Conductor in Demand

Since Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner began redraping Grandfather Richard's operas in modern scenic dress seven years ago, premiere audiences at the Bayreuth Festival have usually focused more on the props than the performance. But last week at the festival's curtain raiser--a new Wolfgang Wagner production of Tristan und Isolde--all ears were sharply tuned to the sounds coming out of the concealed orchestra pit. There Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, at 34 perhaps the most gifted German conductor to emerge since Herbert von Karajan and the youngest ever to conduct at Bayreuth, was making his most important operatic debut.

Flaws & Cheers. If the production itself was undistinguished (marked, said Wolfgang Wagner, by "objective sobriety"), the first yearning sighs of the orchestral prelude left little doubt that this Tristan was in expert hands. Dressed in tuxedo trousers and open-throated shirt, Conductor Sawallisch led his orchestra through a performance marked by a water-clear sense of orchestral relationships and rock-sure control. He attacked at a slower than usual tempo, underscored the sensuous quality of the music without letting his orchestra wallow in it. There were the usual first-night flaws. During the second-act love duet, the word ueber-maechtig "vanished without trace" from Tenor Wolfgang Windgassen's memory. With a series of semaphore cues that almost sent him clambering on the stage, Sawallisch brought order out of chaos while Soprano Birgit Nilsson improvised for several measures. But the third act went off with well-oiled precision, and the audience responded with cheering, stamping, and a thunderclap of applause.

Critics looking for the source of Sawallisch's power have found the germ of it in his approach to the music he conducts; like Toscanini, he tries to immerse his own personality in the personality he finds expressed in the score. The process is so absorbing that even at mealtimes he is likely to sit silent, sunk in mental rehearsal of selections from the file of music stored in his memory. He is largely self-taught. The son of a Munich insurance director, he studied piano privately, had only three months' instruction in conducting in 1942 at the Munich Hochschule fuer Musik before he was called up for army service. He was taken prisoner by the British in 1945, released in 1946.

Augsburg Apprenticeship. The solid routine of conducting he learned after the war as assistant conductor at the Augsburg Opera (where he also occasionally tinkled the triangle in the pit). In 1953 he tried out (with 64 other applicants) for the job of music director at Aachen. With a piano score Sawallisch prepared Aachen's cut version of Tannhaeuser, learned on his way to the podium for the last act that a 20-page cut had been restored, sailed through the intricate music at sight without a bobble. He was promptly hired.

His accomplishments at Aachen have brought Sawallisch permanent bids from the Berlin Municipal Opera and from Hamburg (he has not made up his mind) and invitations to guest-conduct most of the great orchestras of Europe. The Vienna State Opera and the San Francisco Opera both want him as their guest. And in Germany he has built a personal following so rapidly that last year the Berlin Philharmonic did not even bother to advertise his sold-out guest appearances.

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