Bayreuth Festival Opens With "Der Fliegende Holländer" BAYREUTH, Germany - Well, it wasn't quite Oscar night. But it was a German high-culture equivalent when a procession of V.I.P."s, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, walked a red carpet past hundreds of gawkers and photographers as the Bayreuth Festival opened here Thursday evening with a performance of Wagner's "Fliegende Holländer." Artistically, a lot is at stake for the festival this summer, which comes during the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wagner, who designed the theater and founded the event. Since 2008, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner, half-sisters who are great-granddaughters of the composer, have been the festival's co-directors. They have been making Bayreuth a hotbed of radical staging concepts, a goal pushed especially by Ms. Wagner, who is also a director. The Wagner bicentennial called for a new production of the "Ring," and the Wagner sisters entrusted this coveted project to Frank Castorf, a director who made his name running the Volksbühne, or People's Theater, of Berlin. His brash productions of classics there ignored whole stretches of the texts and presented actors stripped naked, screaming lines, getting drunk on stage and stepping out of character to tell bad jokes. Audiences have long been alternately outraged and enthralled by his work. Mr. Castorf's new "Ring" opens on Friday night with "Das Rheingold," and the opera world has been buzzing about what he is up to. Photos have been released showing a Mount Rushmore facade with Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao in place of American presidents, a tacky drive-in entrance to place called the Golden Motel and more. We'll see. The production of "Der Fliegende Holländer" ("The Flying Dutchman") was introduced last summer, when it also opened the festival. A brief scandal arose when the bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, who was to sing the title role, pulled out at the last moment after a television station broadcast a video showing him with a tattoo, one of many, that resembled a Nazi swastika. At the time, Mr. Nikitin said that the tattoo was a youthful mistake from his days in a Russian heavy-metal band. He was replaced by the bass-baritone Samuel Youn, who is singing the role again this summer. Mr. Nikitin later denied that the tattoo was a swastika. Directed by Jan Philipp Gloger, the production is not especially daring, but it offers an inventive modern-dress take on the work and is full of ideas. The musical performance on Thursday was superb. The conductor Christian Thielemann, the festival's de facto music director, drew pulsing, dynamic and transparent playing from the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. He clearly made careful decisions about when a burst of fleet notes in the strings should be executed with maximum clarity and when a surging passage should be milked for drama. Yet the result was music-making of overwhelming naturalness. The story of the opera tells of the accursed Dutch captain of a mysterious ship who must sail the seas eternally and is allowed just one day every seven years to land on shore and try to find salvation through the love of a woman. The opera presents a director with rich opportunities to evoke the sea. Mr. Gloger, however, wanted to present the sea as a metaphor for the unrestrained influences in the world. The designer Christof Hetzer has devised a stage-filling structure like a black erector set, with compartments and alcoves and neon lights that flash accumulating numbers and data. His idea, it would seem, is to evoke the global market and the untrammeled forces that control and surround us. The metaphor may be perhaps forced. But the set provides a vivid visual backdrop and sets the mood for Mr. Gloger's contemporary take on the characters. In the opening scene, when Daland, a Norwegian sea captain, is forced by a storm to take refuge in a port some miles from his home, he washes up in a small rowboat with a young Steersman. The robust bass Franz-Josef Selig is a powerhouse Daland, and the fine tenor Benjamin Bruns brings an ardent voice and impetuosity to the Steersman. The Norwegian sailors are here a chorus of hearty businessmen in matching three-piece suits who seem eager for any deal. The Dutchman, a beleaguered wayfarer in a dingy leather jacket, is first seen dragging a suitcase on rollers, a perpetual traveler in search of a place to rest and find salvation, which for him means death. The excellent Mr. Youn is a sympathetic and suffering Dutchman who sings with dignity touched with anguish. The one risk Mr. Gloger takes is with his presentation of Senta, Daland's daughter. In most productions, as Wagner's libretto suggests, Senta is a strange young woman fixated on a portrait and the legend of the Dutchman and is convinced that she can save him. Amid a chorus of sensible women who work together mending sails, she usually seems a little disturbed. In a playful contemporary stroke, Mr. Gloger presents the chorus of women as curiously eager employees of a factory where small household fans (another way to stir up wind) are produced and packed in corrugated boxes for shipping. Here, Senta seems the sensible one. The concept, it seems, it that Senta yearns for love as a route to her own salvation, a means of escaping this grinding modern life. In this sense, she and the Dutchman are soul mates, looking for love to rescue them, even unto death. Any quibbles you might have with Mr. Gloger's conception of Senta are pushed aside by the star-making performance of the German soprano Ricarda Merbeth, who brings a big, penetrating voice to the role and plumbs the conflicts and passions of the character. Sometimes her full-voiced top notes are steely, but it hardly matters, given the excitement she generates. The strong cast includes the powerful tenor Tomislav Muzek, as the humble Erik, who loves Senta hopelessly, and the appealing mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer, who sings Mary, supervises the working women and tries to talk some sense into Senta. To have some fun with Wagner during the bicentennial, about 500 nearly four-foot plastic figures of the composer, his arms outstretched directing Bayreuth, painted in shades of blue, red and purple, have been scattered around the extensive festival grounds. They are the work of the artist Ottmar Hörl. But the Wagner sisters who run the festival are also making serious efforts to open the family archives and present a full history of Bayreuth's relationship to the Nazi era, including the close involvement of members of the Wagner clan. They have met with resistance from other branches of the family. Still, they have made significant gestures, including an affecting display on the grounds near the opera house that tells the personal stories of Jewish singers and orchestra musicians who played here before the Nazi era and what subsequently happened to them. I have long felt that another way for the festival to honor Wagner and place his operas in a fresh context, besides recruiting radical directors to reinterpret the canon, would be now and then to perform the works of other composers. Imagine a Bayreuth production of Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron," an opera that would have been impossible without Wagner's example. Or what about commissioning a new work? Performances of "Der Fliegende Holländer" continue through Aug. 24 at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de.