Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bayreuth in Danger?" The question, posed by Munich's Abendzeitung, may have seemed strange as the little Bavarian town of Bayreuth prepared last week for its annual Wagner festival. Hotels were doubling their rates; black marketeers were getting an all-time high of $500 for tickets; and economically at least, the institution created by Richard Wagner in 1876 to perpetuate his works and ideals was thriving as never before...
...fact, Bayreuth is confronting a turning point in its history. When the composer's innovation-minded grandson Wieland Wagner died two years ago, the festival's postwar era of boldly symbolic, iconoclastic productions appeared to be over. Wieland was succeeded as chief artistic administrator by his younger and more conservative brother Wolfgang, who had previously concentrated on Bayreuth's business affairs...
...Bayreuth's-artistic future, waited anxiously for his new production this year of Die Meistersinger. The work's chauvinism and its basis in medieval history had traditionally called forth productions that were awash with romanticist naturalism-gingerbread houses, magical forests and peasant maids. Wieland Wagner twice tried to replace all this with fresh approaches. In 1956, he staged the work as a spare, poetically brooding vision, in 1963, as an authentic but highly mannered recreation of Shakespearean theater...
ludging from the thunderous opening-night ovation, most of the audience agreed with the critic who hailed the return of the "real Richard Wagner" to Bayreuth. Others deplored the production. "It was," said one reviewer, "as if Wieland had never lived...
...pavilions, hideaways and other architectural follies in the 1870s and 1880s. Was he totally deranged? Not according to Dr. Michael Petzet, 35, the Munich art historian who oversees Bavaria's state-run castle-museums (including Ludwig's). Petzet, pointing out that Ludwig was the patron of Richard Wagner, sees the king as "a creator in his own right, someone who aimed to fulfill what Wagner understood as total art on his own terms...