Word: ch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...feel like Orson Welles when he first came to Hollywood and cried, 'This is the most beautiful toy in the world.' " So said French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau, 31, as he contemplated the prospect of staging the centennial celebration of the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner's longest, densest and most puzzling creation. The results were on display last week at the somber brick Festspielhaus, which Wagner himself designed, and they brought on a storm of booing deep and raw. A few people both booed and clapped...
...known for his readings of modern works but not particularly for his Wagner. He then approached Berlin's Peter Stein to be director, and the word around Bayreuth is that the irreverent Stein proposed a Ring cycle without music. Wagner's next pick, suggested by Boulez, was Chéreau, the current enfant terrible of the Paris stage, whose only previous ventures into opera were an iconoclastic Tales of Hoffmann in Paris and Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algeri at Spoleto. ("You should watch this young man," said Luchino Visconti, director of The Damned and Death...
Painful Fun. Chéreau obviously does not want to be confined to either a realistic Ring or a symbolic one. Says he: "I don't believe in pat solutions. What interests me in Wagner are the contradictions." So he has staged the Ring largely in the "modern dress" of 1876, the year of its first full performance. To that basic idea he has added touches of surrealistic humor. For example, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who gain the magic ring in Das Rheingold in payment for building Valhalla, lumber around on the sagging shoulders of two local weight...
...sound. Physically nothing has changed in the Festspielhaus auditorium since Wagner designed it, and its acoustics are among the best in the world. The old man would probably relish the scene in 1976: the full house, the well-dressed crowd, the impresarios gathered from several continents. As for Chéreau and Boulez, Wagner would probably be one of the people who were both booing and clapping...
Fortunately, the Puerto Rico summit served less narrow purposes as well. The atmosphere was almost totally different from the first economic summit last November, when the leaders spent a weekend at the Cháteau de Rambouillet near Paris as the guests of Giscard. Then the mood was anxious concern about the worldwide recession. This time, as the leaders talked for eight hours at the Dorado Beach Hotel, overlooking a palm-lined shore, the mood was optimistic. The only real worry was that the world recovery might be proceeding too quickly...