Wolfgang’s curtain call
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on August 6, 2008
The mane of white hair is instantly recognisable, the twinkle that never fully conceals the toughness within is still the same, and the family features that seem to pass almost unchanged from one generation to the next are as striking as ever.
Somehow, Wolfgang has not merely survived from then until now. He has also succeeded in the terms that matter most to him. He has kept Bayreuth and its unique, visionary theatre in the forefront of European artistic life, ensured its funding and stability, maintained its generally high musical standards and continued to deliver an annual Wagner festival that could sell out many times over. He has done it, moreover, without relinquishing the Wagner family’s control and often by taking the unexpectedly daring artistic option - notably in the centenary Marx and Shaw influenced Ring directed by Patrice Chéreau in 1976 and now again this year, in a truly remarkable new production of Parsifal by the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim.
All this, though, has come at a price. Though the Wagner family has always been refreshingly willing to conduct its arguments in public, Wolfgang himself has often steered a furtive course through the minefields of the Wagner and Bayreuth past. The family and festival’s Nazi connections have frequently been downplayed in the years throughout which he has had charge. Wolfgang’s English-born mother Winifred, indeed, openly continued to celebrate the friendship with Hitler until she died in 1980.
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