Word: wieland
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When the U.S. Army in 1949 turned the theater over to Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner, the composer's grandsons, certain stipulations were part of the deal. One was that the directors should eliminate all Nazi undertones in their mountings of the music dramas. Another, not unrelated, was that British-born Winifred Wagner, widow of the composer's son Siegfried and mother of Wolfgang and Wieland, should abdicate her long-held role as iron-fisted matriarch of Bayreuth's every artistic and managerial move. Winifred had been a high-ranking Nazi, a personal friend and financial supporter...
Sole Control. As long as Wieland lived, the new Bayreuth flourished. He was the artistic director; Wolfgang stuck to business management. Mama Winifred stayed away. Wieland's new productions were aimed imaginatively toward new, always controversial, often brilliantly successful dramatic ideals. Instead of the heavily literal, violently brassy, pompous stagings admired by Hitler, in which choral scenes often resembled SS rallies in a Black Forest thicket, Wieland created stark, impressionistic stage pictures with a shaft of light here, a barren rock there. To enhance Bayreuth as a cultural force of worldwide significance, Wieland broke with the old chauvinistic policies...
...Wieland died at 49 last fall (shortly before he was to have made his Metropolitan Opera directorial debut), and now Wolfgang, 47, has assumed sole control over Bayreuth. So far, the results have been taken by many observers as a series of ominous portents. Wolfgang's staging of Lohengrin last month, his first effort since his brother's death, departed markedly from Wieland's stylization and simplification and seemed to echo the old conservatism in stead. The bridal chamber was done up like a Moorish gazebo. Singers were allowed to return to the old style of explicit...
...Though Wieland's treatment may not have pleased everyone, there was no disputing that his influence will be felt in future Met productions; he buried once and for all the heavy-handed theatrics that characterized traditional Wagnerian productions. "All Wagner literature written before 1950 should be burned," he once said, "together with the old Wagnerians. For living theater, there can only be one style-that of its own period...
...Thus, as Wieland interpreted the Ring cycle, Valhalla would be Wall Street, the heroes Siegfried and Siegmund self-sacrificing astronauts, the temptress Gutrune a mythological call girl, the god Wotan a wheeler-dealer politician, his wife Fricka everybody's nagging mother-in-law, and the spear-carrying Valkyries teen-age Beatle fans. Richard Wagner would have adored it, insisted Wieland. After all, no one despised the old Wagnerite purists more than Grandfather, who delighted in shocking admiring visitors by greeting them at the door on all fours and yapping like a fox terrier...