Bayreuth, Germany — Soprano Adrienne Dugger, an Atlanta native, was schedule to sing the role of Brunnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, but canceled, citing personal reasons, with only three weeks notice.

Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.

This would have been an important milestone in a career that has carried Dugger to some of operas most important roles at major houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang regularly before moving to Europe. Her parents still live in Atlanta.

Dugger is a dramatic soprano, possessing one of opera’s rarest voices, and capable of singing the cruel and demanding roles in Richard Wagner’s operas. The Bayreuth opera house, built for Wagner by King Ludwig II, is the high temple of Wagnerian singing. Dugger has sung here for the last few years as Senta in “The Flying Dutchman,” to mixed reviews. But the role of Brunnhilde, dominating the 16-hour, four-opera “Ring” cycle, is paramount.

With her departure, the festival turned back to the singer it had abandoned, Linda Watson. A problematic singer, with a large but shrill sound and huge vibrato, Watson is still a practiced singer who can get through the entire “Ring” honorably. She was joined by a cast of mixed virtue, with perhaps the best singing coming from the Siegfried, heldentenor Stephen Gould, another American.

But the musical highlight was the conducting by Christian Thielemann. Rarely has a conductor so closely understood the peculiar demands and opportunities of this magic space, with its covered pit serving as a sort of mute for the giant Wagner orchestra.

Rather than struggling to make his orchestra heard, he went out of his way to support his singers, and to focus on simple passages that go unnoticed in a more brash interpretation.

At Bayreuth, when talk is about the “new” it’s not about a contemporary opera, it means a new, often radical re-staging of the Wagner canon. That’s all they do here. In his 10 or so mature masterpieces, Wagner (1813-1883) seemed to presage everything from Freudian psychoanalysis to fascism, Marxism and the liberal environmental movement.

Thus since the end of WWII, Bayreuth has emerged as a stronghold for complex, intensely psychological productions which demand much from the audience, in terms of familiarity not only with the operas but with literature and a vast range of references.

This “Ring,” directed by Tankred Dorst, a theater director who had never before directed an opera, suggests that the gods, and all myth, don’t die at the end of the final opera, but are always with us, often unnoticed but imbedded in our psyche, and forever a part of the landscape of our lives. We learn this metaphorically through the ruined sets, now part of a contemporary world, with children, lovers, and other real people wandering about as the cycle progresses.

But the opera world’s most talked about production is that of “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” which had its debut here last year. Directed by Wagner’s 30 year-old great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner, it upends the opera, making Beckmesser, generally the laughingstock of this opera, into a radical artist who assaults the stuffy world of the erudite masters with his performance art. The latter includes the creation of an onstage “Adam and Eve” scene with frontal nudity.

Over the course of the opera, various icons of German culture are parodied as giant dancing puppets, complete with naughty exposures and a group of strippers. There are more ideas, some brilliant and many questionable, than can possibly fit into any single opera production, and things just become grotesque.

It was all a bit much for the Germans, who booed lustily, some even making it a point to exit noisily in the middle of the second act, when things were at their wildest.

Singing was generally mediocre, although the Beckmesser, Michael Volle, was outstanding. Sebastian Weigle conducted without subtlety, shape or form, although he managed some significant changes and questionable cuts to accommodate the conceits of the production.

Stefan Herheim’s production of “Parsifal,” making its debut this year, is simply brilliant. In it, the opera becomes a parable about the role of the past, and how to reconcile it with the present. Parsifal’s unconscious dream of his past is suggested, rather controversially, in Freudian settings where he returns again and again to the bed of his mother, always at the center of the stage. And each of the other major characters undergoes a psycho-sexual examination of sorts.

Meanwhile Germany’s history overlays everything, from the early 20th century through the Nazi years and into the time of Konrad Adenauer, the beginnings of modern Germany and modern Bayreuth, whose own history also overlays everything, just to keep the complexity going.

Given the history of Bayreuth, which embraced Hitler and served as his summer retreat, there is something especially disturbing about seeing Nazi banners unfurled on the stage here, even when they are about to be pulled down.

“Parsifal” was conducted by Daniele Gatti, who found a way to inject energy into the score but retain it’s feeling of spaciousness and clarity. Singing was mostly sub-par, with no one really distinguishing themselves.

Offstage, a dramatic and often bitter struggle has been going on as members of the Wagner clan battle for control of the festival. Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s 89 year-old grandson, has run the festival with an iron fist for the last 57 years, and has announced that he will step down. He has insisted that he be replaced by his youngest daughter, Katharina, but the festival’s board, which meets in November, has balked at her lack of experience.

Until this year, the main other faction consisted of Wolfgang’s estranged elder daughter, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, who has worked at major opera houses and is currently on staff at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, allied with his estranged niece, Nike Wagner, daughter of Wieland (Wolfgang’s brother), whose brilliant abstract productions led Bayreuth into a new era after World War II, and greatly influenced stage design around the world.

It’s a family a little more dysfunctional and than most; you can read about them in dozens of books, which seemed to appear on an annual basis.

Lately, apparently sensing the direction in which things were moving, Eva switched sides, suddenly was reunited with her father, and allied herself with Katherina.

Nike has been complaining loudly about this betrayal. But the Eva/Katharina bid seems to have the inside track, so we can probably expect to see more of Katharina’s work here. Things are definitely interesting in this little Bavarian town.

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