Bayreuth Carries On

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.

Again they swept the big stage clear of musty traditions (TIME, Aug. 4), but the innovations started fewer quarrels among old Wagnerites. Produced this time by younger brother Wolfgang, 34, who heretofore has concentrated on the business side of Bayreuth, the new Lohengrin stressed simple sets and alternate lighting effects of dazzle and darkness (Richard Wagner himself was limited to gaslamp effects). The new Bayreuth also dispensed with helmets and beards, soft-pedaled grand operatic gesticulation, and permitted cast and producers to take mundane curtain calls when it was all over.

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 up;

Lohengrin was ably conducted by Hamburg's Josef Keilberth, and Vienna's Klemens Krauss led Parsifal the next night.

Two Metropolitan Opera stars were the center of attention in the opening-night Lohengrin. The part of Elsa was splendidly sung by Eleanor Steber, in her first German-language appearance in Germany; Astrid Varnay turned in a solid performance as Ortrud. Some critics said it was the best Lohengrin they could remember. Two 'other Met stars scored in the Parsifal: George London as Amfortas and Chile's Ramon Vinay as a slightly Latinate Parsifal.

The Wagner brothers' innovations in staging may have cost them some admirers, but the changes seem to be sticking.

This year there is scarcely an opera house in Wagner's homeland that has not adopted some of their simplified staging as standard. As for the objectors, each year there are fewer of those who can remember Bayreuth's original traditions.

*Sons of Richard Wagner's only son, Siegfried, who was born to Wagner's second wife, Cosima, illegitimate daughter of Composer Franz Liszt, who divorced Conductor Hans von Buelow to marry Wagner. For Coca's first birthday after the marriage, Wagner composed his famed Siegfried Idyll, based on themes from his opera Siegfried.

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