Word: wielands
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...conductor slammed down his baton, grumbled "auf Wiedersehen," and walked out. Leading singers caught colds in the wet July weather. Technicians scrambled to lighten the murky stage so that the audience could see more of what was going on. After six weeks of preparing the season, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner last week raised the curtain on the opening production, their grandfather's Tannhäuser. Despite all crises, the production turned out topnotch...
When old Richard Wagner was directing his music festivals at Bayreuth, he shut up the Festspielhaus every third season-which was only reasonable for a man who wanted time to write more operas. Under no such pressure, the composer's grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner,* last week shattered another hallowed Bayreuth custom, opened their third Wagner Festival in three years with a new production of Lohengrin...
Missing from the podium this year was veteran Conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, 65, last of the great Wagner traditionalists, a casualty of the grandsons' innovations. He was in the middle of a rehearsal last spring when he suddenly put down his baton and folded his hands. Wieland Wagner, who had already lost temperamental Conductor Herbert von Karajan over artistic disagreements, begged him to explain what he wanted. "I wish," replied Knappertsbusch, "that you would put back into this opera what your grandfather put into it and what you have taken out." The quarrel was never patched...
...Designer Wieland Wagner achieved most of his atmosphere by the use of lighting effects rather than scenery, and his sets contained a minimum of props. Act I was furnished with a single couch for Isolde (not a sign of the usual sail or sailors); there was no castle in Act II and none of the customary trees in Act III. The stage sloped so steeply that Tristan on his couch almost seemed in danger of rolling into the orchestra...
...Said Wieland: "I want to concentrate on the persons." His other general idea was to avoid the style of a 19th century romantic love story and display Tristan as the "erotic mystery" he thinks "the old man" meant...