The Bayreuth Festival will open this year on July 25 with a performance of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner's first "mature" opera. This production is a controversial modern, Freudian staging of the work that has been greeted with boos year after year since the first time that it premiered in 2003. In this podcast we will listen to excerpts from last year's production (whose cast is almost identical to this summer's scheduled artists) as well as classic and rare examples of past performances of this romantic opera.

In contrast to the first "complete" recording ever made at the Bayreuth Festival in 1928, which was the subject of our two previous podcasts, we now offer excerpts from the latest Tristan und Isolde from the Festspielhaus. This modern dress production premiered on July 25, 2005, and the action of the opera takes place aboard an ocean liner. This "Ship of Fools" production, as the European press dubbed it, stars soprano Nina Stemme and tenor Robert Dean Smith. The Bayreuth Orchestra is under the direction of Eiji Oue.