Topnotch Tannh

One conductor slammed down his baton, grumbled "auf Wiedersehen," and walked out. Leading singers caught colds in the wet July weather. Technicians scrambled to lighten the murky stage so that the audience could see more of what was going on. After six weeks of preparing the season, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner last week raised the curtain on the opening production, their grandfather's Tannhaeuser. Despite all crises, the production turned out topnotch.

Bayreuth had not dared do Tannhaeuser since Toscanini's unforgettable version 24 years ago. But brothers Wieland and Wolfgang, who will dare anything, decided the old Venusberg needed some drastic new landscaping. They hired fast-rising, Kiev-born Conductor Igor Markevitch, who had never done Wagnerian opera before, then replaced him with Germany's Joseph Keilberth. "I was not aware that anybody here was interested in tempo," huffed Markevitch at one point. "All they talk about is lighting"--and no wonder, for Director Wieland Wagner's new staging relies mainly on light effects. When the trumpets announced curtain time one afternoon last week, nobody at Bayreuth quite knew what to expect.

Musically, the production proved to be more than adequate, despite the fact that Tenor Ramon Vinay and pretty Soprano Gre Brouenstein showed signs of strain. The chorus, one of the world's finest, performed brilliantly. But the chief attraction, as usual, was the staging. Wieland sees Tannhaeuser as a harried misfit in a world of rigid conventions. Dressed in a black cloak (while the other minstrels wear brown), he moves among stiff, almost mechanized people of the court. Preparing for the crucial song contest in the second act--usually staged with casual confusion--uniformly dressed men and women march into the hall in stiff military style. But the orgiastic Venusberg scene, set in flowing concentric circles of light, is heavily sensual: the ballet flings itself into bumps and grinds that rival the old Minsky's.

After the final curtain, half of the Bayreuth audience seemed in tears, clapped for 15 minutes. With Tannhaeuser, the Bayreuth brothers have now redraped all the standard Wagner works in their new, bare, dramatically lighted dress. Their style has become a prototype for new Wagner productions in most major opera houses. Notable exception: New York's Metropolitan, whose Wagner producers seem never to have heard of Bayreuth's lighting, let alone Minsky's.

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