The peace and quiet are deceptive. As it should be for any theatre, life behind the stage goes on in all its twists and turns. The Wagner family has never let Bayreuth and the festival out of its grip. Even after the festival's rebirth in 1951, when the brothers Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner decided to clear away the cobwebs of Bayreuth's close association with Hitler, who had been an ardent admirer of Wagner's oeuvre, it was their personal fiefdom. Only their mother Winifred, a close friend of the Führer, was excluded from the hill. The Wagners' jus soli ("right of soil") had become inextricably  entwined with their jus sanguinis ("right of blood"). 

In 2008, the decision regarding the hotly disputed succession of the patriarch Wolfgang Wagner made headlines. The Richard Wagner Foundation appointed the half-sisters Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner as joint directors of the festival.    Because of  the acrimonious divorce of their father from his first wife, Eva and Katharina had never met or spoken before. The sisters are separated by more than 35 years in age and a huge gap in experience: Eva has worked at houses such as Covent Garden and the Opera Bastille, while Katharina had been heavily criticised for her own staging of Meistersinger from 2007-11. 

They are, however, united by a powerful name and calling. "We get along just fine," says Katharina somewhat defensively, perhaps tired of the endless speculation about their intellectual inheritance and personal relationship. "We don't scratch each other's eyes out. People just have nothing to gossip about and are unhappy with that." Just get on with it, she seems to say, yet it is clear that the joint governance can't be an easy one. 

Their task is undoubtedly monumental. Together, and nolens volens, they had to transform the €25 million-a-year  festival into a modern theatre company in order to justify public subsidies, which amount to 40 per cent of the annual cost. Reforms started everywhere at the same time and are riddled with problems, which is not surprising given the scale of the operation. Contracts had to conform to the demands of trade unions. This means a steady increase in wages as well as regulated working hours — a nightmare for any cash-strapped artistic enterprise. The widely criticised ticket distribution system had to be made more transparent — the longest wait for tickets was 13 years and demand still exceeds supply by five to one. Since 2010 it has been possible to place orders on the internet, although which performance and on what date is still up to the festival's discretion. In 2013, the year of Wagner's 200th anniversary, this is to change. For the first time, tickets for one of the operas are to be sold online — first come, first served. Bayreuth wants to make itself more democratic, and that, too, isn't easy. On August 11, the staging of Parsifal is to be streamed to cinemas throughout Europe.