Wieland Wagner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wieland Adolf Gottfried Wagner (born January 5, 1917 in Bayreuth , † October 17, 1966 in Munich ) was a German opera director and set designer .

Life

Wieland Wagner was the firstborn child of the composer Siegfried Wagner , son of Richard Wagner , and his wife Winifred (née Williams). He was trained as a painter and photographer and was responsible for the stage sets for the Bayreuth Festival from an early age (1937 Parsifal , 1943 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg ).

On September 12, 1941, he married Gertrud Reissinger, a former classmate with whom he had been friends since school days. From this marriage the children Iris Wagner (1942-2014), Wolf Siegfried Wagner (* 1943), Nike Wagner (* 1945) and Daphne Wagner (* 1946) emerged. Wieland Wagner's grave is located in the Bayreuth city cemetery in the Wagner family crypt, where his parents, his wife, his sister-in-law Gudrun Wagner and the urn of his brother Wolfgang Wagner were also buried.

Career in the Nazi state

Wieland Wagner was a member of the Hitler Youth as early as 1933 . In 1937 he created sets for the Parsifal stage dedication play . Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on July 24th: “Very dilettante.” In 1938 Wieland Wagner joined the NSDAP (No. 6078301). Adolf Hitler personally exempted him from any military service. Wieland Wagner used his access to the “Führer” in the Bayreuth power struggle (against his mother, against the artistic director Heinz Tietjen and the set designer Emil Preetorius ). During the so-called “War Festival” in 1943/1944, he created the stage decorations for the Meistersingers of Nuremberg , the only Wagner opera performed in Bayreuth at the time (quote from the program booklet: “In addition to the festival choir, Hitler Youth, BDM and men of the SS standard Wiking with. ”) Previously, in 1943, he had staged the“ Ring ”for the first time in the Altenburg State Theater. From September 1944 to April 1945 Wieland Wagner did military service at the "Institute for Physical Research" in the Bayreuth satellite camp , where many prisoners from the Flossenbürg concentration camp were obliged to produce control systems for rockets for forced labor . Here he was the deputy civil director of the Bayreuth satellite camp. On April 8th, he left for Nussdorf on Lake Constance.

Career in post-war Germany

Wieland Wagner stayed in the French occupation zone after the end of the war. He presumably did this to avoid a stricter denazification process . Only on November 13, 1948 did he come back and face the denazification process. In doing so, he kept silent about both his work in the concentration camp and his very close ties to Adolf Hitler, whom he had visited in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in December 1944. He was also classified as a follower.

After the war, Wieland Wagner completely turned away from the “brown” past and became an innovative director and set designer who was not afraid to break with tradition and at times also deliberately provoked. Since the new beginning in 1951 he was the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival , while his brother Wolfgang was the commercial director. He found his special staging style not least through the collaboration of his wife Gertrud Wagner (née Reissinger, 1916–1998), a dancer and choreographer. As the best-known director of “New Bayreuth”, Wieland eschewed detailed naturalism in his productions . With abstractions and suggestive lighting , the music remained in the foreground. The action on the stage was expressively condensed and only underlined by extremely reserved, stylized and meaningful gestures and movements. His Bayreuth staging style became the model for opera productions that were copied many times up until the 1970s.

Wieland Wagner managed to win over the best singers and conductors of his time for his work. One of his most important discoveries is the soprano Anja Silja , with whom he also had a personal relationship. In addition to the works of his grandfather, he staged operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck ( Orfeo ed Euridice ), Ludwig van Beethoven ( Fidelio ), Giuseppe Verdi ( Aida , Otello ), Georges Bizet ( Carmen ), Richard Strauss ( Salome , Elektra ), Alban Berg ( Wozzeck , Lulu ) and Carl Orff ( Antigonae , Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione ). Guest engagements have taken him to Stuttgart , Hamburg , Berlin , Munich , Cologne , Frankfurt , Vienna , Naples , Venice , Turin, Milan , Rome, Brussels , Barcelona , Lausanne, Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen , London and Edinburgh.

Wieland Wagner's grave in the Bayreuth city cemetery

In his last productions, Wieland Wagner turned more to the representational design model. From his untimely death in October 1966, his brother Wolfgang directed the Bayreuth Festival under sole responsibility until 2008.

Reconstructed productions by Wieland Wagner were later shown in the Metropolitan Opera New York, the San Francisco Opera , the Sydney Opera House and in Osaka .

Awards

Honors

With the city council resolution of October 26, 1966, the continuation of Richard-Wagner-Strasse outside the city ​​center around Bayreuth up to the confluence of Königsallee with Wieland-Wagner-Strasse was named.

The planned memorial event on the 50th anniversary of his death, most recently in the form of a panel discussion in the Wahnfried House , was canceled on the instructions of the city's cultural department. This was done at the request of the family.

See also

literature

  • Stephan Mösch , Sven Friedrich (ed.): “There is nothing 'eternal'”. Wieland Wagner: Aesthetics, Contemporary History, Effect. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-8260-6236-0 .
  • Brigitte Hamann : Winifred Wagner or Hitler's Bayreuth. Piper, Munich, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-492-04300-3 .
  • Walter Panofsky: Wieland Wagner. Schünemann, Bremen 1964.
  • Walter Erich Schäfer: Wieland Wagner. Personality and performance. Wunderlich / Leins, Tübingen 1970, new edition 1979.
  • Viola Schmid: Studies on Wieland Wagner's staging concept and his directorial practice. Dissertation. Munich 1973.
  • Anja Silja: The longing for the unattainable. Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932529-29-4 .
  • Geoffrey Skelton: Wieland Wagner. The positive skeptic. Gollancz, London 1971.
  • Berndt W. Wessling: Wieland Wagner, the grandson. Tonger Musikverlag, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-920950-28-3 .
  • Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
  • Jörg Skriebeleits and Albrecht Balds: The Bayreuth satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Rabenstein, Bayreuth 2003, ISBN 3-928683-30-6 .
  • Ingrid Kapsamer: Wieland Wagner: Wegbereiter und Weltffekt , Verlag Styria, Graz 2010, ISBN 978-3-222-13300-8
  • Grandpa's opera . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1962 ( online - via Wieland Wagner's Bayreuth Tristan production).
  • Renate Schostack , Behind Wahnfried's Walls - Gertrud Wagner - A life , 2. verä. Edition 1998, Hoffmann and Campe Verlag Hamburg, ISBN 3-455-08535-0
  • Oliver Hilmes : Cosima's children - triumph and tragedy of the Wagner dynasty . Siedler Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-899-1 .
  • Christoph Kammertöns : Wieland Wagner , in: Elisabeth Schmierer (ed.): Lexikon der Oper , Volume 2, Laaber, Laaber 2002, ISBN 978-3-89007-524-2 , pp. 776-777.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Renate Schostack, Behind Wahnfried's Walls - Gertrud Wagner - A Life , 2. verä. Edition 1998, Hoffmann and Campe Verlag Hamburg , ISBN 3-455-08535-0
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 638.
  3. ↑ Quotation printed in Ernst Klees Kulturlexikon, p. 638.
  4. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 638 and Jörg Skriebeleits and Albrecht Balds: The Bayreuth satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Rabenstein, Bayreuth 2003, ISBN 3-928683-30-6 .
  5. ^ Franz Simon Meyer (Stadtheimatpfleger der Stadt Bayreuth): Bayreuth street names , Bayreuth 2009, pp. 25 and 55.
  6. ↑ Bayreuth Marketing und Tourismus GmbH: Bayreuth aktuell August 2016 ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 13. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bayreuth.de
  7. ↑ Event announcement ( memento from August 31, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ) of the Richard Wagner Museum.
  8. ^ No public commemoration , Bayreuther Sonntagszeitung of October 2, 2016, p. 1.
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Wieland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner, Wieland Adolf Gottfried (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera director and set designer
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Bayreuth
DATE OF DEATH 17th October 1966
Place of death Munich