Valhaila & Mozart's Tomb

Despite the claims of such chic newcomers as Spoleto, Europe's two most important music festivals remain Salzburg and Bayreuth. As they opened last week--Bayreuth with new productions of all four operas of Richard Wagner's Ring, and Salzburg with a new Festspielhaus reputed to be the world's most technically advanced theater--both festivals were musically still far ahead of most other summer fare, but seemed disappointing compared to the success of past seasons.

At Bayreuth, Wagner's grandson Wolfgang was up. to his old tricks: stripped down, sparsely lighted productions designed to free the stern old gods of Valhalla from heavy, cardboard-shield and plaster-throne cliches. But by now, this once revolutionary style has produced some bothersome cliches of its own. The basic stage set of last week's Ring was an eight-ton, segmented concave disk looking somewhat like a huge radar antenna. In the second and fourth Rheingold scenes it was used intact, tilted toward the audience to suggest the rugged slopes of Wotan's mountain home; in other scenes the disk's movable segments represented a cave or a hut.

Despite such simplicity of design, stage movements throughout most of The Ring were so statuesque that they suggested oratorio rather than opera. Realism was often ludicrously mixed with abstraction; when Mime helped to fashion a sword for Siegfried out of a magic potion, he matter-of-factly cracked two eggs into the potion as if following a recipe by Gayelord Hauser. Worst of all was the lighting, which was so murky that it came close to achieving Richard Wagner's stated ideal: "Now that I have created the in visible orchestra,* I would like to invent the invisible stage."

What redeemed Bayreuth's Ring was the first-rate musical performance by Conductor Rudolf Kempe and his singers, among them Birgit Nilsson, Aase Nordmo Loevberg, Hermann Uhde, Jerome Hines. While the stars bore familiar names, the surprises of the festival were provided by the talented newcomers. Among them: Berlin-born Anja Silja, 20, singing Senta in The Flying Dutchman, who first came to Bayreuth four years ago as a visiting teenager; Texas-born Thomas Stewart, 32, who was selected for the impressive role of Amfortas in Parsifal after illness forced George London to cancel; U.S. Conductor Lorin Maazel, 30, who accounted for a fine reading of Lohengrin, thus becoming the first American and the youngest conductor of any nation in the Bayreuth pit.

In Salzburg, the new Festspielhaus opened with Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, but it was the theater itself that drew most of the attention. Although plenty of other sites had been available, the sentimental Salzburgers built the new house right next to the old one in the city's mountain-hugging old quarter. Result: the 100-ft.-wide stage had to be blasted out of solid rock, dragging out construction time to four years. The original estimated cost was tripled to $11 million. Everything about the 2,360-seat new theater, designed in a kind of Radio City Music Hall Modern, is massive and somber--the stage is framed by six gun-grey arches whose openings for lights and loudspeakers look like the portholes of a battleship. Austrians, who like their theaters in baroque plush, already refer to their new Festspielhaus as "Mozart's Tomb." It is too big, they argue, for the drawing room and bedroom humors of such operas as The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutte.

If Salzburg's artistic director, Herbert von Karajan, had hoped to quiet the criticism by opening with Strauss instead of Mozart, he did not entirely succeed. Although the new hall's acoustics were fine--clean and clear but not too dry--the performance itself was limp and fussily slow. The excellent singers, including Lisa Delia Casa, Sena Jurinac, Otto Edelmann, Hilde Gueden, seemed tired and over-rehearsed. At the end of perhaps the longest Rosenkavalier on record (4 1/2 hours), the audience responded with dutiful, lukewarm applause and filed out wearily. As a sop to grumbling Salzburgers, Festspielhaus Architect Clemens Holzmeister came forward with a new proposal: reconstruction of the old festival house into an intimate, baroque theater "perfect for Mozart."

*For the opening at the theater at Bayreuth in 1876, Wagner insisted that the orchestra be sunk in a partially covered pit, in order to achieve the proper blend of sound and prevent the audience from being distracted by the sight of the musicians.

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