Friday, Aug. 25, 1967
Clouds over Valhalla
Strife was no stranger to Richard Wagner. His lifelong battles with critics, rival composers, performers and jealous husbands formed the sonorous core of his own career, and even blared into some of his opera plots. This summer, 84 years after Wagner's death, the storms still rage over the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, that Bavarian operatic Valhalla built by the composer to house definitive performances of his musico-dramatic masterworks.
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 of Hitler, and had allowed Wolfgang to be photographed as a child sitting in the Fiihrer's lap.
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 toward performers and imported singers and conductors of all nationalities. Bayreuth's postwar glory, in fact, rests largely on the shoulders of American singers and conductors: George London, James King, Jess Thomas, Grace Bumbry, Thomas Stewart, Thomas Schippers and scores of others.
But 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 gesticulation and heavy underlining of points in the text.
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.
Not surprisingly, the East German government also got into the act. Ostensibly to protest the strong neo-Nazi vote in Bayreuth in last December's elections, the Communists demanded a statement from Wolfgang distancing himself from the policies of the neo-Nazi National Democrats. No statement was forthcoming, so the East Germans abruptly canceled the visas for nearly 150 singers, orchestral players and technicians who had gone over to work at Bayreuth during previous festivals.
"Best Ever." Wolfgang, greying and somewhat snappish under the reception his new efforts have so far received, readily admits that his esthetic ideals differ from his late brother's. "I seek the middle of the road," he explains, denying that his road has any political direction. Yes, Mama has been at rehearsals, he goes on, but she has made no effort to interfere, and has so far refused to discuss Bayreuth in anything sounding like an official capacity.
Much of Wieland's Bayreuth is still in evidence. Many of his productions remain, directed by his former assistant, Peter Lehmann, 34, and critics called this year's Lehmann-staged Parsifal "the best ever." The brilliant Elsa of Heath er Harper, a British soprano engaged by Wolfgang, indicates a continuance of international casting. Even without Wieland, Richard Wagner's genius hovers over Bayreuth to tempt both singers and audiences toward their yearly pilgrimage. "I am forced to admit that I am frankly worried," says American Bass-Baritone Thomas Stewart, "but even with Wieland gone, this remains the most accomplished operatic stage in the world."
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