Word: wieland
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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...
Maypoles Again. Last year, in his first season, Wolfgang appeared to be harking back to the heavily literal stagings and overly oppressive nationalism that had prevailed before Wieland's day. Many observers, disturbed by what they took to be ominous portents for Wolfgang's-and 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...
...Isolde are lovers who seem to forget that they have bodies. Sometimes the audience wishes it could forget too, in view of the age and bulk of most singers who are up to the demands of the vocal score. Not even the composer's innovation-minded grandson, Wieland Wagner, could change this. His productions introduced heavy hints of Freudian psychology, but the lovers' bond remained shrouded in symbolism. It all seemed to bear out Wagner's advice to Nietzsche that to get the most out of the opera, he should take off his glasses and listen...
...when she auditioned for Bayreuth's innovation-minded director, the late Wieland Wagner, grandson of the composer. Instantly, she says, "I knew he was going to become the most important person in my life." Wieland felt the same. "When I heard her I immediately knew that there was nothing I could still teach her," he said later. The following year he overrode tradition and his family's objections and starred his unknown find in The Flying Dutchman. Also, in a move that his grandfather would have understood perfectly, Wieland, then a married man of 41, moved Anja...
Distracter. Under Wieland's tutelage, Silja appeared in 33 productions. Still, as long as she played Galatea to Wieland's Pygmalion, many listeners regarded her as an extension of her mentor. Now, however, she is making it handsomely on her own-but not at Bayreuth. Soon after Wieland's death in 1966, his widow fired Anja on the grounds that her miniskirts were "distracting the personnel...