View of the festival house of the Bayreuth Festival
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BAYREUTH, Germany (AFP) - A day after 29-year-old Katharina Wagner was booed off the stage for her production of "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg", Thursday's audience was much better disposed to Arlaud's reading of Richard Wagner's romantic opera.

His production, which dates back to 2002, is being revived for the very last time this year after a year-long break in 2006.

Both the director -- who also created the bright, garish designer sets -- and his costume designer, Carin Bartels, received long and enthusiastic applause when the final curtain came down.

But that may have been less due to Arlaud's direction which, despite the pretty visuals, came across as sloppy and one-dimensional, than to the stark contrast between his production with that of the previous night.

The French director's ultimately rather conventional reading nevertheless compared favourably with the provocative staging of "Meistersinger" by the composer's 29-year-old great-granddaughter, Katharina, the night before.

Unlike "Meistersinger", Arlaud's "Tannhaeuser" was neither intellectually demanding, nor offered a brand-new interpretation of one of Richard Wagner's best-loved operas.

But perhaps it was precisely its lack of intellectual pretensions that so appealed to the ultra-conservative Bayreuth audiences and makes "Tannhaeuser" so popular among the current run of productions.

Certainly, it ran in contrast to the artistic and interpretative excesses of recent years, such as Christoph Schlingensief's "Parsifal".

Rehearsal for Richard Wagner's opera "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg" in Bayreuth
© AFP/DDP/File

Vocally, too, "Tannhaeuser" proved unremarkable.

The audience, many of whom had waited 10 years for a ticket, rapturously applauded Dutch tenor, Frank van Aken, who was clearly over-taxed in the title role.

Hungarian soprano Judith Nemeth who gave a shrill and uneven performance of Venus, was equally well received.

Only German soprano Ricarda Merbeth in the role of Elisabeth and the audience's darling, German baritone Roman Trekel, who sang Wolfram von Eschenbach, succeeded in coming anywhere close to the standards one can expect in the world's oldest and most prestigious summer music festival.

Arlaud himself admitted in a recent interview that he no longer stands by his production.

"It belongs more to the 20th than the 21st century. I no longer totally agree with my aesthetics," he said. "In fact, I find my 'Tannhaeuser' pretty crap now."

Arlaud continued: "You have to remember, my first ideas for the staging go back as far as 2000. From my point of view today, I'd like to chuck it all in and do something completely different. But I suppose that's normal."

Wagner's opera is about Tannhaeuser, a knight-minstrel from the Middle Ages, who is torn between physical and spiritual love, incorporated in the figures of Venus and Elisabeth respectively.

But Arlaud effectively anaesthetizes Tannhaeuser's personal and artistic crisis by giving the play a space-age setting full of cartoon-like visuals and virtually no religious trappings.

While the production is still good to look at five years on, it barely scratches the surface of Wagner's complex work, with which the composer himself was never fully satisfied and revised on several occasions.

In the pit, German conductor Christoph Ulrich Meier, who stepped in at short notice to replace indisposed Italian maestro Fabio Luisi, gave a solid performance.

But perhaps the real star of the evening was the Bayreuth Festival chorus, which earned frenetic applause from the audience.

The 96th Bayreuth Festival will continue on Friday with a performance of "Das Rheingold" (The Rhinegold), the first part of Wagner's massive four-part "Ring" cycle in a reading by German theatre director Tankred Dorst.

©AFP