Word: bayreuth
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...Bayreuth has always been run by a Wagner, and now it is Richard's grandson Wolfgang, 75, who is in charge. As skilled a manager as his forebear, possessing just as combative and strife-prone a temperament, Wolfgang is the most visible person at the festival. He also conducts one of the behind-the- scenes highlights at Bayreuth, the press conference that follows a new production. This year he outdid himself in grouchy garrulity. Ignoring the journalists' humble need to get quotes from all major participants, he grabbed the mike and answered questions addressed to Rosalie or Alfred Kirchner...
...Wolfgang in command of the festival. He too has had a busy career directing, but his work tends to be fussy and literal, and he is not taken seriously. The rumor is that Wolfgang started his memoir when he heard he had a rival, American author Frederic Spotts, whose Bayreuth (Yale University; $35) appeared in late June. Once again Wolfgang has been badly bested...
...great subject of Bayreuth gossip now is, Who will replace Wolfgang? For the time being, no one; he shows that he is still more than capable of running a one-man show. He says the next boss may not be a Wagner at all, but he will probably choose his second wife, Gudrun, 50, formerly a festival secretary. That solution would follow tradition. When the composer died, his wife Cosima succeeded him for 23 years, then handed control to her son Siegfried. After he died in 1930, his widow Winifred continued in his place until after the war, when, publicly...
...production of the Ring is as sacred to Wagnerians as the one that takes place at their holy see -- Bayreuth (pronounced buy-roit). Wagner founded the music festival first held there in 1876 and designed its theater, the Festspielhaus. He engineered the completion of the theater specifically for this 15 1/2-hour tetralogy about a peculiarly human race of gods and demigods who were ruined by their greed for a cursed treasure of gold. Heads of state -- from mad King Ludwig of Bavaria to the much madder Adolf Hitler -- have made the pilgrimage to this isolated city in northern Bavaria...
...Central European repertory of Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms. It has also successfully branched out to opera: last month's dazzling concert version of Wagner's Das Rheingold, continuing a Ring cycle that is being recorded by London/Decca, was as fine a performance as one is likely to hear outside Bayreuth or the Metropolitan Opera...