Word: wagnerities
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...strong brooding Parsifal highlights the Wagner festival...
...hands and caressed one another while onstage the pure knight sang of his love for the chaste Elsa. At the climax of Tristan und Isolde, one bejeweled lady was so overcome by the intoxicating music that she pitched backward into the laps of the unflappable listeners behind her. Richard Wagner, who caused all the excitement, rested peacefully in his grave behind his villa Wahnfried, buried, in the phrase of one astonished British tourist, "in the backyard, sir, like a dog." Bayreuth has seen everything...
...Germany, the passion and the controversy were not only to be found in the audience. Fortunately, they could be seen in the new productions as well. The Götz Friedrich staging of Parsifal, produced in honor of the opera's centenary, is a deeply pessimistic view of Wagner's valedictory ode to the redemptive power of Christianity. Colored in stark blacks, whites and grays, it takes place in what appears to be a gigantic mausoleum. More radical was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tristan, new last year. Ponnelle has staged the last 40 minutes of the work...
...Wagner's Festspielhaus is, as usual, in transition. During its early years, it was the physical realization of Wagner's artistic vision: a theater built to his own specifications where his revolutionary music dramas could be given their fullest expression. After Wagner's death in 1883, his widow Cosima carried on the tradition for 25 years, when she was succeeded by their son Siegfried. Bayreuth was re-opened after the war in 1951, and a leaner, more ascetic style developed under Wagner's grandson Wieland. Operating under the twin inspirations of his own adventurous ideas...
...into full bloom in 1976 with the centennial production of the Ring cycle, staged by the French enfant terrible Patrice Chreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Using such anachronisms as the Rhine Maidens playing near a hydroelectric dam, Chéreau fashioned an allegory of the industrial revolution from Wagner's mythic tale of greed and its consequences. A vivid mixture of naturalistic detail and wild flights of imaginative fancy, the Chéreau Ring set the tone for what followed...