A View from the Pit: Roger Allen appraises the reflections of one of today’s leading Wagnerian interpreters

Review of Christian Thielemann, My Life with Wagner, tr. Anthea Bell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015).

July 2016, Volume 10, Number 2, 93–6.

There can be little doubt that the conductor Christian Thielemann (b.1959) is one of the most prominent and influential figures in the Wagnerian firmament today. From his debut in 1985 conducting a concert performance of Rienzi to his appointment in 2015 as only the second ever Musikdirektor of the Bayreuth Festival, he has emerged as what might be seen as the latest in a long line of Wagner conductors extending back through his mentor Herbert von Karajan and his admired predecessors Hans Knappertsbusch and Wilhelm Furtwängler to such legendary figures as Hans Richter, Hans von Bülow and thus to Wagner himself. Or that, at least from the evidence of his book, is how Thielemann would like to be regarded.