Horst Stein: conductor and mainstay at Bayreuth Posted on August 22nd
Every summer, from 1969 until 1986, Horst Stein served the Bayreuth Festival
loyally as a reliable interpreter of Wagner’s mature music dramas. Invisible
in the Festspielhaus’s hooded pit, this tubby and diminutive figure provided
apt musical counterpart to the traditional productions staged by Wolfgang
Wagner, more naturalistic, less severe revisions of the neu-Bayreuth
abstractions of his late brother, Wieland, which had so vexed audiences in
the 1950s and 1960s.