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 Bayreuth FestivalBayreuth, Germany, is home to this annual festival devoted to the performance of operas by Richard Wagner. Wagner launched the festival in 1876 to showcase a variety of German music and did not intend for his compositions to be the focus. The event was plagued by financial problems in its early years, but survived through state intervention and the support of influential Wagnerians, including Ludwig II of Bavaria and Adolf Hitler. Who did Hitler beg—unsuccessfully—to lead the festival? More...
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Winifred's influence with Hitler was so strong that Hitler even wrote a letter (at her behest) to anti-fascist Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, begging him to lead the festival. Toscanini refused. From 1933 to 1942, the festival was conducted principally by Karl Elmendorff.
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Impressive
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[quote=LucOneOff]Winifred's influence with Hitler was so strong that Hitler even wrote a letter (at her behest) to anti-fascist Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, begging him to lead the festival. Toscanini refused. From 1933 to 1942, the festival was conducted principally by Karl Elmendorff, who evidently had no problem with Nazis.
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germany alway have great music festivals
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Scandal and outrage at Germany's Bayreuth opera festivalFestival is becoming more notorious for its scandals than its music after second year of boos, jeers and insults.Philip Oltermann in Berlin The Guardian , Thursday 31 July 2014 17.44 BST Long considered the embodiment of German high culture, Bayreuth's opera festival is becoming more notorious for its scandals than its music after one performer this week complained he had never come across "an audience with so much hatred. When the chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid her annual visit with her husband Joachim Sauer, for a performance of Wagner's Siegfried, she must have felt safe in the knowledge that her presence in the audience would be unlikely to overshadow events on the stage. Director Frank Castorf's radically deconstructed production of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung was met with boos and jeers when it premiered at Bayreuth last year, culminating in a 15-minute standoff between director and audience. And this year's shows received a similarly vicious response. Lance Ryan, the Canadian opera singer who plays Siegfried, told Germany's news agency dpa: "I have never come across an audience with so much hatred, so much anger, such a thirst for revenge. They take everything personally. It makes you a little bit scared, and it's really quite terrifying."http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/scandal-germany-bayreuth-opera-festival
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Anybody heard of the public reaction to John Adams' “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the NY Met?
Quite impressive.
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The Ring or Der Ring des Nibelungen in German, is based on the ancient Scandinavian legends which have also inspired Sigurd the Volsung by Snorri Sturlesson in the eleventh century & even JRR Tolkein. If you skip the Nazi history, it's a great story.
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I like most kinds of classical music. It gives me a sense of looking through ages, rural landscapes (Beethoven), Sundays in castles, big parks, wit, philosophy, exclusiveness. And clavichords and perukes. And horse and carriage.
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Though Wagner's work is considered brooding with negative connotation's, I believe it has its place in the world on excellent music. Sadly, it will for some tome to come, always be associated to the Nazi party. But then, there are those that lean towards that particular frame of reference, do love "Vogner's" work....
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There was a great Icelandic composer named Jón Leifs. He went to study in Germany, as many Icelandic musicians did as there was no symphony orchestra in Iceland at the beginning of the twentieth century. He married a German Jew, and settled in Germany, and became a successful conductor and composer. His wife survived the war because as the wife of a foreigner she was considered Icelandic, but her family were killed. He wrote music such as Baldr to reclaim the Norse myths from Wagner and Nazism and reclaim them for the Norse people and their true folk roots. On a lighter note - I remember being told of how one production (or part of) was packed up and transported to Beirut instead of Bayreuth. Easy mistake to make..... 
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