In the Shadow of a Genius: Mike Ashman appraises two studies of the work of the composer’s grandson Wieland

Reviews of Stephan Mösch and Sven Friedrich, eds, ’Es gibt nichts “Ewiges”’ – Wieland Wagner: Ästhetik, Zeitgeschichte, Wirkung. Wagner in der Diskussion, Band 16 (Würzburg, 2019); Till Haberfeld and Oswald Georg Bauer, Wieland Wagner: Revolutionär und Visionär des Musiktheaters (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017).

November 2020, Volume 14, Number 3, 80–91.

Many will agree that Wieland Wagner (1917–66), co-artistic director of so-called New Bayreuth from the festival’s reopening after the Second World War, was a second genius of the Wagner family. Also (especially if they are anglophone) that there has been a sad lack of available, let alone seriously comprehensive, written material on an iconic practising stage director for whom the cliché ‘a revolutionary and visionary of music theatre’ has become almost a routine appellation.