Abstract

The anniversary of Wagner`s Bayreuth Theatre was for the year 1976 one of the most outstanding worldwide musical events. During the last hundred years, philosophers or musicians, Hegelians or Socialists, naturalist or realist romantics, still found in Wagner`s works the fundamental sources of their thinking. Among them, in the 1960`s, a young and unknown Hegelian from Romania, by the name of Titu I. Maiorescu, distinguished himself with the conference he delivered at the "Filosofische Gesellschaft" in Berlin and at the "Cercle des Sociétés savantes" in Paris, entitled: The Old French Tragedy and Wagner`s Music. In this anniversary year, we retain especially the aesthetic thinking of one of the musicians who signed the centennial`s performances: Pierre Boulez. Time became a new category that the eminent French composer integrated in the analysis, in the light of the contemporary philosophical literary or musical experience. The musical direction of the Tetralogy, signed by Pierre Boulez, was a living proof of his aesthetic views and, perhaps, of a few aspects of the maestro`s interpretative vision. In this masterpiece he doubled all this clarity of the structural constructions with the emotional and passionate dimension. By his direction, Patrice Chéreau achieved what in musical direction was considered to be the opera`s dramatic world, unfolding perhaps his own life story and expressing, by all means, the musical world. Despite some eclectic and unconventional means, the director and the stage manager (Richard Peduzzi) expressed their views in an effective manner in which the patina of time would bring more unity and more consistency to the overwhelming ensemble of the four opera evenings of August 1976.

Keywords: centenary, centennial, Wagnerian theatre, aesthetic thinking, Tetralogy


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