[1] Their son Wolf married Marie Eleanore von Lehndorff-Steinort,[2] sister of fashion model Veruschka, whose father was involved in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler.

In his later production of the opera he instead used pairs of giant eyes, which were picked out in turn from the back-projected forest, to suggest the movements of a huge creature stretching halfway down the Bayreuth hill.

Wieland's 1956 "Mastersingers without Nuremberg" was the symbolic culmination of his campaign to move away from naturalism in Wagner production with the medieval town represented by the cobbled shape of a street and, above the stage, a ball suggestive of a flowering tree.

The performer of Gunther, for example, was expected to sing leaning forward in Act 1 of Götterdämmerung until he felt his authority challenged by Hagen and sat up straight.

Among the other celebrated singers who worked with Wieland were Hans Hotter, George London, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Eberhard Wächter, Thomas Stewart, Theo Adam, Josef Greindl, Jerome Hines, Wolfgang Windgassen, Ramón Vinay, Jess Thomas, Jon Vickers, Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Régine Crespin, Rita Gorr, Leonie Rysanek, Regina Resnik, Birgit Nilsson, Jean Madeira, Grace Hoffman, Franz Crass, Victoria de los Ángeles, Grace Bumbry, Christa Ludwig, Martti Talvela, Carlos Alexander, Ruth Hesse, Isabel Strauß, Rosl Zapf, James King, Claude Heater, Ticho Parly, Dame Gwyneth Jones, and Fritz Wunderlich.

Conductors with whom he collaborated were Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Joseph Keilberth, André Cluytens, Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan, Erich Leinsdorf, Heinz Tietjen, Lorin Maazel, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Karl Böhm, Bruno Maderna, and Thomas Schippers.

Winifred Wagner's close friendship with Hitler meant that, as a teenager and young man, Wieland knew the dictator as "Uncle Wolf".

From September 1944 to April 1945 he held a sinecure at the Institut für physikalische Forschung in Bayreuth, founded by his brother-in-law Bodo Lafferentz, which was a satellite of the Flossenbürg concentration camp devoted to research and development of an improved guidance system of the V-2 rocket bomb.

At his denazification hearing in Bayreuth, on 10 December 1948, he was classified as a "Mitläufer" (follower), the fourth and lowest category of those not exonerated, and fined DM100 plus the court costs.