That was my conclusion after spending the last two weeks of July taking in the offerings of both theaters: nine evenings of Wagner in 12 days, by turns exhilarating and enervating. Sated by a sausage-prone diet and a professional volume of the local brew, I heard the “Ring” and “Parsifal” during a Munich Opera Festival that seemed deliberately timed to offer a challenge to its Franconian neighbor to the north, and “Lohengrin,” “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” “Der Fliegende Holländer” and “Parsifal,” again, at Bayreuth.

It’s testament to the power and allure of these dramas that I was still listening to them even on the way home. Despite dismay at some stagings, and concern with a paucity of vocal quality even in this Wagnerian heartland, I came back enthused, electrified — evangelical, one might say.

Why? I beheld the miracle of Kirill Petrenko.

Mr. Petrenko, the diminutive, Omsk-born general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, and the future chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is spoken of with quiet awe in these parts. There is an aura around him, stoked rather than relieved by his modesty and industry. Interview requests are inevitably turned down — not because of any past incidents, but because he would rather work. While glamorous portraits of major artists hang in the corridors of Munich’s National Theater, Mr. Petrenko is represented by a simple video, surreptitiously taken from a camera pointing vertically down at a score he is conducting. You can only see his hands.

Mr. Petrenko’s Wagner is not quite like any I have heard before. He doesn’t have the architectonic obsessions of Daniel Barenboim, and doesn’t seem to be concerned with any kind of tradition at all, unlike Christian Thielemann. He’s not in love with his own sound, like Andris Nelsons. Nor is he preternaturally deliberate, as with Mark Elder.