Author : Jos Hermans
The reopening of the Bayreuth Festival on July 30, 1951 with a performance of Parsifal, must rank as the most important operatic event in Germany since the Berlin premiere of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in 1925. From the very first bars, a shock wave ran through the auditorium that made it clear that with this production, a sacred Wagnerian rite had been profoundly secularized. In time this production would be considered one of the greatest opera productions of all time but at the premiere itself opinions were rather divided. It brought ecstasy to some spectators, and scared the hell out of others. "This was not only the best Parsifal I have ever seen and heard but also one of the three or four most moving spiritual experiences of my life," wrote Ernest Newman. "Bayreuth has risen again: the mysticism that surrounds Bayreuth is no illusion. Wagner is alive! His message is not dead," Le Figaro block-lettered. The German press did not know what hit it and reacted rather skeptically. Few understood what this new Bayreuth stood for but it was clear that the old orthodox performance practice of Wagner's operas had been shaken and that a new path had been taken. The reaction was fierce but came as no surprise. To change the scenic realization of a work like Parsifal, which for decades had been enslaved by a leaden tradition, was a bold move. Only a Wagner would have dared. That Wagner was the grandson Wieland, traumatized by the war and its aftermath, who had been Adolf Hitler's favorite of all the Wagners.
Entrümpelung
What surprised the audience most was not what they got to see but rather what they did not get to see. Instead of a lush forest and a picturesque lake, during the opening scene there was hardly more to be seen than an empty stage. Gone was the Temple of the Grail with its mighty columns and its ornate Romanesque dome; in its place was a dark, unreal interior with a round table built on a small stage and surrounded by the vague silhouette of four columns. Gone was Klingsor's sinister magic castle; only the head and shoulders of the scary wizard were now visible in the center of what appeared to be an enormous spider's web. There was no swan to be seen in the first act and no dove in the third. When Hans Knappertsbusch, who was conducting the production, was asked by an enraged audience member how it was possible that he could have given his cooperation to such a thing, he replied -not entirely without seriousness- that during rehearsals he had assumed that the set pieces would still be delivered.
The Ring was also on the schedule in the reopening year. Although it was less evocatively conceived and contained more realistic elements than Parsifal, this production too represented a radical break with the tradition of the past. Familiar set elements such as the Valhalla Castle, the rainbow bridge, the ash tree in Hunding's hut, the Valkyries’ rock, and Mime's forge were still present on stage but clearly not in the familiar guise as before. All other traditional props and costumes were gone. What replaced them suggested a world of Greek rather than Germanic gods, an impression which gained strength in the following years as Wieland continued to rid his productions of all superfluous realistic elements until by 1954 he reached a stylistic harmony.
The following season Wieland turned to Tristan und Isolde. Wieland was convinced that all the traditional stage elements distracted the attention of the main characters and consequently robbed the psychological drama of its impact. And so he staged the play in a completely abstract style that placed the two main actors at the center of the action. In doing so, he adhered to Adolphe Appia's vision, which was already half a century old. In the first act, one could only make out the vague outlines of a ship's deck, a huge canvas and a sofa. The love duet took place on a sofa in a cosmos saturated with darkness, with the only visible element being the heads of the two lovers, united in a kind of blue-black infinity. The third act took place in an indefinable environment, filled with a monumental emptiness, of irredeemable bleakness.
With these three productions, Wieland had, in two years, defined the framework of Bayreuth's new house style, a style that would later be canonized by the press as "Neu-Bayreuth," and which granted the spectator an almost unlimited freedom to fill in the images suggested by the music itself. Characteristic of this new Bayreuth were: the circular acting area, the ingenious use of light to connect the music with movement and color, the simplification of costumes without any suggestive reference to time or space, the transformation of the characters from pseudo-human beings into symbols, the removal of superfluous set pieces and unnecessary movements. The purpose of this "Entrümpelung" was to strip Richard Wagner's operas of their traditional Germanic character. And just as silence can be an essential element of music so Wieland's abstract style demonstrated that emptiness can play a vital role on an operatic stage.
With the 1954 production of Tannhäuser, Wieland's evolving style entered its next creative phase. Again the stage was freed of excess naturalistic elements but rather than leaving the stage bare he emplaced a sequence of highly stylized expressionist tableaux reminiscent of Paul Klee. In the opening scene, the two worlds of the drama were provocatively juxtaposed. On the left, the mountain of Venus could be seen as an abstract cave, sculpted by concentric circles of light. On the right, at the foot of a giant cross, lay Tannhäuser. The world of the Wartburg was a stark, disciplined world. The hall of song was given a highly geometric layout with a floor like a chessboard on which the participants seemed to move like chess pieces. The opera concluded with a stunning transformation of the traditional pilgrim choir into a flat pyramid of haloes glowing in the dark like Greek icons. Wieland was immediately accused of creating costumed oratorios and that the logical culmination of this would be the concert performance.
Die Meistersinger of 1956 was considered by its detractors to be the most problematic production of all. Not only was the new house style applied more brutally than ever before, this version was at the same time an outright criticism of any nationalistic feeling. The final scene was the most shocking: there was no trace of the familiar Nürenberg which elicited the mocking comment that Wieland had realized a "Meistersinger ohne Nürenberg." For the first time in its history, the Festspielhaus witnessed booing. For the Wagner fundamentalists and political conservatives -two tendencies that usually went together- the production was a parody of Wagner's creation. Worse, by forcing the audience to face the fact that the Nürnberg of the mastersingers could no longer exist as before, the performance was also experienced as a political humiliation. Walter Abendroth, music critic at Die Zeit, who as recently as 1934 had bewailed "the immortal German character" of the play, was furious. "Who will defend Wagner in Bayreuth?" he complained aloud.
Moritz Klönne, president of the Friends of Bayreuth, bundled all the disappointment and consternation into a personal letter to Wieland: "Bayreuth is a sacred German cultural shrine," he wrote, "and Die Meistersinger is Wagner's most German work. All your romantic internationalism can't help that". Which was further proof that the old guard had not adjusted its emotions in a century, that it had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Klönne did not leave it at that and also added an inventory of traditional set pieces that he wanted to see returned to the stage in the name of the Friends. In the absence of these, he concluded menacingly, he would sever all ties with Bayreuth and look elsewhere for HIS Meistersinger. Not without contempt, Wieland replied that if the political right and the conservative opera audience of the festival wished to make its cultural nest in Bayreuth they had to do so on his artistic terms.
This was followed in 1958 by Lohengrin, considered by many to be Wieland's finest and most harmonious production, which featured a series of mythological dreamscapes that seemed to match what Thomas Mann had once described as music of a "silver-blue beauty." Clad in silver and sapphire blue light, the knights and courtiers of Brabant and Saxony stood motionless in rows arranged in a semicircle. Scenery was all but absent. The swan and the oak of justice had become elegant symbols. All movement had been reduced to the bare minimum. Of the church in the second act, only the outlines could be seen by means of a faintly lit stained glass window and a few Gothic arches. The bedroom scene received a rather ironic treatment. The members of the small bridal choir wore white lilies and resembled Pre-Raphaelite virgins in the soft Art Nouveau style of Rosetti or Burne-Jones. Lohengrin marked the culmination of the second phase in Wieland's stylistic evolution in which he used the stage as a "Geistiger Raum. In doing so, he provided the members of the chorus with uniform costumes and had them move in identical ways. He complemented the minimal set pieces with an imaginative direction of light and color that subtly referred to place and time.
With Der Fliegende Holländer in 1959, Wieland's style entered a new phase again. The disc, the Greek chorus, the symbols and stylized movements of the earlier productions had now given way to a more postmodern realism in which this time there was a real ship, real spinning wheels and an exciting choreography of the sailors. Hans Knappertsbusch was astonished. The costumes were a motley mishmash of styles and colors. For the first time the work was performed with the Dresden score, without Wagner's later revisions of the orchestration and without the redemption motif at the end. Instead of the romantic apotheosis, he had the Dutchman die on the stage and Senta disappear into the darkness. The result was fairly unanimously hailed by critics as a revelation, as the best production the work had ever seen at Bayreuth. Sawallisch's orchestral direction and the vocal performances of George London and Leonie Rysanek gave everyone, Wieland included, the feeling of having witnessed a historic performance.
Notwithstanding the provision in Siegfried's will that claimed Bayreuth exclusively for Wagner, Wieland toyed with the idea of also performing Rienzi and even contemporary operas including those by Carl Orff at Bayreuth. In the end he left it at an idea and limited his extra-Wagner creations to the other opera houses where he staged. He spent the last six years of his life in Bayreuth reinterpreting his own original Wagner productions.
First came Tannhäuser in 1961. The Venusberg was no longer a cave but a giant wasps' nest. The valley at the Wartburg was a somber space dominated by a giant cross while the singing hall was a gilded abstract space. The movements on the stage had changed greatly. The courtiers were freer in their movements and the pilgrim choir was divided into three disjointed groups. The 24-year-old Grace Bumbry was the sensation of the production, although this had at least as much to do with her skin color. Only in Bayreuth was it possible for a "black Venus" to be considered an outright provocation. Maurice Béjart mimicked a sex orgy during the bacchanal described by the Times as a "combination of Wagner, Place Pigalle and Henry Miller."
Wieland's second version of Tristan und Isolde ran annually from 1962 to 1970. With it he reached the pinnacle of his symbolic style. Each act was dominated by a large monolith that recalled Henry Moore. The power and mystery of the totemic objects -erotic and phallic on the one hand and suggestive of the story's Celtic background on the other- was heightened by the use of lighting in tones such as greenish yellow, blue, and red. In his first version he had kept all the sailors and courtiers off the stage to emphasize the lovers' self-obsession and indifference to the outside world. Now he had brought them back in in the first act to demonstrate that the couple could not escape the social context. With Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen and Karl Böhm all at their peak, this production was judged by many a critic to be Wieland's most perfect.
In 1963 it was Die Meistersinger's turn again. Here Wieland showed himself at his most eclectic, gleaning ideas from Shakespeare, Brecht and Brueghel. Thus the chorus was now a collection of individuals who also moved on stage as such. The production was both an imaginative plunge into realism and an adventurous attempt at parody. In this sense, it was probably a more faithful representation of life in sixteenth-century Nuremberg than ever before. The unitary scenery showed an Elizabethan theater with a wooden gallery and wooden floor. The scene on the party meadow was a boisterous display of earthy vulgarity rather than a solemn occasion where German art was revered. Nothing irritated Wieland more than the traditional ceremonial entrance of the mastersingers that reminded him of Nazi party meetings. Consequently, he scrapped the procession of the guilds. It earned him the loudest boos in the history of the festival.
Public interest was high for his Ring in 1965. More press was present than at any post-war musical event. After Henry Moore had dropped out as a set designer Wieland decided to take on the scenography himself once again. The result was a synthesis of his abstract and symbolic style. Valhalla was built like a towering, threatening wall. The stacked gold took the form of a woman's body. The giants had no sticks, Donner had no hammer and no rock to strike. There was no trace of Hunding's hut and the ash tree was barely recognizable. The sets for Siegfried and the two first acts of Götterdämmerung were dominated by totemic objects that seemed to come from a science-fiction movie studio. Wotan and Fricka slept standing up. Fasolt was never truck, much less pummelled to death. Siegfried didn't get a funeral procession and Brünnhilde didn't get a funeral pyre. This was an interpretation that completely wiped the floor with the past. Keys to what this all meant were found in the symbols.
Staging is interpretation
At the new start of the festival in 1951, Wieland had several objectives. The most obvious objective was to achieve the very highest level vocally and musically. Another objective was to free the institution of Bayreuth from its artistic and political past. But above all he wanted to show that Wagner's operas were building blocks of a lively art form that contained more than beautiful music and spectacle, that they were in fact great drama with a pertinent meaning for the contemporary world. How he was to achieve this was far from clear when he began and had to be worked through, opera by opera. Each opera was staged by Wieland according to the dramatic and musical uniqueness of the work so that a uniform style never actually came about. Step by step he sought his way, and he did so with considerably more toil and self-doubt than his openly candid productions and his often commanding and intolerant behavior made it seem.
Until a stretch in the 1950s, critics disagreed on whether Neu-Bayreuth would have a short life or become a definitive chapter in the interpretive history of Wagner's operas. The answer came, production after production. There were those for whom Wieland could do nothing bad and there were those for whom Wieland could do nothing good. The general attitude of criticism, however, was enthusiastic. His work was admired for its imagination, its clarity, its inner integrity, its unity. It was both a revolution and a revelation. Even his most hostile critics could not deny that his productions had often produced unsurpassedly beautiful and very exciting experiences, beyond anything that had been seen on an opera stage up to that point. "For the first time I saw a Tristan und Isolde in which the stage, orchestra, singers, conductor, costumes and lighting melted into a unity that Wagner could only have dreamed of," was the typical reaction of the Opera reviewer in 1952. Many a critic of the first hour later swallowed his judgment like the Opera critic who had stared dismayed at Die Meistersinger of 1956 and later described it as "the truest and most beautiful production one could wish for."
But as always, there was also considerable opposition. Some opponents were as fanatical as only Bayreuth can be. The hostility showed that artistic and political conservatism still coincided and that postwar Bayreuth was hardly different from prewar in this respect, even if terms such as "Jewish influences" and "cultural Bolshevism" were no longer openly uttered. When Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was invited to tea by Winifred Wagner, he had to listen in amazement to how she destroyed her son's work, the work of Picasso but at the same time did not stop praising the Führer.
Wieland's most extreme opponents - mostly incorrigible National Socialists - united in the "Vereinigung für die werktreue Wiedergabe der Dramen Richard Wagners", an organization that engaged in sabotage actions on stage, distributing pamphlets and taking legal action to have the old productions protected as "national monuments". At the same time, there were also more rational critics who believed they found fundamental objections in Wieland's work. Wagner's works required specific staging, they felt, and this rule had been flouted by Wieland. Wagner, they knew, would have known exactly what he wanted and so ignoring his explicit stage directions meant nothing less than an undesirable change to his work. The gravest charge applied with respect to Wieland's interference with Wagner's scores. Thus he had permitted himself to cut or insert pieces in Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Götterdämmerung.
Wieland had little patience with his critics whom he regarded as bullying neo-Hanslicks. In his 1951 essay "Überlieferung und Neugestaltung," he anticipated all these charges and provided his critics with answers even before the questions were asked. Opposition to change, he argued, following Appia and Preetorius, is not fidelity to the work but nitpicking. Cosima's mistake was not that she had established a strict style but that she considered it final and unchangeable. The development of electric lighting techniques alone had consigned a whole world of traditional stage techniques to the history book. Resistance to change, he wrote, "means transforming the virtue of fidelity into the vice of rigidity." To the claim that his changes meant artistic betrayal, he replied, "inszenieren heisst interpretieren." After all, Cosima, Siegfried and Preetorius were interpreting no less than he was, he thought. True masterpieces tolerate a very varied treatment. The only meaningful criterion for fidelity is whether a production clearly conveys the intentions of the music and the drama. And this assertion led to his second counterargument: traditional sets distorted the score and Wagner's dramatic intentions - exactly as Appia had once put it. "The stage can at best offer only an imperfect image of what the orchestra in the mystic gulf triumphantly conveys to our ears without any need for visual manifestation. No highbrow theories nor pseudo-philosophical tracts on the problem of Wagnerian staging, no debates between the fanatics of tradition and those who want innovation for its own sake, will alter this fact." In any case, he continued, Wagner's own productions were out of date and his original stage directions were merely indications of visionary images in his mind. "The zealots of tradition cling to every comma in the Master's stage directions as though the perfect realization of the work depends on these alone. But how far did the productions of 1876 and 1882, though under Wagner's personal direction, deviate from his own sacrosanct instructions !" Wieland therefore did not consider his grandfather's stage instructions more sacred than his writings on vegetarianism. Wieland was fond of quoting Liszt : "Der Buchstabe tötet den Geist". It was clear that the Germanic bric-à-brac had to go. The old productions turned the works too much into fairy tales, into entertainment rather than commentary on life here and now. They distorted the music and weakened the dramatic intentions; they created a barrier between Wagner's creations and the real world. His own personal experience of witnessing a Hitler sitting through the Ring and not realizing how much it was about himself, may well have been reflected here.
By placing the operas in a timeless cosmos, Wieland hoped to shift attention away from the incidentals to the essence of the drama. This is how Wagner had intended it by choosing myth as his means of expression: "Wat is unique about myth is that it is true for all time and its content, despite its intense concision, has relevance for every age." Wieland therefore presented some of his productions as mystery plays in which he used a totally different staging and logic than was usual in more realistic opera. At the same time, he stressed that no production could ever be definitive. He himself was never satisfied with the result and constantly refined his creations. "Every age," he declared, "will have its own Wagner."
With Wolfgang Sawallisch he discussed for hours the relationship between the music and the visual image. Wieland knew the scores better than many conductors, and what the music expressed aurally did not need to be repeated again on stage in the form of an image. Thus, the second act of Die Meistersinger could suffice with a symbolic reference to the elder tree because the entire scene was already described by the music. Initially Wieland regarded the score as the most important component of the performance; later he placed the drama at the forefront. By the early 1960s, he argued, "all opera composers started with the concept of a play, not with the music. The music therefore comes second because without the dramatic idea the music would never have been written. The idea causes the music which is therefore only one but not the dominant component of the whole." Wieland started from the psychological elements of the drama and built his productions around them: "My sets take their essential meaning not from stage directions but from the scenes themselves." With music, text and sets subordinate to the dramatic concept, conventional effects sometimes had to be sacrificed. He did the transformation scene in Lohengrin with the curtain closed, and he even deleted a choral passage in the last act. Of Tannhäuser he made his own collage of the Paris and Dresden versions. In the 1965 Ring, he cut Gutrune's short scene after Siegfried's funeral march.
But for all the upheaval he caused by his Entrümpelung and by his bold interventions, it was well often forgotten what he had put in its place. One of his notable innovations was the disc, which he first introduced in 1951 and which, as a symbol of the universe, lent a visual unity to the four parts of the Ring. From the expressionist theater maker Leopold Jessner he adopted the Jessner steps that transformed the stage into an amphitheater as a mirror image of the auditorium. For Wieland, costumes had a dramatic rather than a decorative function. He paid as much attention to them as he did to his sets. "The color of a costume is as important as the sound of a violin," he said. He also stressed that costumes should fit the personality of the soloist. The costume for Isolde, designed for the 1962 production, was changed ten times both for Birgit Nilsson and Astrid Varnay.
The central element in Wieland's stagecraft was the lighting. He considered his lighting technician to be as important as his conductor. The lighting scenario therefore became as complicated as the score. Wieland used light as Wagner used music namely to clarify and enhance the dramatic action and for creating an atmosphere or a state of mind. He was intrigued by the relationship between color and music, and with his close collaborator Paul Eberhardt he spent hours searching for the right colors to match the music.
For Wieland, no detail of a production was too small to engage his attention. But never did he consider a production finished; always he was looking for something new or something better, always with the intention of clarifying the meaning of the dramas. No one since Richard Wagner himself had thought about the works in such a profound and original way, and over time his attempts to reach the intellectual core of Wagner's œuvre became a veritable obsession. First, all the old sets and all the familiar theatrical conventions went overboard. Then he began to dig out the works themselves. He delved into Wagner's scores and writings, not only to know what the composer had written but also to find out what he had meant. He tapped into other sources that could give him additional insights, sources as varied as Freud and Jung, Brecht and Aischylos, Adorno and Bloch. Not only did he study what Craig and Appia had realized before, he also turned his discerning gaze to older productions that had once been considered innovative: productions such as Der Fliegende Holländer by Jürgen Fehling, Ewald Dülberg, and Otto Klemperer at the Kroll Opera (1929) and another production by Fehling of Tannhäuser from 1933 that had been banned by the Nazis. Through this thought process, his productions came about naturally. The most important thing is to describe the characters correctly, he often said, then everything else will fall into place automatically. In fact, this was a process of psychoanalysis and he was sometimes accused of being guilty of a typical German form of over-intellectualization. But there was also an important personal and political motive at play. The deletion of the old interpretations was ultimately a way of cleansing himself and Bayreuth of its own past. Wiping away recent history was a deep psychological and artistic need for Wieland. His intention was to bring about a new Bayreuth, to liberate Bayreuth and Wagner from its old Germanness in which nationalism and romantic sentimentality had piled up for years.
"The Richard Wagner Festival has become a Wieland Wagner Festival," wrote one critic in 1958. Intended as a commentary on the sensation Wieland generated with his productions, this remark could just as easily refer to his all-encompassing competence. Wieland developed the concept, designed the sets, sketched the costumes, chose the singers and conductors, coached the soloists, and directed each of his productions. Vital help came from Wolfgang who relieved him of the enormous burden of financing and administration so that he himself had his hands free to devote himself to his artistic mission. His wife Gertrud took care of the group choreography. Wilhelm Pitz directed the choir.
Wagner via Mozart
Wieland felt that music, too, should be freed from its German tradition. "Don't think about the way it was done in the past," he constantly pressed singers and conductors. "What good is it to break new ground on stage if the music is played in the spirit of the last century." He wanted an orchestral sound characterized by lightness, clarity, sensitivity, transparency and fast tempi which he associated with his so-called Latin conductors. The chorus also had to produce a lighter sound. The voices of the flowermaidens in Parsifal had to sound Debussy-like according to him. Finding and keeping conductors was his biggest headache, torn as he was between what he wanted and what was available. He started with Knappertsbusch and Von Karajan. Both resigned after the second year. Knappertsbusch because he could no longer stand Wieland's Parsifal and Karajan because of a number of personal and professional disagreements. For Parsifal Wieland subsequently called on Clemens Krauss who improved Richard Strauss' 1933 speed record by 23 minutes. When Krauss died shortly before his second season, Knappertsbusch took pity on the unfortunate festival leader and took his place back in the orchestra pit. Knappertsbusch closed his eyes to everything that happened on stage and remained principal conductor until his death in 1965. The Parsifal he conducted year after year made him a worthy successor to Levi and Muck.
Joseph Keilberth conducted the Ring and several other operas from 1952 to 1956, after which he was shown the door by Wieland. Wolfgang Sawallisch arrived in 1957 and left just before the 1963 season due to a disagreement over the casting of Anja Silja. The first "Latin" conductor to arrive on the Green Hill was the Belgian André Cluytens, whose light sound was met with mixed feelings by the press. Karl Böhms treatment of the Ring in 1965 and described by Wieland as "Wagner via Mozart" also did not meet with general approval. Most of Wieland's other conductors were solid old-style Wagnerians : Eugen Jochum, Erich Leinsdorf, Rudolf Kempe, Ferdinand Leitner, Josef Krips and Robert Heger. Even Heinz Tietjen made a remarkable come-back and conducted Lohengrin in 1959. Two other conductors were invited for political reasons: Paul Hindemith conducted Beethoven's Ninth in 1953 and Otto Klemperer was invited for Die Meistersinger but had to withdraw after a tragic accident.
Although this way he had the best conductors of his time at his disposal Wieland constantly chafed at his orthodox conducting staff. In search of "fresh interpretations" he tried a number of young, mostly little-known conductors: Lovro von Matačić, Lorin Maazel, Thomas Schippers and Berislav Klobučar. None of them were invited back afterwards. In 1966 he finally found his ideal musical collaborator in the person of Pierre Boulez, who had never conducted a Wagner opera and who was also particularly skeptical of tradition and blessed with the same willingness to experiment as Wieland Wagner himself. Boulez was allowed to conduct Parsifal with "fresh ideas". Egon Voss reported, "It was as if the Parsifal production of 1951 had had to wait until 1966 to get the musical interpretation intended by Wieland Wagner."
Less problematic were the singers although initially they were not so easy to find. After all, Wieland fundamentally avoided any singer who had previously sung at Bayreuth. Rather than international stars, he was initially interested in cultivating young talent that he could mold according to his wishes. As it had occurred to Richard Wagner himself in 1875 so he wanted to develop a new type of singer - the singing actor. "Our singers," he declared, "must know not only the meaning of the music but also of the text. They must be able to express every nuance with as few gestures as possible and master the right voice volume. And they must give up self-centered mannerisms". He got tremendously angry when a singer responded to the music with a movement that coincided with a leitmotif or an accent. "The music says everything!" he would exclaim.
There was another criterion for working as a singer in Bayreuth and that was that one had to get along with Wieland. Although very loyal, Wieland could also be short-tempered and ruthless. Something that annoyed him, however slight and unintentional, could result in dismissal with no hope of ever singing at Bayreuth again. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau only learned years later that he had been summarily dropped because as Wolfram he had refused to wear a hunter's hat, a hat that prevented him from hearing his own voice. Keilberth who had never understood what he had done wrong was offended for the rest of his life.
Over the years, Wieland built a vocal team that had no equal in the world. To his original group -Mödl, Varnay, Kuën, Stolze, Uhde, Weber and Windgassen- later joined Birgit Nilsson, Anja Silja, Leonie Rysanek, Gré Brouwenstijn, George London, Theo Adam, Kurt Böhme, Hans Hotter, Gustav Neidlinger, Ramon Vinay, Jess Thomas, Thomas Stewart, Josef Greindl, Eberhard Waechter, Erwin Wohlfahrt and Martti Talvela. Foreign singers came to Bayreuth in large numbers as never before although some of the most exotic stars like Maria Callas, Leontyne Price, Nicolai Gedda and Mario del Monaco could not be lured to Bayreuth.
Just before the opening of the 1966 season, Wieland suddenly became seriously ill. He spent the summer in a hospital in Munich. In October he died of lung cancer. He spent his last hours discussing, as well as he could, a new production of Tannhäuser. During the preceding spring, he had been awarded "Pour le mérite," a national honour created by Frederick the Great and given by the government to the most intellectually and culturally deserving figures in Germany. The award came as a recognition of all that Wieland had wanted to achieve with the reopening of the festival: the liberation of Wagner's music from its ill-fated association with the Third Reich and a demonstration of its timelessness and universality. By showing the way to new productions and new interpretations, he had opened the door for other opera houses to follow in his path and, in so doing, inspired a renaissance of Wagnerian opera around the world.