Redemption for Wagner, redemption for Germany? … «Redemption» is the central theme in Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Milo Rau turns the question on its head and applies it to German history over the past hundred years. Thus, this concept inevitably leads to the inexcusable: to anti-Semitism, genocide and transgenerational trauma. Was Wagner the starting point? Is there such a thing as redemption?

In the run-up to the new production, historian Dan Diner, author Mirna Funk, Sven Friedrich, director of the Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, and director Milo Rau discuss the ambivalent reception of a composer whose work is ideologically heavily burdened yet still beloved, as well as cultures of remembrance in Germany and Israel, boycotts, the breaking of taboos, and the question of what opera, as an art form, has to say on the matter.