Katharina Wagner and her half sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier (right). Between them, they've at least kept the festival in good financial shape. Photograph: Ralph Orlowski/REUTERS

News that Eva Wagner-Pasquier is next year stepping down from the leadership of the Bayreuth Festival, which she's been running with her half-sister Katharina since 2008 (they're both the Ur-Wagner's great-grand-daughters, children of his grandson and the previous undisputed chief of Bayreuth, Wolfgang Wagner) appears mystifying. Whatever you think about some of the productions on the Green Hill over the last few years (which apparently reached a nadir in Frank Castorf's glibly and by all accounts pointlessly shocking Ring cycle last summer) the fact that the sisters have kept the festival in good financial and administrative shape over the last five years, and the fact that they're maintained musical standards in the pit, with such conductors as Christian Thielemann, Andris Nelsons, and the star of last year's festival, Kirill Petrenko, bears witness to what can be achieved when the internecine feuding stops at Bayreuth, and the Wagner-clan gets on with the business of running an opera house. (Even if they still need to find some better singers on stage.)

Eva's job was the administrative and casting side of the partnership, while Katharina was allowed to direct shows of her own (a Meistersinger that appalled some and delighted a few), with both of them taking joint responsibility for the overall artistic direction of the Festival. Her departure leaves a gaping hole in Bayreuth's leadership, and raises the spectre of all that family feuding breaking out again.

Eva hasn't given any explanation for her departure (although she will remain as an "advisor"), so did she go of her own accord, or was she pushed? With Katharina's quite probably in place until 2021 (negotiations are ongoing), she will become the de facto Meisterin of the Festival - realising the will of her late father, who wasn't close to Eva by the end of his life. Yet Katharina will have to find someone to replace Eva as the manager of the festival. The only other Wagner who could realistically take over from Eva is her cousin Nike, who put in a rival bid for the leadership of Bayreuth back in 2008. But repairing the relationship between Nike and Katharina would take international diplomacy, so for first time since Heinz Tietjen in the 1930s and 40s, a non-Wagner could soon be in a position of real power at Bayreuth. For the sake of the festival, let's hope the situation resolves soon – but for the sake of a bit more out-of-season Wagnerian drama, maybe it's no bad thing if the saga continues a little longer.