Music: Bayreuth Festival get “General Manager” from Berlin

News from the green hill: Shortly before the start of the opera spectacle in the coming week, the Bayreuth Festival found a man for finance. Matthias Rädel, deputy director and senior controller at the Deutsche Oper Berlin since 2006, is to become General Manager of the Festival.

The decision fell unanimously on the board of directors of the Festival, as Bavaria’s Minister of Art Markus Blume (CSU) and Minister of Culture Wolfram Weimer announced after the meeting.

Rädel is “a profiled theater manager with a comprehensive and many years of experience in the business area, combined with a strong content and artistic interest,” said Blume.

Katharina Wagner should concentrate on art

Weimer named Rädel “The Right Choice for Bayreuth” – also because he “had already accompanied the necessary transformation processes”. He was convinced that Rädel “will meet the current challenges and thus lead the Bayreuth Festival into the future”.

Already last year, when the contract extension was announced by director Katharina Wagner, Weimer’s predecessor Claudia Roth (Greens) and flower had announced that there will be a general manager in the future and that Katharina Wagner – unlike before – should no longer hold any managing directors. As a result, Wagner should be “enabled an even stronger focus on the artistic direction of the festival”. In addition to Wagner, the second managing director Ulrich Jagels has been in office since 2021.

New structure was a condition of the federal government

The new structure was also a prerequisite for the federal government to take on further shares in the festival company, which had become free due to the financing problems of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth.

“He specified in a special way the connection between theory and practice, management and culture, of administrative responsibility and intellectual standards,” said Katharina Wagner about her future colleague Rädel. The chairman of the board of directors, Georg von Waldenfels, is intended to conduct the contract negotiations with rädel.