Word: wolfgang
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Germany alone. Inspired by Helga's triumph, other producers quickly jumped into the enlightenment-movie business. Among the titles that have been doing boffo business in Germany are Miracle of Love, The Perfect Marriage, and You, an account of masturbation and its tension-easing benefits narrated by Dr. Wolfgang Hochheimer of Berlin's Pedagogical Academy. Actress Ruth Gassmann, the unabashed mother of Helga, was quickly signed up to star in a pair of sequels: Helga and Michael, the story of a courtship from first kiss to consummation, and Helga and the Sexual Revolution, in which the heroine discovers...
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...
Last week Wolfgang's version proved to be, as he admitted, a "look straight into the face of the past." Back again were the familiar Maypobs, lush backdrops and looming timbers. Once more, singers appeared in costumes that might have come from the Oberammergau Passion Play...
...Precedent. Within those limits, the production had its virtues. Aided by Karl Boehm's lively and sensitive conducting, Wolfgang gave intimate poignancy to the often-slighted scene in which the knight, Von Stolzing. works out his song for the mastersinger's competition. At the end, Wolfgang toned down the eulogy to German art by the cobbler, Hans Sachs (at which German audiences used to rise reverently to their feet), and closed the opera on Sachs's more characteristic note of skepticism and resignation: "Folly, all is folly...
...Wolfgang insisted that Meistersinger was nothing more than "another experiment in our workshop" and was not necessarily a precedent for future productions. Already, he pointed out. he has signed up two of Europe's more unorthodox young directors, Munich's August Everding and Milan's Giorgio Strehler, to stage works in 1969 and 1970. "Such a program," he said, "doesn't look like a triumph for those prophets who keep predicting that Bayreuth is going to sink into a quagmire of provincialism, or does...