WiWa's Dutchman

Among the stagehands at the Bayreuth Festival, Co-Director Wieland Wagner is popularly known as "WiWa" and Co-Director Wolfgang Wagner as "WoWa." Between them, WiWa and WoWa have redraped all of Grandfather Richard's major operas in the starkly modern style they introduced eight years ago at the opening of the first postwar Bayreuth Festival. Last week WiWa had a fresh go at The Flying Dutchman, an opera that WoWa attempted four years ago with scant success. Musically, the new production was a smash hit, thanks to Bass-Baritone George London, Soprano Leonie Rysanek and Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who made the most of the romantic, haunting score (Wagner was only 28 when he wrote it). But the staging suggested that the Wagner Brothers have become the prisoners of their own style.

WiWa's new sets for the old seafaring legend were less spare, more realistically detailed than the shadowy, sketchy style that Bayreuth audiences have become accustomed to in Parsifal, Lohengrin, the Ring cycle. Example: the arrival of the Dutchman's ghostly, red-sailed galleon was brilliantly suggested by the hoisting of a painted drop that stood forth in cunningly detailed perspective. There was some highly imaginative staging, too. Example: in the third-act scene of the Dutchman's departure, WiWa placed the heroine high on a ramp stage right, while the Dutchman stood far below, stage left, near his ship, pouring out his passion across yawning space. But most of the time, particularly in his handling of the chorus, Wieland Wagner fell back on his familiar, stiffly symmetrical movements. At one point he had the sailors execute a boisterous dance in a manner as rigid and contained as a platoon of guardsmen on parade. "One begins to wonder," wrote one critic after watching such maneuvers, "where the border between simplicity and simple-mindedness lies."

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