The Richard Wagner Foundation (in German Richard-Wagner-Stiftung) was formed in 1973, when, faced with overwhelming criticism and infighting amongst the descendants of Richard Wagner, [1] the Bayreuth Festival and its assets were transferred to the newly created Foundation. The board of directors included members of the Wagner family and others appointed by the state. [2]
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Wagner himself conceived and promoted the idea of a special festival to showcase his own works, in particular his monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal.
The Wagner family handed over the Festspielhaus and the Richard Wagner Archive to the Foundation and donated Wagner's villa Wahnfried to the town of Bayreuth. In 1976 the National Archive of the Richard Wagner Foundation (formerly known as the Richard Wagner Family Archive or Wahnfried Archive), was deposited with the Foundation. [3]
Wahnfried was the name given by Richard Wagner to his villa in Bayreuth. The name is a German compound of Wahn and Fried(e).
In 2008 the Foundation's 24 board members, mostly descendants of Wagner, selected Katharina Wagner and her sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier to lead the Bayreuth Festival following the decision of Wolfgang Wagner to stand down. [4]
Katharina Wagner is a German opera stage-director and co-director of the Bayreuth Festival. She is the daughter of Wolfgang Wagner, great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, and great-great granddaughter of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.
Eva Wagner-Pasquier is a German opera manager. She is the daughter of Wolfgang Wagner and Ellen Drexel. On 1 September 2008, Wagner-Pasquier and her half-sister Katharina Wagner were named as joint directors of the Bayreuth Festival which is largely dedicated to the stage works of their great-grandfather Richard Wagner.
Wolfgang Wagner was a German opera director. He is best known as the director (Festspielleiter) of the Bayreuth Festival, a position he initially assumed alongside his brother Wieland in 1951 until the latter's death in 1966. From then on, he assumed total control until he retired in 2008, although many of the productions which he commissioned were severely criticized in their day. He had been plagued by family conflicts and criticism for many years. He was the son of Siegfried Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner, and the great-grandson of Franz Liszt.
