Word: wagnerism
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...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...
...tour begins in the courtyard with the gilded and tasseled coach that served Ludwig at his coronation in 1864, when he was, in Bismarck's words, a "beautiful girl" of 18. Inside, the displays begin with stage models for Wagner's operas. From the age of twelve, Ludwig was enthralled by the work of the composer, whose fascination with medieval legend he shared. Upon his accession to the throne, he summoned Wagner from Stuttgart, installed him in a Munich suburban house, bankrolled the first productions of his most famous operas. Atop the Munich Residence he built a huge...