For Bayreuth’s 150th anniversary, a creative team led by Marcus Lobbes called Wagner’s four-opera Ring of the Nibelungen a “curated” production. A screen filled the proscenium while real-time projections drew on Bayreuth’s archive of Ring stagings and a chronology of events. AP independently reported that Lobbes’s team preselected images, that the collage included Helmut Kohl, the World Trade Center after September 11, and a German-reunification stamp, and, citing dpa, that boos and whistles met the team after Götterdämmerung. The Guardian’s Flora Willson supplied the harsher judgments, calling the rapid association “mindless scrolling” and visual bric-a-brac. Those terms identify Willson’s critical response.

Each scene began with material from the 1876 premiere, after which the system determined the sequence during performance. Faces blurred and hands acquired surplus fingers. Rocks changed into bodies while historical images passed among abandoned rooms and scrap metal. The screen’s placement established a physical hierarchy. It occupied the proscenium’s full width and height; singers performed behind it, mostly stationary, with murders reduced to exits and erotic climaxes to clasped hands. Willson observed that even the silence conductor Christian Thielemann left in Wotan’s monologue could not arrest the projections. Their continuous motion dispersed the dramatic tension she heard in the music, because each image morphed before a gesture could gather force. During Thielemann’s silence, the screen kept moving in front of the singer.