A Latin Pilgrimage: Peter Quantrill welcomes the earliest recording of a pivotal Bayreuth production

Review of Tannhäuser, conducted Sawallisch, Bayreuth, 1961 (Orfeo, 3 CDs).

March 2015, Volume 9, Number 1, 94–6.

Even with no more visual confirmation than grainy production shots, this set is a vivid document of Wieland Wagner’s drive to reinvent Bayreuth a decade after its postwar reopening. Just as Tannhäuser itself contains so many motifs in action and sound that Wagner would rework in his later operas, Wieland’s ‘new’ 1961 production signifies his determination to grow modern production values from the seedbed of his grandfather’s invention and to refine his previous staging of just seven years earlier. Many participants may be familiar from other recordings, yet they work together here at an unrivalled pitch of intensity to approach Wieland’s ideal of ‘a Latin Wagner’.