Attending the Bayreuth festival these days is a bit like eavesdropping on the private grief of the Wagner family and the collective soul-baring, breast-beating and gnashing of teeth of the entire German nation. The festival is a paradox: hugely successful at the box office – there are 7.5 times more applications for tickets than available seats – and apparently, if you read the German press, in a state of permanent crisis. The festival director, the composer’s last surviving grandson, Wolfgang Wagner, has been in charge (with his late brother, Wieland) since 1951 and sole master of his grandfather’s Festspielhaus since Wieland’s death in 1966. Although aged – he will be 88 this year – and in failing health, he is clinging to his sovereignty until the Wagner Foundation anoints his chosen successor, his only daughter from his second marriage, Katharina. For more than 40 years he has kept the senior branch of the Wagner great-grandchildren (Wieland’s offspring) at bay and marginalised his own children by his first marriage, Gottfried and Eva, with whom he is barely on speaking terms. Eva is the only living fourth-generation Wagner experienced in running opera theatres.

Katharina is 29, tall, blonde and photogenic, the image of a Wagnerian heroine, but she remains a theatrical novice – to date, she has staged only five productions, including this year’s new Bayreuth Meistersinger von Nürnberg. She is said to rely on the intellectual input of her favoured dramaturg (an ideas man or woman, a role virtually unknown in the British theatre, where directors are expected to have some of their own), Robert Sollich. Katharina’s new Mastersingers carries heavy ideological baggage and debatable glosses on the performance and “reception” history of Wagner’s only mature comic opera, while virtually ignoring Wagner’s narrative, characterisations and music, in favour of an alternative scenario of her (or Sollich’s) own.

Like her uncle Wieland in his abstract 1956 Bayreuth production, she has staged a Mastersingers without Nurem-berg. Tilo Steffens’s single, adaptable set places the entire action in a modernish arts academy with busts of great German masters, including Wagner and Bach, Goethe and Schiller, adorning its galleries. And, as in his less well-documented 1940s staging, she evokes the dread spirit of Nazism, though without unfurling swastika banners in the festival-meadow finale, as the young Wieland did under the Third Reich. Here, before Hans Sachs delivers his encomium to German art, a theatre director and a conductor are bound and gagged and thrown into a skip, which Sachs then sets alight while flunkies hold out their arms at something just short of the angle required for a Hitler salute.

Katharina is not the first German director to make such extraneous and mprovocative commentaries on the nationalism inherent in the text of The Mastersingers, but she is the first to do so at Bayreuth. Some may feel it is a little late in the day to harp on Bayreuth’s unfortunate history of collaboration with the Nazi regime, when almost the only person in Bayreuth who remembers Hitler personally is her father, who sat on “Uncle Wolf’s” knee alongside his brother.

The public howls its protests – Katharina’s appearance at curtain down provoked the worst storm of boos I have experienced at Bayreuth since my first visit, in 1986 – but the German press barely questions the debatable premises on which the director and her dramaturg base their contentious interpretations. Sollich writes, in a note distributed to the press, of Sachs’s “aggressive conservatism” in Act III and, in the official programme book, of the “sinister content” of his final peroration on German art. But what is aggressive and sinister about a defence of German art from foreign influ-ence? His speech is essentially aimed at Italian opera and is a warning against princes who don’t speak the same language as their people. To suggest anything else is as much of a distortion of Wagner’s text as the Third Reich’s misappropriation of Wagner’s works for propaganda purposes.

But then, Katharina Wagner and Sollich’s Mastersingers is all attention-seeking exaggeration and parodic distortion. They throw everything into the pot: a staged debate about modern art that has the would-be mastersinger Walther von Stolzing throwing paint around the masters’ academy and drawing pudenda and breasts on Eva’s frock; caricatures of the German masters, who sit disconsolately during the Act III prelude; the chorus emptying replicas of Warhol’s Camp-bell’s soup tin over the brawlers of the Midsummer Nightmare at the end of Act II. There are two stark-naked women and a man, and Walther’s Prize Song climaxes in a game-show presentation of a huge cardboard cheque by television studio hostesses. The result is an unpalatable witch’s brew: a mishmash of the styles of fashionable avant-garde German directors such as Peter Konwitschny and Christoph Schlin-gensief. If Katharina has inherited anything from her father, it is a knack for aping other directors’ work.

One of her more ludicrous notions is that Beckmesser is the hero of Die Meistersinger and that Wagner’s parody of composition represented by his song is an example of avant-garde music. This has to be one of the most unmusical stagings of Die Meistersinger in the entire performance history of the work. Dramatically, it has all the sophistication of a drunken and druggy fancy-dress party for rich kids.

More shocking than anything in the production, however, is the mediocrity of the musical performance, dully conducted by Sebastian Weigle and poorly cast: Franz Haw-lata’s Sachs and Amanda Mace’s Eva, both vocally sub-standard, were mercilessly booed, while Klaus Florian Vogt’s overgrown-choirboy-ish, unheroic, pop-singer-like Walther was cheered to the rafters. Only Michael Volle’s trenchantly sung Beckmesser achieved anything close to festival standards. In her bid to succeed her father, Katharina apparently chose those singers, though Vogt was a late replacement. If this puerile and musically deficient Meistersinger is a glimpse of the future of a Katharina-led festival, the outlook for Bayreuth is bleak indeed. Whether it will be regarded as sufficiently scandalous to secure her succession remains to be seen, but I doubt if such considerations will affect the Wagner Foundation’s eventual decision. After all, Katharina’s father is living proof that you don’t have to be a particularly original or admired stage director to run the Bayreuth festival. If she has a fraction of Wolfgang’s administrative skills and tenacity, her name will be enough.

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