Word: bavarians
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Germany's Bayreuth Festival had not seen anything like it in years. Instead of applause for Richard Wagner's music, there were hisses and catcalls -led off by an ear-shattering "No!" from the box of Dr. Alfons Goppel, Bavarian minister-president (equivalent of a U.S. Governor). Women lost their jewelry in the tumult, and one man furiously tore up $250 worth of tickets for subsequent performances...
LEFT-WING TANNHÄUSER'S FALL, ran the headline in Süddeutsche Zeitung next day. "The Bavarian minister-president vowed to cut off all further subsidies to Bayreuth if any more Communist propaganda is ever attempted," fumed Wolfgang Wagner, the politically neutral director of the festival and grandson of the composer: "Is this democratic freedom?* Haven't there been boos in Bayreuth before...
...changed all that. "A genius like Richard Wagner," he says, "inevitably provides room for a whole complex of often contradictory interpretations." There was nothing contradictory about the box office results after the news of his scandalous Tannhäuser. Gossip about Bayreuth's impending demise stopped, the Bavarian ministry denied it had ever thought of cutting off subsidies, and the paying public, though it may have come to denounce, remained to cheer. Said Wolfgang: "When Grandfather went to Bayreuth, he conceived it as a workshop. Tannhäuser has brought us back to where we should always have been...
STRADDLING the historic trade routes of Southern Europe, drinking in the influence of other cultures, Munich has always been chiefly absorbed with the manufacture and enjoyment of Bavarian Gemütlichkeit (some of which is identified by its sudsy head). It's all very apparent today, this spirit of "leben und leben lassen"-a cheery apathy and beery tolerance combined with a benign condescension toward anything German that is not also old Bavarian. The ambience of the cities to the north-those pompous Prussians-can be described in straight lines and right angles. Munich gives you embroidered corners...
...days. It is also much too innocent. Still, it is the place where most Germans prefer to live, and candid Münchner concede that it is the "other" Germans who »JJJ lend the city much of its style. Only one out of three Münchner is Bavarian-born, while about 15% of the city's population is non-German. It is this cultural blend that finally gives the city its lustig if somewhat spurious cosmopolitanism, an odd chemistry of the provincial and the sophisticated...