Wikipedia:Today's featured list/November 28, 2014
The Bayreuth canon consists of those operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (pictured) that have been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. The festival, which is dedicated to the staging of these works, was founded by Wagner in 1876 in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, and has continued under the directorship of his family since his death. The operas in the Bayreuth canon are the last ten of the thirteen that Wagner completed. He rejected the first three — Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi — as apprentice works. Although these have been staged elsewhere, and Rienzi was very popular into the early 20th century, the works in the canon exceed them, both in the number of performances given and in the number of available recordings. The term Bayreuth canon is therefore sometimes glossed as meaning the composer's mature operas. Georg Solti was the first conductor to complete studio recordings of all the works in the canon, starting in 1958 with Das Rheingold and finishing in 1986 with Lohengrin. (Full list...)