Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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World Music Festivals (Sun. 2:30 p.m., CBS). The Wagner Opera Festival in Bayreuth, Germany...
When old Richard Wagner was directing his music festivals at Bayreuth, he shut up the Festspielhaus every third season-which was only reasonable for a man who wanted time to write more operas. Under no such pressure, the composer's grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner,* last week shattered another hallowed Bayreuth custom, opened their third Wagner Festival in three years with a new production of Lohengrin...
Again they swept the big stage clear of musty traditions (TIME, Aug. 4), but the innovations started fewer quarrels among old Wagnerites. Produced this time by younger brother Wolfgang, 34, who heretofore has concentrated on the business side of Bayreuth, the new Lohengrin stressed simple sets and alternate lighting effects of dazzle and darkness (Richard Wagner himself was limited to gaslamp effects). The new Bayreuth also dispensed with helmets and beards, soft-pedaled grand operatic gesticulation, and permitted cast and producers to take mundane curtain calls when it was all over...
This year there is scarcely an opera house in Wagner's homeland that has not adopted some of their simplified staging as standard. As for the objectors, each year there are fewer of those who can remember Bayreuth's original traditions...
...Guitarist Andrés Segovia, Harpist Nicanor Zabaleta, Ballerina Margot Fonteyn and the Sadler's Wells Ballet. For Granada, it was the windup of a fortnight of music and dance, the second in two years, which the city fondly hopes will become an annual affair eventually rivaling Bayreuth, Salzburg and Edinburgh...