Looking Forward Backward

"Is Bayreuth in Danger?" The question, posed by Munich's Abendzeitung, may have seemed strange as the little Bavarian town of Bayreuth prepared last week for its annual Wagner festival. Hotels were doubling their rates; black marketeers were getting an all-time high of $500 for tickets; and economically at least, the institution created by Richard Wagner in 1876 to perpetuate his works and ideals was thriving as never before.

In fact, Bayreuth is confronting a turning point in its history. When the composer's innovation-minded grandson Wieland Wagner died two years ago, the festival's postwar era of boldly symbolic, iconoclastic productions appeared to be over. Wieland was succeeded as chief artistic administrator by his younger and more conservative brother Wolfgang, who had previously concentrated on Bayreuth's business affairs.

Maypoles Again. Last year, in his first season, Wolfgang appeared to be harking back to the heavily literal stagings and overly oppressive nationalism that had prevailed before Wieland's day. Many observers, disturbed by what they took to be ominous portents for Wolfgang's--and Bayreuth's--artistic future, waited anxiously for his new production this year of Die Meistersinger. The work's chauvinism and its basis in medieval history had traditionally called forth productions that were awash with romanticist naturalism--gingerbread houses, magical forests and peasant maids. Wieland Wagner twice tried to replace all this with fresh approaches. In 1956, he staged the work as a spare, poetically brooding vision, in 1963, as an authentic but highly mannered recreation of Shakespearean theater.

Last week Wolfgang's version proved to be, as he admitted, a "look straight into the face of the past." Back again were the familiar Maypobs, lush backdrops and looming timbers. Once more, singers appeared in costumes that might have come from the Oberammergau Passion Play.

No Precedent. Within those limits, the production had its virtues. Aided by Karl Boehm's lively and sensitive conducting, Wolfgang gave intimate poignancy to the often-slighted scene in which the knight, Von Stolzing. works out his song for the mastersinger's competition. At the end, Wolfgang toned down the eulogy to German art by the cobbler, Hans Sachs (at which German audiences used to rise reverently to their feet), and closed the opera on Sachs's more characteristic note of skepticism and resignation: "Folly, all is folly."

ludging from the thunderous opening-night ovation, most of the audience agreed with the critic who hailed the return of the "real Richard Wagner" to Bayreuth. Others deplored the production. "It was," said one reviewer, "as if Wieland had never lived."

Wolfgang insisted that Meistersinger was nothing more than "another experiment in our workshop" and was not necessarily a precedent for future productions. Already, he pointed out. he has signed up two of Europe's more unorthodox young directors, Munich's August Everding and Milan's Giorgio Strehler, to stage works in 1969 and 1970. "Such a program," he said, "doesn't look like a triumph for those prophets who keep predicting that Bayreuth is going to sink into a quagmire of provincialism, or does it?"

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