Word: bayreuth
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...Bayreuth Festival, however, can see him as something other than a stalwart. In a brilliant bit of casting against type, the suave, silken Prey has been portraying the cantankerous Beckmesser in Wagner's Die Meistersinger. It may be the first time in history that Beckmesser out-sings his tenor rival in the prize-song contest. "In his letters, Wagner said that Beckmesser should not be too comic," says Prey. "So I said I will sing this music like Schubert's Winterreise. "And he does...
...intoxicating music that she pitched backward into the laps of the unflappable listeners behind her. Richard Wagner, who caused all the excitement, rested peacefully in his grave behind his villa Wahnfried, buried, in the phrase of one astonished British tourist, "in the backyard, sir, like a dog." Bayreuth has seen everything...
...appears to be a gigantic mausoleum. More radical was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tristan, new last year. Ponnelle has staged the last 40 minutes of the work, including Isolde's famous Liebestod, as the hallucination of the dying Tristan, who has been abandoned by his beloved. Now Bayreuth may really have seen everything...
Wagner's artistic vision: a theater built to his own specifications where his revolutionary music dramas could be given their fullest expression. After Wagner's death in 1883, his widow Cosima carried on the tradition for 25 years, when she was succeeded by their son Siegfried. Bayreuth was re-opened after the war in 1951, and a leaner, more ascetic style developed under Wagner's grandson Wieland. Operating under the twin inspirations of his own adventurous ideas and the straitened German economy, Wieland Wagner created a spare, allusive form of musical theater in which the listener...
...latest Bayreuth style came into full bloom in 1976 with the centennial production of the Ring cycle, staged by the French enfant terrible Patrice Chreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Using such anachronisms as the Rhine Maidens playing near a hydroelectric dam, Chéreau fashioned an allegory of the industrial revolution from Wagner's mythic tale of greed and its consequences. A vivid mixture of naturalistic detail and wild flights of imaginative fancy, the Chéreau Ring set the tone for what followed...