By Rupert Christiansen 1205PM GMT twenty-three March 2010
With the deaths voiced yesterday of Wolfgang Wagner, at the age of 90, and Lady Walton, at the age of 83, dual of the song worlds good keepers of the fire have been snuffed out. Their paths never crossed, and they could frequency have been some-more opposite in personality, but the fluke of their coexisting flitting leads one to cruise them in comparison.
Mothers Day 50 Most Memorable Mums in the humanities Dallas McKennon Jill Balcon Bayreuth show legal holiday in jeopardy by set upon Classical CD Reviews Shostakovich, Bach to Bart?k, UBS Soundscapes, HandelWolfgang Wagner was Richard Wagners grandson, and had clear memories of his parents mother Cosima, Wagners widow. This alliance to the source of the cult done him a extreme defender of what he saw as the truth, the proceed and the light of Wagnerism, but one wonders if he had any surpassing bargain of them. His abilities were unsentimental from 1951, he was obliged for the commercial operation side of the revived, de-Nazified Bayreuth Festival, a charge he one after another to liberate for over half a century, latterly in partnership with his second mother Gudrun.
The inventive decisions were primarily left to his some-more egghead and charismatic hermit Wieland, whom Wolfgang loathed. (Nothing surprising about that - roughly everybody in the Wagner dynasty loathes everybody else.) But when Wieland died immature in 1966, Wolfgang took solitary carry out and proposed directing the Wagner operas himself, in a character in all deliberate clumsy and dull. This folie de loftiness was his biggest mistake. Wieland had been a theatre executive of might and originality, whose post-Nazi reinterpretation of Wagners operas were of good informative importance. Wolfgang was in some-more aged a plonker, unreflectively regressive in his proceed and not in in aptitude for stagecraft.
Although he was mostly indicted of being cruel and unimaginative, even his misfortune enemies had to confess that Wolfgang was a rarely fit administrator, and the Bayreuth Festival prospered underneath his deceit and advantageous management. Those who went to work there, regularly for unequivocally small money, regularly dignified his courtesy to item and his capability to keep sequence and safeguard glorious operative conditions - not usual in the pell-mell universe of opera.
Yet the irony of Wolfgangs career is that however majority of a dull- witted conservative he was personally, he had the cleverness to see that if Wagner was to sojourn title headlines and Bayreuth was to keep the general repute and clat, it was critical that it was seen to be open to immature bent and in advance influences = even if they were profoundly detestable to his own tastes.
From the 1970s onwards, he invited a array of left-leaning immature directors to theatre the operas, between them Patrice Chreau, Götz Friedrich, Werner Herzog, Harry Kupfer, Christoph Schlingenschief and Christoph Marthaler. It is their work - and the controversies, scandals, ovations and abuse that they desirous - that constitutes Wolfgangs biggest achievement.
Susana Gil was innate in Argentina. A distinguished beauty, she met the composer William Walton when he was on vacation Buenos Aires on a post-war outing and she was a cabinet member at the internal British Council.
They were tied together in 1948 and set up home together on the island of Ischia, where Walton could harmonise in peace.
Susana was a shining housewife and shortly learnt how to understanding with Waltons ardent appetites, that mostly led him astray. Girl friends were tolerated up to a point, but no further, and Walton regularly went at the back of to his wife.
Susana wasnt quite low-pitched and the integrate had no children.
What joined them - and what used up majority of Waltons beautiful appetite in his after years was the pretentious grassed area they combined with the gardener Russell Page on their estate at La Mortella. It is right away open to the open and majority visited.
After Waltons genocide in 1983, Susana became fiercely active in the means of compelling her late husbands music, mostly pushing others concerned - orchestras, conductors, publishers to daze with her letters and phone calls. She could, but doubt, be a bit of a nightmare, and both her loyalties and her enmities were ardent and absolute. But there was good warmth, affability and munificence about her too, as well as a superb clarity of humour, as evinced in her comical warts-and-all discourse of her matrimony Behind the Façade.
Wolfgang Wagner didnt unequivocally have a possibility in life, one feels. His estate was complicated and inevitable and poisonous, though his feuding with his own young kids and nephews and nieces usually exacerbated the abuse on the dynasty. In appointing Eva, the daughter of his initial marriage, and Katharina, the daughter of his second marriage, as his successors at Bayreuth, he was receiving his last punish on Wieland by decisively incompatible his lineage. But I wouldnt bank on this being the finish of the story.
Susana Waltons last years, done physically unpleasant by distressing arthritis, contingency have been done even some-more unhappy by the obscure in Waltons reputation, that all her efforts could do zero to reverse. But she leaves at the back of her intense memories of a vivid, life-enhancing celebrity - she illuminated up a room when she entered it - and the relic of a grassed area of good and lasting beauty. Thats a improved human bequest than Wolfgangs.
