Every summer, from 1969 until 1986, Horst Stein served the Bayreuth Festival loyally as a reliable interpreter of Wagner’s mature music dramas. Invisible in the Festspielhaus’s hooded pit, this tubby and diminutive figure provided apt musical counterpart to the traditional productions staged by Wolfgang Wagner, more naturalistic, less severe revisions of the neu-Bayreuth abstractions of his late brother, Wieland, which had so vexed audiences in the 1950s and 1960s.

Solid, reliable and often underlit, the Wagner-Stein efforts were rarely judged remarkable, but they were not seriously inept, and for the more conservative patrons of the festival they provided a welcome corrective to what they perceived as the unacceptably radical, Marxist stagings of ascendant producers such as Götz Friedrich, Patrice Chéreau and Harry Kupfer.

To the Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring, the Stein-Wolfgang Wagner Parsifal provided a sturdy alternative, as did their final collaboration, a Meistersinger featuring Bernd Weikl, Hermann Prey, Siegfried Jerusalem and Graham Clark, to Friedrich’s Parsifal. All three productions certainly played safe but, since a lack of innovation and surprise by no means preclude a richly rewarding Wagnerian experience, Stein’s interpretations, characteristically sympathetic to singers and vitalised by passages of febrile intensity, may well prove more durable than their critics.

Indeed, hindsight ought to prove kinder than the Anglophone journalists who were his sternest detractors. For Stein was a deeply experienced musician, a profound medium for the 19th-century Austro-German classics that formed the core of his repertoire and who was admired in countries, such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan, which valued tradition over innovation. He knew and loved the works he conducted and sought fidelity to the music in his charge. He evidently worked hard and, as his mentor Joseph Keilberth had early perceived, was ambitious. His father was a mechanic but Stein, mindful perhaps that he shared a birth town with the eminent Wagnerian Hans Knappertsbusch, chose to pursue a musical career.

At school in Frankfurt he studied piano, oboe and singing and, after training at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, which included lessons in composition with the Busoni pupil Philipp Jarnach, he returned to the region of his birth, as a répétiteur at the municipal theatre in Wuppertal, a position he held from 1947 until 1951. It was at this time that he became acquainted with Keilberth, whose post as chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra he was later to hold with great success and whom he observed in his parallel capacity as the region’s general music director. Later Stein admitted frankly that professional advancement was as much the motive for his interest in Keilberth as the deepening of his conducting skills.

His perseverance duly paid off, however, and in 1952 the older conductor invited the younger to work with him at Bayreuth, newly reopened after the war. At Bayreuth Stein also worked with Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss and von Karajan, but he was to wait until 1969 before he conducted an opera there, the late Wieland Wagner minimal-mystical staging of Parsifal, a legend in its early years, but by then looking somewhat tired and tatty.

The following year he was entrusted with Wolfgang Wagner’s brand new Ring cycle, at which he presided for its six-season duration. It boasted some of the leading Wagner singers of the day, including Theo Adam, Thomas Stewart, Karl Ridderbusch and Gustav Neidlinger. Stein followed this up with Wolfgang’s Parsifal before the Meistersinger, initially conducted by Mark Elder, brought his Bayreuth tally to 76 performances.

By this time Stein had held a number of appointments with leading German opera houses and orchestras. He was Kapellmeister at the Hamburg Staatsoper from 1951 until 1955 and state Kapellmeister at East Berlin’s Staatsoper (Unter den Linden) from 1955 until 1961, a post he relinquished when the Wall went up. He then transferred his activities back to Hamburg, first as deputy chief conductor under the intendant Rolf Liebermann and, after an interim period from 1963 until 1970 as opera director and general music director in Mannheim, as Generalmusikdirektor of the Opera and Hamburg Philharmonic.

After five years as artistic director of the Suisse Romande Orchestra, he was appointed principal conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in 1985 until 1996, a responsibility he held concurrently with the principal conductorship of the Basle Symphony Orchestra. The Bamberg years proved especially fruitful and during this time he and the orchestra contributed many discs to Koch Schwann’s complete Max Reger edition.

Stein’s discography also included the five Beethoven piano concertos, with Friedrich Gulda and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, live recordings of the complete Schubert and Brahms symphonies, Don Carlos with the Vienna State Opera (where he often conducted) and German-language accounts of Carmen, Pagliacci, Tosca, as well as DVDs of the Bayreuth Parsifal and Meistersinger, a Tristan captured at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and a Hamburg Magic Flute featuring Nicolai Gedda, Edith Mathis and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Horst Stein, conductor, was born on May 2, 1928. He died on July 27, 2008, aged 80