This new production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival was the opera event of the 2022 Festival summer. Young director Valentin Schwarz reimagines the mythical story in the present day and tells a gripping family saga in the world of the rich and powerful. The musical direction is in the hands of Cornelius Meister. In Das Rheingold, the antagonists Wotan and Alberich are hostile twin brothers and it is not the gold from the Rhine that is stolen at the outset, but a child, emphasizing the fact that dynasties are always overshadowed by the question of who will one day inherit power.

Richard Wagner's Parsifal, staged at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo in 2020, opened the opera season on January 26. The production, directed by Graham Vick and conducted by Omer Meir Wellber, featured staging with references to the imagery of war.