The Bayreuth Festival, an annual opera festival dedicated to Richard Wagner's music, has opened Wednesday, days after an opera singer's Nazi tattoo scandal.
After the Russian singer Yevgeny Nikitin, 38, pulled out of the month-long event over the scandal, the festival's organizers found South Korean bass-baritone Samuel Youn, who agreed to replace Nikitin.
Nikitin's withdrawal was "fully in line with our policy of completely rejecting Nazi ideology in any shape or form", festival co-chiefs Katharina Wagner, 34, and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 67 told AFP.
The Bayreuth Festival is a prestigious summer music festival held in Bayreuth, Germany. It was founded in 1872 by, and for, composer Richard Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite.
Nikitin's Nazi scandal had surfaced as a German TV program showed old footage of the Rassian singer, playing drums in a rock band with swastika tattoo on his chest.
The singer insisted the images that he got as a teenager have nothing to do with Nazism, but he had to withdraw from the event last weekend, just days before his debut performance.
"Bayreuth has a bad history with the Nazis," festival spokesman Gunther Philipowski told CNN.
"It's clear that Bayreuth has to be careful about this terrible part of history and has to take a position against it," Philipowski stated.
The new face Samuel Youn has regularly appeared in Bayreuth since 2004 and is also scheduled to sing the king's herald in "Lohengrin" on Friday.
Opera Singer Quits Wagner Festival Over Nazi Tattoos
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