Music: Clock Watchers

The evenings can grow long at Germany’s Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and many an operagoer has cast a furtive glance at his watch as the Teutonic roll and tumble thundered on. Furtive watch watchers may not know that backstage, opera-house technicians have been keeping their own Teutonically thorough stop watch record of Festival performances since 1876. How the tradition started, or why, no one can remember. But now a former Bayreuth technician has leaked some of the results, affording opera lovers some interesting sidelights on the old question of conductors’ tempos and tempers. Items:

Das Rheingold: Conductor Heinz Tiet-jen’s fast time of two hours and 17 minutes set in 1934 has never been beaten. Slowest time for the distance: two hours and 42 minutes in 1951 by Hans Knap-pertsbusch, long regarded, but unclocked, as a relatively “slow” conductor.

Die Walkiire: Tietjen and Knapperts-busch ended in a dead heat for the speed record for the first act. Time: one hour, five minutes. In the third act, Knapperts-busch displayed a strong kick at the finish, beating Tietjen by one minute.

Parsifal: Toscanini’s swift handling contributed to his reputation as a fast conductor. His early record of two hours and six minutes for the first act, set in 1931, was finally broken in 1953 by Clemens Krauss, who raced to the finish in an astounding one hour and 30 minutes.

Die Meistersinger: The third act has served as a classic test for conducting speed, and no one has ever matched the spectacular time of one hour and 54 minutes registered by Fritz Busch in 1924.

Everybody concedes that Wagner dragged out can get unbearable, but even the clock watchers themselves do not agree on the important question: Is fastest best?