FESTIVAL ATMOSPHERE.(Germany)(Brief Article)

The Bayreuth Festival is 125 years old, and it seemed to us at OPERA NEWS that a century and a quarter of presenting the same ten operas to sold-out houses is a record deserving of observance. In "Bayreuth: Summer Pilgrimage" (page 22), Simon Williams, professor of dramatic art at the University of California at Santa Barbara, talks about the Festival, what it's like to attend, what to do while you're there. These are subjects he is well qualified to cover, since on many mornings during the Festival one can find him in Bayreuth, lecturing on the opera that will be presented that afternoon. For an offbeat look at the town that Wagner adopted as his home, we called on Jan Morris. Morris has previously given OPERA NEWS readers glimpses of Venice, Riga and Berlin, among others. To organize an appropriate photographic tribute, art director Gregory Downer traveled to Bayreuth while rehearsals for last year's Festival were underway. In addition to photographing Haus Wahnfried/Richard-Wagner-Museum, Downer also persuaded the Festival press authorities to let him roam the Festpielhaus with his camera, a concession that allowed him to take the unusual photograph that appears on page 24 shot from inside the famous sunken pit, looking upward into the auditorium.

While our observance marks the founding of the Festival in 1876, a second milestone has been achieved this year that seems only slightly less noteworthy. Fifty years ago, Richard Wagner's grandsons, Wolfgang and Wieland, re-launched the Festival in the aftermath of World War II. Wieland died in 1966, after establishing himself as a visionary opera director; Wolfgang, however, has remained in nearly total control of the enterprise for the full half-century. Critics have disparaged his productions of his grandfather's operas, and a family industry has sprung up with close kin describing the snubs and ill treatment they have received at his hands. Now, in this anniversary year, some of Wolfgang's friends are mounting a counterattack. Perhaps the most notable is Astrid Varnay, who sang in the first postwar Festival (and in sixteen others), and who worked harmoniously with both Wagner brothers. Just before this issue of ...