Writings

Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, 1923)

Winifred Wagner, ed.: Reisetagebuch 1892 (Bayreuth, 1935) [private printing]

Bibliography

Grove6 (H. Leuchtmann) [incl. further bibiliography]

L. Karpath: Siegfried Wagner als Mensch und Künstler (Leipzig, 1902)

K. Söhnlein: Erinnerungen an Siegfried Wagner und Bayreuth (Bayreuth, 1980) [with suppl. Siegfried Wagners Briefe an Söhnlein, ed. P.P. Pachl]

P.P. Pachl: Siegfried Wagner: Genie im Schatten (Munich, 1988)

M. Kiesel: Studien zur Instrumentalmusik Siegfried Wagners (Frankfurt, 1994)

Wagner

(4) Wieland (Adolf Gottfried) Wagner

(b Bayreuth, 5 Jan 1917; d Munich,17 Oct 1966). Director and stage designer, grandson of (1) Richard Wagner and son of (3) Siegfried Wagner. Brought up to direct the Bayreuth Festival, he observed the work of the designers Emil Preetorius and Alfred Roller in the 1930s. His first professional work as a designer and director was at Altenburg, but he also provided designs for Parsifal (1937) and Meistersinger (1943) at Bayreuth. After World War II, with his brother (5) Wolfgang Wagner, he revived the Bayreuth Festival, in 1951, with starkly modern, symbolist productions; he remained co-director of the festival until 1966. His productions were greatly at variance with the Romantic tradition of Wagnerian staging consolidated by Wagner’s widow Cosima, who at the turn of the century had firmly rejected the symbolist projects of Adolphe Appia, an acknowledged influence on Wieland.

Wieland Wagner directed and designed all his grandfather’s operas, from Rienzi to Parsifal, according to his conviction that the music did not require the old-fashioned, explicit scenery and stage action that the composer had prescribed. He used much reduced stage movements, dispensed with rainbow bridges and shattering swords, and imposed his own images on the works; in his 1954 Tannhäuser, Act 2 was set on a chessboard where the White Queen broke the rules by rushing forward to protect a threatened Black Knight. His productions were marked by the naked simplicity of their settings – most notably the tilted disc on which he staged the second of his three Ring cycles (1951) – by the importance he attached to lighting, and by their strongly defined characterizations. A political, even socialist, element was perceived by some critics in productions such as that of the Ring of 1965, while other critics responded only to its mythical dimensions. He continually reworked his stagings, so that many Bayreuth ‘revivals’ were in effect new productions.

Though usually associated with Bayreuth and his grandfather’s works, he contributed important productions of works by other composers, including Gluck, Verdi, Berg and Orff, notably at the Stuttgart Staatsoper. His Fidelio (1954) was notorious for his removal of the spoken dialogue and rearrangement of many of the musical numbers; Salome (1962), a production conceived specifically for Anja Silja, was remarkable for his reversal of the style of the piece: he found stillness in the dance, and movement in the traditionally static dramatic sections. After his death the Bayreuth Festival gradually replaced all his productions; Parsifal, the last to survive, was retired in 1973.

See also Bayreuth.