.
The very same spectators and critics who for decades had enthusiastically swallowed even the most far-fetched and violently imposed associations of Regietheater suddenly became hypersensitive the moment the arbitrariness came from AI-generated images. Frank Castorf’s Rhinemaidens were presented as prostitutes in a run-down motel—and frenetically applauded. Kratzer’s Tannhäuser had its tragic title hero copulating with the mournful lump Wolfram in a dreary scrapyard—and the production became a darling of audiences and critics alike. So what exactly had Bayreuth’s otherwise AI-believing pilgrims expected? A miracle, apparently.
In an earlier production, Frank Castorf’s Rhinemaidens were presented as prostitutes in a run-down motel—and frenetically applauded.
Expectations of salvation through artificial intelligence are high—perhaps not entirely without reason. Should AI unexpectedly fail to wipe out humanity, the day will come when opera lovers will be able to use it to create their own utterly private productions on a screen. I, for example—assuming I live to see it—will put together a highly particular Lohengrin: conducted by Rudolf Kempe, with the voices of Elisabeth Grümmer as Elsa, Christa Ludwig as Ortrud, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Telramund, in Wieland Wagner’s production. The perfect production, the perfect nightmare, and the most ominous of curses: “May all your wishes come true”.
The day will come when opera lovers will be able to use AI to create their own utterly private productions.
Pornographic productions will most likely become popular, as will those transforming the Ring into a heavy-metal musical. Wagner, after all, enjoys considerable esteem in the metal scene. But never mind. For the time being, all this remains music of the future.
Anyone who had expected more than a digital collage was a little naïve. In the end, the possibilities of visual illustration remain limited. Modern collage technique—whether analog, with scissors and glue, or digital—is all too often a solution born of artistic embarrassment: when the artwork fails to generate meaning immanently, organically, from a unified concept or a genuinely artistic gesture, collage readily steps in as a simulacrum of meaning. Alien fragments are assembled in the hope that surprise, contrast, or sheer accumulation will produce the appearance of depth, complexity, or contemporary relevance. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno described montage as art’s capitulation to what is heterogeneous to it, while at the same time praising it as a necessary progressive form. That was a long time ago.
In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno described montage as art’s capitulation to what is heterogeneous to it, while at the same time praising it as a necessary progressive form.
Collage lives off what already exists: quotation, rupture of context, recombination. It rarely creates anything genuinely new from within itself. All too quickly, it risks lapsing into arbitrariness or decoration. There is little AI can do to change that.
The visual commentaries generated in real time at Bayreuth varied considerably in their ability to produce meaning. During Siegfried’s playful encounter with the bear, images of bears appeared—wonder of wonders. When Alberich transformed himself into a toad, we were treated to mutated amphibians and surrealistically deformed toads. When Siegmund grew thirsty, the AI presented us with ornamental fish.
But it could be bolder, too. During the ever-popular Ride of the Valkyries, it generated destructive images of war reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, abruptly interrupted by an idyllic green meadow full of sheep.
In Götterdämmerung, former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the smoking Twin Towers, and the commemorative postage stamp marking German reunification made surprise appearances. Throughout the Ring, one could enjoy hybrids of old Bayreuth stage designs—Wolfgang Wagner and Harry Kupfer—alongside abstract patterns and expanses reminiscent of Rothko and de Kooning.
Many spectators found themselves unpleasantly distracted because the artificially generated associations frequently wandered far from the actual events of the Ring. In the past, however, no one had particularly objected to this sort of thing. Quite the opposite: it was precisely for their most audacious associations that the stagings of Tobias Kratzer, Frank Castorf and Barrie Kosky had been frenetically applauded.
In the past, no one had particularly objected to associations that wandered far from the actual events of the Ring.
“Children, create something new!” must be the most frequently abused quotation from Richard Wagner. It comes from a letter to his fellow campaigner and later father-in-law Franz Liszt. Even the dreariest pseudo-modernism invokes it to legitimize its own lack of ideas. I wish the quotation could be locked away for a century.
Another Wagner remark is considerably more apt. At the premiere of the Ring in 1876, Wagner urged Nietzsche—the philosopher was as blind as a mole—with the words:
“Take off your glasses! You must hear nothing but the orchestra!”
