In more recent statements released through the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, Mr. Nikitin, in a shift, said that the tattoo never depicted a swastika; the video footage, he said, captured an intermediate stage in the creation of the eight-pointed star that appears in current photos. And he now implied that it was done not in his rebellious youth but just a few years ago.

This strange, changeable story encompasses heavy-metal culture — Mr. Nikitin was in a band in Russia — and the charged deployment of Nazi imagery during the Soviet era. But while the details keep altering, their implications are profound for a festival that cannot and should not stop thinking about its past.

The incident comes at an important moment for Bayreuth, led since 2008 by two of Wagner’s great-granddaughters, Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Next year is the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the occasion for a new production of the “Ring” cycle. The Villa Wahnfried, where the family lived and Hitler would regularly stay, is in the midst of major renovations before reopening in 2014: the past brought into the present once again.

It is easy to mock Mr. Nikitin’s original statement, to doubt that any adult could be unaware that a swastika would raise hackles at Bayreuth. The sensitivities here are real and reasonable. After all, everyone knows that Wagner himself was a virulent anti-Semite and later Hitler’s favorite composer, and that the festival, which opened in 1876, was closely allied with the Nazi Party before and during World War II.

From a distance it can sometimes seem that the festival itself is like the Dutchman, locked in a cruelly extended cycle of recriminations and guilt over the errors of an isolated period now nearly a century ago. But “Silenced Voices,” a somber temporary exhibition on the verdant grounds in front of the Festival Theater that details the stories of the Jewish artists who performed at Bayreuth before the war, is a crushing reminder that the festival did not make a mere foray into Nazism.