Wieland Wagner (Bayreuth, 5 de enero de 1917 – Múnich, 17 de octubre de 1966) fue el primogénito de los cuatro hijos (Wieland, Wolfgang, Friedelinde y Verena) de Siegfried Wagner y la inglesa Winifred Wagner (nacida Williams), nieto del compositor Richard Wagner y bisnieto del compositor y pianista Franz Liszt.
El nuevo Bayreuth
Fue uno de los directores de escena operísticos más importantes del siglo XX; sus escenificaciones de las óperas de su abuelo en el teatro del Festival de Bayreuth revolucionaron la percepción de la obra de Wagner para siempre. Enfocado en su raíz griega y en el teatro psicológico, es uno de los creadores del Regietheater.
Su trayectoria evolucionó desde el naturalismo hasta puestas en escena simbolistas, fuertemente influidas por la obra de Adolphe Appia. Sus elementos más característicos eran la fuerte expresividad interna e inmovilidad de los cantantes, el vacío casi total de la escena y un fuerte uso de la iluminación como creadora de ambientes; se dice que «pintaba con luz».
Se considera que su manifiesto artístico es la puesta en escena de Parsifal en 1951, que sirvió para reabrir el Festival de Bayreuth después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Buscando huir de los vínculos que se habían creado entre esta obra y el nazismo, eliminó la escenografía tradicional (el templo, el bosque). Por ejemplo, Klingsor no aparecía en su castillo mágico, sino en medio de una telaraña verdosa creada con la luz.
Además de Parsifal, produjo Los maestros cantores de Núremberg en 1956, donde debido a la abstracción se lo llamó «Los maestros sin Nuremberg». En el marco del festival creó Tristán e Isolda, El anillo del nibelungo, Lohengrin y Tannhäuser.
Fuera de Bayreuth produjo Fidelio, Salomé y El anillo del nibelungo en Nápoles, Stuttgart y Colonia.
Reclutó un importante grupo de cantantes que dieron origen al llamado «Nuevo Bayreuth», atentos a sus indicaciones, fue fundamental en las carreras de Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Anja Silja, Régine Crespin, Hans Hotter, Ramón Vinay, James King, Gustav Neidlinger, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hermann Uhde, Josef Greindl, Thomas Stewart, Theo Adam, Gottlob Frick, Elisabeth Grümmer, Hermann Prey y Grace Bumbry, la primera afroamericana en cantar en el escenario del teatro.
Durante su regencia el festival contó con la participación de directores de orquesta de la talla de Herbert von Karajan, Hans Knappertsbusch, Joseph Keilberth, Clemens Krauss, Wolfgang Sawallisch y André Cluytens.
Desde 1951 hasta su muerte en 1966, Wieland Wagner fue codirector del Festival de Bayreuth junto con su hermano Wolfgang Wagner.
Vida privada
En 1941 se casó con la coreógrafa Gertrud Reisinger, con la que tuvo cuatro hijos: Iris Wagner (1942-2014), Wolf-Siegfried (*1943), Nike (*1945) y Daphne (*1946).
En la década del sesenta mantuvo un sonado romance con la soprano Anja Silja, una de las jóvenes estrellas del festival, para la que produjo Salomé y otras óperas fuera de Bayreuth.
Murió a los 48 años en 1966 de cáncer de pulmón.
Curiosidades
Sobreviven muy pocos testimonios filmados de su obra, entre ellos las históricas representaciones de Tristán y La valquiria en Osaka, Japón, un año después de su muerte, con la participación de algunos de sus cantantes mas dilectos. Durante la II Guerra Mundial se dedicó a pintar retratos de su abuelo para obtener ingresos.
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Wieland Wagner (5 January 1917 – 17 October 1966) was a German opera director.
Life
Wieland Wagner was the elder of two sons of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, grandson of composer Richard Wagner, and great-grandson of composer Franz Liszt through Wieland's paternal grandmother.
In 1941, he married the dancer and choreographer Gertrud Reissinger. They had four children: Iris (b. 1942), Wolf Siegfried (b. 1943), Nike (b. 1945) and Daphne (b. 1946). Their son Wolf married Marie Eleanore von Lehndorff-Steinort, sister of fashion model Veruschka, whose father was involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.
Late in his life, Wieland had a love affair with the much younger Anja Silja, one of the singers he had recruited for Bayreuth.
In 1965, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite.
He died of lung cancer in October 1966.
Career
Wieland Wagner is credited as an initiator of Regietheater through ushering in a new modern style to Wagnerian opera as a stage director and designer, substituting a symbolic for a naturalist staging and focusing on the psychology of the drama.
Wieland began his directorial career before World War II, working on operas by his father and grandfather. His innovative approach did not become clear until after the war. His design for the 1937 Bayreuth production of Parsifal, for example, was conservative, though it did have film projections during the transformation scenes.
When the Bayreuth Festival reopened after the war in 1951, Wieland and his brother Wolfgang became festival directors in place of their mother, whose association with Adolf Hitler had made her unacceptable. (Wieland's own past was, however, suppressed.) The revolutionary productions evoked extreme views both for and against.
Wieland's long-lasting 1951 production of Parsifal included many features with which he later would be identified. Post-war austerity and his own interest - influenced by Adolphe Appia - in lighting effects led to the use of round minimalist sets lit from above.
Wieland's first post-war Siegfried represented Fafner with a 30 ft statue of a dragon belching fire. In his later production of the opera he instead used pairs of giant eyes, which were picked out in turn from the back-projected forest, to suggest the movements of a huge creature stretching halfway down the Bayreuth hill.
Wieland's 1956 "Mastersingers without Nuremberg" was the symbolic culmination of his campaign to move away from naturalism in Wagner production with the medieval town represented by the cobbled shape of a street and, above the stage, a ball suggestive of a flowering tree.
Wieland's minimalism extended beyond the stage furniture and props. The performer of Gunther, for example, was expected to sing leaning forward in Act 1 of Götterdämmerung until he felt his authority challenged by Hagen and sat up straight. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast with traditional operatic acting.
Although Wieland is best remembered for productions of his grandfather's works at Bayreuth, he was often asked to work elsewhere in Germany and Europe. For example, he produced Tannhäuser and Der fliegende Holländer in Copenhagen, the Ring in Naples, Stuttgart and Cologne, and Beethoven's Fidelio in Stuttgart, London, Paris and Brussels.
Wieland's wife Gertrud collaborated with him to develop his interpretations of the operas and devise stage movement for the solo singers and chorus. Trained in modern dance, she is credited in the Bayreuth programs with choreography for Parsifal, Tannhäuser, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but in fact she assisted him in all of his Bayreuth productions and many that he staged elsewhere, sometimes taking rehearsals on her own. This was not revealed until after Wieland's death, and Wolfgang Wagner claims in his memoirs that it's not true. But biographer Renate Schostack recounts many particulars of this collaboration,] as does the daughter of Wieland and Gertrud, Nike Wagner.
The great love of his life was the German soprano Anja Silja. Only twenty years old, she took over as Senta in 1960 in Bayreuth when Leonie Rysanek cancelled, and created a sensation. Blessed with a strong, agile, youthful and gleaming voice, and with an extraordinary talent for acting, she embodied Wieland's ideals. She sang Elsa in Lohengrin, Elisabeth and Venus in Tannhäuser and Eva in Meistersinger at Bayreuth. Elsewhere, he cast her as Isolde, Brünnhilde, Richard Strauss's Elektra, and Salome, and Alban Berg's Lulu and Marie in Wozzeck. She even sang Desdemona in Verdi's Otello in Wieland's production.
Among the other celebrated singers who worked with Wieland were Hans Hotter, George London, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Eberhard Wächter, Thomas Stewart, Theo Adam, Josef Greindl, Jerome Hines, Wolfgang Windgassen, Ramón Vinay, Jess Thomas, Jon Vickers, Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Régine Crespin, Rita Gorr, Leonie Rysanek, Birgit Nilsson, Jean Madeira, Grace Hoffman, Franz Crass, Victoria de los Ángeles, Grace Bumbry, Christa Ludwig, Martti Talvela, Carlos Alexander, Isabel Strauß, James King, Claude Heater, Ticho Parly, Dame Gwyneth Jones, and Fritz Wunderlich. Wieland wanted great actors, but he also wanted the singers to execute his plans faithfully.
Conductors with whom he collaborated were Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Joseph Keilberth, André Cluytens, Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan, Erich Leinsdorf, Heinz Tietjen, Lorin Maazel, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Karl Böhm, Bruno Maderna, and Thomas Schippers.
Wieland Wagner's life and work are discussed in Tony Palmer's 2011 film, The Wagner Family.
Associations with Hitler and Nazism
Winifred Wagner's close friendship with Hitler meant that, as a teenager and young man, Wieland knew the dictator as "Uncle Wolf".In 1938 he joined the Nazi Party on Hitler's personal insistence. From September 1944 to April 1945 he held a sinecure at the Institut für physikalische Forschung in Bayreuth, founded by his brother-in-law Bodo Lafferentz, which was a satellite of the Flossenbürg concentration camp devoted to research and development of an improved guidance system of the V-2 rocket bomb. This enabled him to avoid being called into the Wehrmacht for the final defense of Germany. At the Institut he built models of stage sets and developed new stage lighting systems with the assistance of prisoner Hans Imhof, an electrical technician. At his denazification hearing in Bayreuth, on December 10, 1948, he was classified as a "Mitläufer" (follower), the fourth and lowest category, and fined DM100 plus the court costs.
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Wagner's grandson 'was in charge of Nazi slaves'
The Telegraph
By Hannah Cleaver in Berlin 02 Aug 2003
Richard Wagner's grandson used slave labourers in a Nazi camp to work on experiments in stage design and lighting for the Bayreuth festival, according to a new book.
Wieland Wagner adopted a firm anti-Nazi stance after the war and his hard line against his mother Winifred's Nazi connections is credited with rehabilitating the Wagner dynasty.
But according to a book, Bayreuth, the Outer Camp of Flossenburg Concentration camp, published this week, he was the deputy civilian leader of the prison during the war.
The authors, Albrecht Bald, a teacher, and Jorg Skriebeleit, who heads the camp memorial organisation, say that he used prison labour to conduct theatrical experiments that bore fruit when the Bayreuth Festival was relaunched in the 1950s.
Flossenburg, in Bayreuth, was a small camp housing 85 prisoners, technically trained Russians, Poles, French, Italian and German men, who were forced to work in what was styled the "Institute for Physical Research", helping to develop the V2 rocket.
The book claims that it would never have been built was it not for the Wagner family and their influence in the government.
Bodo Lafferentz, Wieland's brother-in-law, used his influence to set up the camp in Bayreuth and to get Wieland a job there, protecting him from possible drafting into the army.
Although the camp was not a scene of mass extermination, and in comparison to places such as Auschwitz, was a relatively humane regime, Wieland Wagner, who died in 1966, worked hard to keep his involvement hidden.
