Wolfgang Sawallisch (26 August 1923 – 22 February 2013) was a German conductor and pianist. (…) When he debuted at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus conducting Tristan und Isolde in 1957, he was the youngest conductor ever to appear there. (…) For thirty years, he was closely associated with musical events in Munich. Here he conducted practically all of the major Richard Strauss operas, Salome being the sole exception. He also conducted 32 complete Richard Wagner Ring des Nibelungen cycles and is credited with nearly 1200 opera performances in the city alone…
Wolfgang Sawallisch (26 August 1923 – 22 February 2013) was a German conductor and pianist. (…) When he debuted at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus conducting Tristan und Isolde in 1957, he was the youngest conductor ever to appear there. (…) For thirty years, he was closely associated with musical events in Munich. Here he conducted practically all of the major Richard Strauss operas, Salome being the sole exception. He also conducted 32 complete Richard Wagner Ring des Nibelungen cycles and is credited with nearly 1200 opera performances in the city alone…
Richard Wagner was one of the most revolutionary figures in the history of music, a composer who made pivotal contributions to the development of harmony and musical drama that reverberate even today. Indeed, though Wagner occasionally produced successful music written on a relatively modest scale, opera – the bigger, the better – was clearly his milieu, and his aesthetic is perhaps the most grandiose that Western music has ever known. Early in his career, Wagner learned both the elements and the practical, political realities of his craft by writing a handful of operas which were unenthusiastically, even angrily, received. © Rovi Staff /TiVo