Restoration at Bayreuth

Bayreuth, operatic shrine erected by Richard Wagner to himself, is getting ready for its first wide-open festival since 1939--and this time under the direction of grandsons Wieland Wagner, 33, and Wolfgang Wagner, 31, both sharp-nosed images of Grossvater. Last week they had workmen hammering & sawing away on the vast stage of the red brick festival house. By July, brand-new sets will be ready for six operas: Parsifal, Die Meistersinger and the Ring.

Bayreuth can count on plenty of festival fans. There are still purists who consider Wagnerian opera just brassy, pretentious twaddle about supermen, but they are a musical minority. Bayreuth is much less concerned with defending Wagner's music than with denazifying him--and, if possible, giving an internationalist, pro-democratic profile to the man who called himself "the most German of the Germans."

Bayreuth's case: some of Wagner's Third Reich worshipers (most notable: Adolf Hitler) "made him a Nazi--he was not." The prewar boss of the festival, Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred, mother of Wieland and Wolfgang, once an ardent Nazi, has retired from all connection with festival affairs in illustration of the point. Moreover, the new Bayreuth is stressing the fact that Wagner admired the U.S. He wrote a grand march for Philadelphia's celebration of the looth anniversary of independence (he was paid $5,000 for it*), planned to visit the U.S. before he died, but "unfortunately he was too busy with new inspirations."

"Did you know," said one enthusiastic publicist, "that when [Wagner] visited St. Petersburg he was constantly followed by Russian secret police?"

Chief Promoter Karl Ipser, who considers Wagner "a moral world power" and Bayreuth "a symbol for the West," has written Margaret Truman, asking her to sponsor a student pilgrimage (no reply). He is also looking for some music-minded U.S. city that might like to help pay for the restoration.

*It was played on the arrival of President Grant to open the centennial. A New York Times critic found it "as clearly Wagnerian as anything in Lohengrin," but crustily concluded that "all its beauties as a specimen of orchestral writing do not make amends for [its] lack of thought . . ."

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