Dates: 1917 – 1966
German opera director and designer.
From Fifty Key Theatre Designers by Arnold Aronson
Director and designer Wieland Wagner, grandson of Richard Wagner, became co-director, along with his younger brother Wolfgang, of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, when it re-opened for the first time since the end of World War II. With his first production, Parsifal, Wieland upended 75 years of Wagnerian staging practice by eliminating all representational scenery. Wieland was strongly influenced by Appia, and the basic set was a raised disc and a cyclorama, with locales largely suggested by lighting. He was also influenced by the ideas of Freud and Jung, and his later productions featured emblematic and iconic scenery. The essentially postmodern approach to staging and scenography— an approach that strips away past staging practices in a search for inner truths that resonate in the contemporary world—is largely a legacy of Wieland Wagner.