Word: bayreuth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Europe has been sweltering this summer as temperatures have soared into the 90s. But the hottest spot on the Continent last week had to be the small West German city of Bayreuth, site of the annual Richard Wagner opera festival. Inside a broiling, stifling Festspielhaus, an elegant first-night crowd shed its tuxedo jackets along with its customary solemn decorum as it watched, with growing disappointment, impatience and finally anger, a new production of Wagner's 16-hour, four-evening German myth, Der Ring des Nibelungen, by two British knights, Director Sir Peter Hall and Conductor Sir Georg Solti...
...Bayreuth, located 41 miles northeast of Nuremberg in the gently rolling Bavarian countryside, is a rumor mill that makes Washington, D.C., look like a Trappist monastery. Long before the curtain went up on Das Rheingold, which opens the cycle, the cafés were humming with musical gossip: Tenor Reiner Goldberg, Solti's original choice to sing the difficult role of Siegfried, had been fired (true). Soprano Hildegard Behrens, the Brünnhilde, had quit (false). The Hall production, with sets by Designer William Dudley, would be the biggest fiasco since ... well, since 1976, when Patrice Chéreau...
...conclusion of Die Walküre, reaching their apogee at the end of Götterdammerung. Both Hall and Dudley, who had refused through the week to take curtain calls, were jeered when they finally came onstage-accompanied for protection by Solti, the entire cast and the Bayreuth orchestra...
Germany's music attractions are among the most prestigious in Europe. Apart from the Munich and the Bayreuth Wagner festivals, which have long since been sold put, there are Jugendfestspiele at Bayreuth in August, Ansbach's legendary Bach week also early in August, and open-air opera at Augsburg and Heidelberg, followed in September by the Berlin Festival centering on Herbert von Karajan. West Berlin has become as racy as it was in the '30s, drawing Americans by the hundreds with dozens of cafés offering every variety of decadence...
...years later; Chéreau's Ring seems less outrageous than adventurous, and it has influenced succeeding productions of Wagner at Bayreuth. Syberberg's daring Parsifal, on the other hand, is likely to become a curiosity. Truly cinematic opera remains a Grail-like goal, waiting for its own Parsifal to redeem the promise of artistic salvation...