I have spent many years in many opera houses and I have heard booing there many times. I have heard booing, in particular, in German opera houses, places in which the tradition of making your disapproval clear when the curtain falls sometimes seems to be as reflexive and automatic as the volleys of bravos during the most humdrum performance at New York's Metropolitan Opera. But I have never heard booing that matched the loudness and endurance from the outraged audience at this week's Bayreuth festival.

This display of vehement displeasure, at the end of Frank Castorf's production of the Ring cycle, was aimed at the Berlin-based Castorf and his creative team, including set designer Aleksandar Denic and the costumes, lighting and video of Adriana Braga Peretzki, Rainer Casper, Andreas Deinert and Jens Crull. It was not directed at the conductor, Russian-born Kirill Petrenko, who the audience cheered to the rafters. Nor was it aimed at the singers, although Catherine Foster's Brünnhilde was booed earlier in the cycle and at the end of Götterdämmerung. Lance Ryan's Siegfried and Attila Jun's Hagen also received some of the audience's displeasure. But overwhelmingly, the Bayreuth audience liked what they heard. It was what they saw that they hated.

The explosion on Wednesday, after Götterdämmerung, had been building up all week. Castorf and his team did not take curtain calls during the other three operas, so their appearance at the end of the cycle unleashed a pent-up tempest akin to the thunderstorms that explode over Bayreuth in a hot, humid August. Not surprisingly, tempers in a theatre without air conditioning can become very short. And what a storm it was.

Some will be rightly squeamish about what took place. Booing is nasty and cruel. In Germany, it comes freighted with a dark history, too. It is particularly devastating for singers, who are doing their best, often in difficult circumstances. But Castorf seemed to revel in it, almost as if the audience verdict was a badge of honour or a vindication. He stood on the stage for more than 10 minutes, mocking his detractors with a thumbs up, ironic applause and dismissive waves. Castorf's response enraged the audience even more. There is no way to know who would have won this battle of wills had not Petrenko diffidently put his head around the curtain to remind Castorf that the orchestra still had to take its traditional end-of-cycle bow. (The orchestra was cheered to the heavens.)

(l to r) Elisabet Strid (Freia), Lothar Odinius (Froh), Oleksandr Pushniak (Donner), Günther Groissboeck (Fasolt), Claudia Mancke (Fricka), Wolfgang Koch (Wotan) and Sorin Coliban (Fafner) in Das Rheingold/ Photograph: ENRICO NAWRATH / BAYREUTH FESTIVAL/EPA

Some people might think they witnessed an uncomfortable martyrdom. That seemed to be Castorf's own projection of it, though surely even he must have been a little daunted by the torrential booing. One should not be naive about the fact that Bayreuth is a lightning rod for dark passions with deep historical roots. Some want it to stay the same; others want radical and permanent change. In my view, change is inevitable, but it needs to be positive. Castorf's production was the latter, and his indifference struck me as egotistical rather than saintly.

His take on the Ring was ultimately – and perhaps deliberately – incoherent. Before the cycle began, Castorf held a press conference. In it, he explained that this Ring cycle, focusing on oil, would tease out ways that our greed for it and its wealth re-enact the impulse for the riches, power and destruction on which Wagner's Ring is centred. In its first two parts – a Rheingold set in a Route 66 US gas station and motel inhabited by Tarantino-style characters, and a Walküre set in the Caspian oil fields just before the Russian revolution – it was just about possible to discern a link, albeit a loosely drawn one, between these two settings and the professed oil theme.

Wolfgang Koch as Der Wanderer and German tenor Burkhard Ulrich as Mime in Siegfried. Photograph: ENRICO NAWRATH / BAYREUTH FESTIVAL/EPA

But the two final parts of Castorf's cycle had almost nothing of this theme, beyond the dark polluted clouds that formed its permanent backdrop. Instead, the settings were increasingly dominated by the remnants and echoes of East Berlin before the fall of communism. Even here, little was developed to a theatrical, let alone musical, argument. Most important, it had nothing to do with Wagner's Ring – with its music, its poetry or its ambition to unify the performing arts and elevate humankind in the process. One can understand why some directors, especially Germans and Marxists, may feel uneasy about tackling Wagner's vast work in his own theatre, but that's the challenge. And some fine modern directors have faced it with great and radical distinction.

Castorf's approach was the reverse. He tried to ignore everything with which Wagner had provided him. He seemed to say that such an effort was inherently unworthy in the 21st century, and he essentially blew a raspberry at the entire Wagnerian inheritance. All along, Castorf alluded and then ran away from what he may have been saying – though so much was all but impossible to see, understand or discern. That lack of clarity was not the audience's fault, but Castorf's. His was an interpretation against interpretation. Fair enough, you may say, if you think that anything goes. But that didn't seem to be the view of the angry audience. And, in that case, why offer Castorf the Bayreuth bicentenary Ring? And why would he accept the commission?

(l to r) Lance Ryan (Siegfrield), Alison Oakes (Gutrune) and Catherine Foster (Brünnhilde) in Götterdämmerung. Photograph: Enrico Nawrath/AFP/Getty Images

If this Ring had any theme, it was unintentional and only occurred to me after the performance. Castorf seems like a living embodiment of the Ring's villain, Alberich, who steals the gold, renounces love and wants to rule the world. Castorf is a director who took the money, wanted notoriety and tried to face down a public. I know whose side I'm on. I wish that the Wagner half-sisters, Eva and Katharina, who run Bayreuth, were on that side, too. But after seeing this deliberately incoherent Ring cycle, it is hard to believe they are.

See also



Review: Das Rheingold and Die Wälkure

Review: Siegfried and Götterdämmerung