Bayreuth canon



The Bayreuth canon consists of those operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) that have been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. The festival, which is dedicated to the staging of these works, was founded by Wagner in 1876 in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, and has continued under the directorship of his family since his death. Although it was not originally held annually, it has taken place in July and August every year since the 75th anniversary season in 1951. Its venue is the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which was built for the first festival. Attendance at the festival is often thought of as a pilgrimage made by Wagner aficionados.

The operas in the Bayreuth canon are the last ten of the thirteen that Wagner completed. He rejected the first three – Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi – as apprentice works. Although these have been staged elsewhere and Rienzi was very popular into the early 20th century, the works in the canon exceed them, both in the number of performances given and in the number of available recordings. The term Bayreuth canon is therefore sometimes taken to mean the composer's mature operas. Georg Solti was the first conductor to complete studio recordings of all the works in the canon, starting in 1958 with Das Rheingold and finishing in 1986 with Lohengrin.

Components
The components of the canon are as follows:


 * Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung:These are the four parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Bayreuth Festival was created for the first complete staging of the Ring in 1876. The Ring was next staged in Bayreuth in 1896, the only other season when the cycle has been performed there unaccompanied by other operas. Since then, it has appeared during most seasons.


 * Parsifal:This work was first performed at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882. The degree to which Parsifal is associated with one venue, the Festspielhaus, makes it unique among major theatrical works. Wagner dubbed the opera a Bühnenweihfestspiel, which opera director Mike Ashman translates as a "festival work to consecrate a stage". Ashman explains this as meaning that it was intended to secure the financial future of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and allow the composer's heirs to continue running the festival profitably. Parsifal was staged nowhere else until 1903 when the Metropolitan Opera in New York broke the embargo placed on theatrical performances outside Bayreuth by Wagner and his widow Cosima.


 * Parsifal far exceeds the other members of the canon in the number of performances it has received at Bayreuth. It is the only work to have had three festival seasons (1882, 1883 and 1884) dedicated solely to its staging, and was performed every season from 1882 until the start of World War II, with the exception of 1896 when Cosima first revived the Ring. Most of these performances were of the original production, which received 205 performances before a new staging was introduced in 1934. Another production – the influential one by the composer's grandson Wieland – was staged every year from 1951, when Bayreuth reopened after the war, until 1973, accumulating 101 performances.


 * Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg:Cosima introduced these five works from 1886 onwards, after she started running the festival on a continuing basis. In introducing these, she fulfilled her dead husband's wishes but over an extended timescale. Meistersinger is the only work in the canon, apart from Parsifal and the Ring cycle, to have had whole festival seasons, those of 1943 and 1944, devoted solely to it.

Performances at Bayreuth
festival, 2725 performances have been given at the Bayreuth Festival of the operas in the canon, distributed as in the following table.