Wotan must wait - The singer Günther Groissboeck

Father of the Gods, Castle of the Gods, Wotan, Valhalla – words that instantly conjure up the "Ring of the Nibelung", Richard Wagner, and Bayreuth. For almost one hundred and fifty years, people have counted the singers brave enough to perform the weighty and extremely difficult role of Wotan. In the summer of 2020, Günther Groissböck was to have been the new Wotan at Bayreuth. The Austrian currently has an international career; he is a regular at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at all major European opera houses. For many months, we accompanied him on his way to this complex debut, and watched his “Wotan” grow. Then came Covid-19, the lockdown, and the closure of all opera houses. So the portrait of Günther Groissböck has now become a film about the fact that nothing in life can be planned. Everything an artist encounters – joy as well as pain – can become part his inner trove of experience, in the hope that he can use these feelings as a kind of raw material to continue shaping himself.