Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shock After Shock. Bayreuth got its first jolt-though, as matters turned out, a relatively mild one-with the new Parsifal. Gone were the traditional leafy gardens and churchly interiors of the past...
...nhilde and Wotan without their winged helmets? Siegfried's funeral pyre just a dainty red glow offstage-plus a couple of puffs of smoke from the wings? Oldtimers at Bayreuth paled with shock last week as they watched Richard Wagner's grandsons streamlining grandfather...
...revive Bayreuth, Wagner's grandsons Wolfgang, 32, and Wieland, 34, collected about $400,000 from the Bavarian government, radio networks and festival devotees. They cleaned up the Festspielhaus, hired musicians, replaced costumes and sets destroyed by playfully masquerading American G.I.s quartered in the building at the end of the war. The Wagners also designed some imaginative props. Example: Fafner, the dragon in Siegfried, is a 30-foot, steam-snorting monster with bloody ten-foot jaws, and teeth a foot long. Mused Wolfgang: "Grandfather, in the sky, probably would not like what we are doing. But on second thought...
...honor of grandfather, the grandsons engaged Veteran Bayreuth Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler to lead the soaring Beethoven choral symphony on opening night. The critics found the performance ragged and erratic-as if an orchestra fed on Wagner during six weeks of rehearsals could hardly keep its mind on Beethoven. Even so, the glossy first-night crowd gave the performance an ovation...
From now on, for the remainder of the three-week season, Bayreuth will be pure Wagner, with a good many newcomers among the performers. Unlike Furtwängler, neither of the Wagner conductors, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan, has ever held the festival podium before. Among the new singers: Met Soprano Astrid Varnay (Brünhilde) and U.S. Bass-Baritone George London (Amfortas in Parsifal), who has been a postwar star of the Vienna State Opera (TIME...