AI-Staged Ring Cycle Draws Boos at Bayreuth's 150th
An artificial intelligence system chose the scenery for Wagner's four-opera cycle at the Bayreuth Festival, drawing about 30 seconds of jeers within a 17-minute ovation.
BAYREUTH, Germany — Scenery selected by artificial intelligence drew boos at the 150th anniversary performance of Richard Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" at the Bayreuth Festival, from an audience frustrated that software could assemble images but not stage drama.
The production, titled "10010110" — 150 written in binary — is subtitled "From Myth to Code" and was intended to portray the history of the four-opera cycle. It was timed to the anniversary of the first complete cycle, performed Aug. 13-17, 1876, at the Festspielhaus built to Wagner's specifications on a Bavarian hill.
After Saturday night's concluding "Götterdämmerung," conductor Christian Thielemann and the cast received a 17-minute ovation. About 30 seconds of boos and whistles came when the production team joined for bows.
Curator Marcus Lobbes developed the concept with Nils Corte and dramaturge Andri Hardmeier, feeding computers roughly 1,000 images drawn from the 15 previous Bayreuth Ring productions. They did not aim for a cohesive drama and suggested minimal blocking.
"We always communicated that it's an experiment, it's not stage-directed," Lobbes said.
Singers stood between two screens measuring 33 by 66 feet (20 by 60 meters), often motionless, across 14 1/2 hours over four nights. About a dozen AI models were combined, with Stable Diffusion starting each act from the 1876 designs by Gotthold and Max Brückner before selecting images based on text and music. Coders divided the work into some 250 scenes of two to six minutes, running on two custom-built PCs with NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics cards.
The projections turned political as the timeline advanced: an image of Theodor Herzl in "Das Rheingold," one of Adolf Hitler in "Die Walküre," and a sign reading "Sorry, no gas today" in "Siegfried" as the sequence reached the 1973 oil crisis.
Lobbes, director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, was approached in February 2023 by festival director Katharina Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter. Many Bayreuth stagings are jeered at first and embraced later; Patrice Chéreau's 1976 centennial production drew a 45-minute ovation at its final outing in 1980.
"I know the ritual," Lobbes said.
This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), in accordance with our editorial policy.
