Music: Valhaila & Mozart's Tomb

Despite the claims of such chic newcomers as Spoleto, Europe's two most important music festivals remain Salzburg and Bayreuth. As they opened last week—Bayreuth with new productions of all four operas of Richard Wagner's Ring, and Salzburg with a new Festspielhaus reputed to be the world's most technically advanced theater—both festivals were musically still far ahead of most other summer fare, but seemed disappointing compared to the success of past seasons.

At Bayreuth, Wagner's grandson Wolfgang was up. to his old tricks: stripped down, sparsely lighted productions designed to free the stern old gods of Valhalla from heavy, cardboard-shield and plaster-throne cliches. But by now, this once revolutionary style has produced some bothersome clichés of its own. The basic stage set of last week's Ring was an eight-ton, segmented concave disk looking somewhat like a huge radar antenna. In the second and fourth Rheingold scenes it was used intact, tilted toward the audience to suggest the rugged slopes of Wotan's mountain home; in other scenes the disk's movable segments represented a cave or a hut.

Despite such simplicity of design, stage movements throughout most of The Ring were so statuesque that they suggested oratorio rather than opera. Realism was often ludicrously mixed with abstraction; when Mime helped to fashion a sword for Siegfried out of a magic potion, he matter-of-factly cracked two eggs into the potion as if following a recipe by Gayelord Hauser. Worst of all was the lighting, which was so murky that it came close to achieving Richard Wagner's stated ideal: "Now that I have created the in visible orchestra,* I would like to invent the invisible stage."

What redeemed Bayreuth's Ring was the first-rate musical performance by Conductor Rudolf Kempe and his singers, among them Birgit Nilsson, Aase Nordmo Loevberg, Hermann Uhde, Jerome Hines. While the stars bore familiar names, the surprises of the festival were provided by the talented newcomers. Among them: Berlin-born Anja Silja, 20, singing Senta in The Flying Dutchman, who first came to Bayreuth four years ago as a visiting teenager; Texas-born Thomas Stewart, 32, who was selected for the impressive role of Amfortas in Parsifal after illness forced George London to cancel; U.S. Conductor Lorin Maazel, 30, who accounted for a fine reading of Lohengrin, thus becoming the first American and the youngest conductor of any nation in the Bayreuth pit.