Twilight of the Gods

Bruenhilde and Wotan without their winged helmets? Siegfried's funeral pyre just a dainty red glow offstage--plus a couple of puffs of smoke from the wings? Oldtimers at Bayreuth paled with shock last week as they watched Richard Wagner's grandsons streamlining grandfather.

Aim of all the innovations: 1) to ditch realism for abstraction in the sets, 2) to make the stern old gods of Valhalla look less like period pieces. Designer Wieland Wagner's argument: the world has changed and so must the cult of Wagner.

Shock After Shock. Bayreuth got its first jolt--though, as matters turned out, a relatively mild one--with the new Parsifal. Gone were the traditional leafy gardens and churchly interiors of the past.

Wieland's garden was scant and ghostly, was seen only through a veil. He marched his knights of the Grail in from the depths of the huge (200 ft.) stage in near darkness. But even traditionalists had to admit that the result of it all was a Parsifal of strong simplicity, rich with the mystery of its Grail theme. Conductor Hans Knappertsbusch and the orchestra gave a faultless musical performance, and young (30) U.S. Bass-Baritone George London sang a magnificent Amfortas. Glowed Wagner Biographer Ernest Newman, 82, critic of the London Sunday Times and a Bayreuth regular for half a century: "The most beautiful Parsifal I have ever seen. I will never go to Covent Garden for it again. I will only see it here."

The real jolt came with the Ring cycle. When Wotan appeared on another dimmed-down stage in Das Rheingold, the murmur went up: "He has no helmet!" Muttered one oldtimer: "The stage is so dark I can't even see if he has a beard." (He had.) Shock followed shock. Wieland stripped his stages bare, cut down on all warlike gear save for a few essential spears. Siegfried's funeral pyre was left to the imagination. In Goetterdaemmerung, nobody got to see Valhalla burn: there was only a red glow in the sky, no sign of a cloud-borne castle.

There were compensations. The Metropolitan's Soprano Astrid Varnay sang such a sumptuous Bruennhilde that she made up for her missing helmet. In Siegfried, the dragon Fafner, an immense 30-ft. creation, emerged from a gaping cave in front-center (instead of from a miserable little hole to one side, as at the conventional Met). Fafner was so terrible in his oversize plungings and snortings that, probably for the first time in history, Siegfried seemed really brave to tackle him.

Kindly Light. Wieland is sure he is on the right track. He keeps the lighting dim partly to avoid any need for elaborate sets, partly out of respect for Richard Wagner's scores. "Grandfather did not want characters clearly seen because it would detract from concentration on the music." He believes that fussy old sets and sticky pathos make grandfather ridiculous to too many mid-century men. "We must go forward."

But other good Wagnerites still felt cheated, longed for a few more props and a lot more light. Their complaint: they had to spend so much energy searching for characters in the gloom that they could hardly concentrate on the music at all.

In "going forward," Wieland seemed to have left a good chunk of the traditional Wagner audience behind.

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