Left-Wing Wagner

Germany's Bayreuth Festival had not seen anything like it in years. Instead of applause for Richard Wagner's music, there were hisses and catcalls --led off by an ear-shattering "No!" from the box of Dr. Alfons Goppel, Bavarian minister-president (equivalent of a U.S. Governor). Women lost their jewelry in the tumult, and one man furiously tore up $250 worth of tickets for subsequent performances.

Wagner, a musical and political revolutionary who liked nothing better than a good row, would probably have loved it. Whether he would have loved what Bayreuth did to his Tannhaeuser, the cause of all the furor, is another matter. Director Goetz Friedrich managed to turn a tale of a man caught between the forces of spirituality and sensuality into a pointed parable of Fascism defeated by Socialism.

Those familiar with Friedrich's background might have expected the unusual: an honored member of the East German Communist Party, he is deputy to the unorthodox Walter Felsenstein at the famed Komische Oper in East Berlin. Yet nobody seemed prepared for what appeared when Conductor Erich Leinsdorf lowered his baton for the overture. Tenor Hugh Beresford wandered over a barren wooden platform; instead of a balletic orgy, there was a huge human brain populated with frightening, dim figures miming psychiatric problems ranging from infantilism to sadomasochism. Venus arrived looking like a Reeperbahn stripper.

The audience began to stiffen when Act II brought on a male chorus dressed in black uniforms, strongly resembling Hitler's SS troops. As Tannhaeuser lay dying at the end and cries of "Hallelujah!" rang out, 345 klieg lights lit up the theater, and instead of pilgrims, the audience saw a stageful of workmen glaring at them, raising clenched fists like a mob in a social protest play.

LEFT-WING TANNHAeUSER'S FALL, ran the headline in Sueddeutsche Zeitung next day. "The Bavarian minister-president vowed to cut off all further subsidies to Bayreuth if any more Communist propaganda is ever attempted," fumed Wolfgang Wagner, the politically neutral director of the festival and grandson of the composer: "Is this democratic freedom?* Haven't there been boos in Bayreuth before?"

In fact, recent seasons have brought little to cause either boos or bravos in Bayreuth. The "new Bayreuth style," fostered by Wolfgang's elder brother Wieland, substituted psychodrama for realism. Since Wieland's death in 1966, the style has remained but the spark has gone. Friedrich has changed all that. "A genius like Richard Wagner," he says, "inevitably provides room for a whole complex of often contradictory interpretations." There was nothing contradictory about the box office results after the news of his scandalous Tannhaeuser. Gossip about Bayreuth's impending demise stopped, the Bavarian ministry denied it had ever thought of cutting off subsidies, and the paying public, though it may have come to denounce, remained to cheer. Said Wolfgang: "When Grandfather went to Bayreuth, he conceived it as a workshop. Tannhaeuser has brought us back to where we should always have been."

-Newsmen might like to ask Wolfgang the same question, since photographers have long been banned from Bayreuth. Production pictures--too often of poor quality--are handed out on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

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