Word: wolfgang
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Last Straw. All this inspired Der Spiegel to sound a warning blast about Bayreuth's future. Bad enough, said the article, that Wolfgang's production was cluttered, unimaginative and-worst of all-harmless. In his very staging of Lohengrin, the magazine saw signs of an alleged return to the bad old Nazi days. The presence at rehearsals of Mama Wagner, now 73, was the last straw...
...only an urban but overwhelmingly a lower-class phenomenon. In Atlanta, for example, neighborhoods with family incomes below $3,000 show a violent-crime rate eight times higher than among $9,000 families. In the middle class, violence is perhaps sublimated increasingly in sport or other pursuits. Says Sociologist Wolfgang: "The gun and fist have been substantially replaced by financial ability, by the capacity to manipulate others in complex organizations, and by intellectual talent. The thoughtful wit, the easy verbalizer, even the striving musician and artist are equivalents of male assertiveness, where broad shoulders and fighting fists were once...