Word: wieland
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hisses and boos mingled with cheers as Richard Wagner's grandsons rang up the curtain last week on the sixth postwar season at Bayreuth. Reason for the excitement: Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner had finally got around to applying to Die Meistersinger the same stripped-down, dramatically lighted staging in which they have redraped all but one (Rienzi) of their Grandfather Richard's works...
...Wagnerians, the looming, medieval sets of Die Meistersinger have long seemed almost as sacrosanct as the music itself. Of all Wagner's operas, Die Meistersinger was the one deemed least adaptable to modern staging. But, for better or worse, Designer Wieland Wagner decided to refute the purists. Wieland only slightly distorted the interior of St. Catherine's Church in Act I. But the medieval Nuremberg of Act II was not only "dema-terialized," as traditionalists feared; it was totally atomized. There was not a trace of the famed gingerbread houses...
Bayreuth's Wagner. By comparison with Salzburg's blaze, Bayreuth was authoritative but monochromatic. The latest style for Wagnerian opera, as set by the composer's grandsons Wieland and Wolf gang Wagner (TIME, Aug. 13, 1951, et seq. features a stage in semidarkness, moonlit landscapes, symmetrical crowd scenes and stark emphasis on the polarities of heaven and earth, man and woman, light and darkness, life and death. With their productions of all of Wagner's major works unveiled in previous seasons, the producers this time tried their hand at the youthful but never completely successful Flying...
Bayreuth had not dared do Tannhäuser since Toscanini's unforgettable version 24 years ago. But brothers Wieland and Wolfgang, who will dare anything, decided the old Venusberg needed some drastic new landscaping. They hired fast-rising, Kiev-born Conductor Igor Markevitch, who had never done Wagnerian opera before, then replaced him with Germany's Joseph Keilberth. "I was not aware that anybody here was interested in tempo," huffed Markevitch at one point. "All they talk about is lighting"-and no wonder, for Director Wieland Wagner's new staging relies mainly on light effects. When...
Musically, the production proved to be more than adequate, despite the fact that Tenor Ramon Vinay and pretty Soprano Gre Brouenstein showed signs of strain. The chorus, one of the world's finest, performed brilliantly. But the chief attraction, as usual, was the staging. Wieland sees Tannhäuser as a harried misfit in a world of rigid conventions. Dressed in a black cloak (while the other minstrels wear brown), he moves among stiff, almost mechanized people of the court. Preparing for the crucial song contest in the second act-usually staged with casual confusion-uniformly dressed...