by A. N. Wilson
Toscanini created an atmosphere around himself of benignity and good humour, but also – a crucial fact – he was not German. Those who were and suffered under the burden of the times latched on, from now onwards, to foreigners. Far from thinking this natural, then I considered it unpatriotic. I thought, ‘Is it any wonder you are hated if you shout out such thoughts to a foreigner?’
And yet only a minute before I was laughing with Toscanini about an American film of Parsifal. I admired Frida Leider’s Kundry and I liked her personally. Yet at this sudden dismissal of, as it seemed, German patriots, something much stronger than the genial, grownup top half of my brain was operating.
When she asked what she could do if ‘these people’ had success, Frida was alluding to the enormous surge in popular votes for the Nazis. In the Reichstag election of 1928 the Nazis had twelve seats. In the election of 1930 they won 107. In Bayreuth the SPD votes stayed steady at about 8,000. The Nazi votes leaped to about the same number, having been less than half. One of the inhabitants of Bayreuth who had voted for them – his first vote for them – was myself. Of course, at home my parents spoke of little else. It especially grieved my mother that there now seemed no prospect at all of the Bavarian royal family returning to power and that local politics had descended to fisticuffs. When Schemm, the Nazi leader in Bayreuth, spoke in the chamber of the City Council they could count on fights breaking out, chairs and glass being broken, ashtrays and blotters and even steel pens being used as weapons as though the violence lurking beneath the polite surface of things was now like some uncontrollable volcanic lava threatening the conventions and structures of even such dull assemblies as our own.
‘Rudolf’ – her husband, Frida was still talking – ‘says Germans are too sensible. They have voted these people in to give the Conservatives a shake-up. Next election he says we’ll be back to dull politicians with watch-chains and frock-coats and Points of Order.’
‘Our beloved Duce,’ said Toscanini, ‘as well as making us ridiculous in the eyes of the world, is so inefficient. He declared the price of eggs was too high. Any farmer who charged an economic price for his eggs would be shot. It meant that for three weeks the shops were full of cheap eggs. Now there are none. If you want an egg at any price you have to buy it on the black market.’
‘Uncle Wolf imitates Il Duce brilliantly,’ blurted out Friedelind.
It was she and not I who had been brave enough to declare an allegiance and to bring this line of talk to an end. Of course, the conversation was overshadowed by what happened immediately after it; but Friedelind and I were both, I am sure, to revert to it in our minds in later years. Only the previous day I had cravenly assented to Winnie’s expressions of rapture at the Nazi electoral successes. When Frida showed herself to belong to a radically opposite viewpoint, the demonic side of my soul felt with complete certainty that Uncle Wolf was right about the Jews. His followers might not have been right to be violent towards them, but their loyalties were elsewhere. Look, I said to myself, look at this Jew (I knew she wasn’t one) leaning across the table to talk to this Eyetie – I admired and liked Toscanini with a large part of my being – to deplore the patriotism of the German people. Such double-think went on all the time in my brain. For example, I thought it was heroic of Winnie to drive to Zurich so often, sometimes as often as once a week, to get Swiss francs and US dollars out of the bank to pay singers, players, conductors and even on occasion the butcher and the baker. The successive governments of Weimar, soppy liberals or downright Reds, had driven all enterprizing Germans to such expedients.
Yet when I went to get my teeth fixed a different set of standards suddenly applied. The guileless, boring figure of Erik Hügel, leaning over me with miniature circular mirror and one of those chrome-plated hooks for fishing about in the gunge between teeth, would give his views on the economy. ‘My wife and I both agree that to keep your money in German marks is the equivalent of putting it – you’ll excuse the expression – putting it down the drain. A little wider please. Thank you. We all got stung after the war, like everyone else, but – a little wider, thank you – the war, but my wife said to me – if you’ll excuse the expression – enough is enough.’
Whereas for the Wagners to have a Swiss bank was enterprise and sensible, for the Hügels to have one – a much more modest one, I’ll be bound – was evidence that they did not really have this country’s interests at heart and were somehow immune from the financial insecurity that plagued the rest of us. The Hügels’ banking arrangements, about which he was speaking so openly and artlessly, translated themselves at once in my brain into something underhand, sneaky, conspiratorial, typical of them.
‘Anyway, young lady, tell us about English school,’ said Toscanini, who had evidently discerned from my face that, politically at least, neither he nor Frida was among friends.
Friedelind was in one of her high, histrionic moods, imitating an Irish teacher of Winnie’s – she’d taught at a school near Berlin that Winnie had attended as a girl – named Miss Scott. This good woman now ran an establishment in the north of England. Friedelind’s grasp of languages was excellent. I suppose I felt reproved by the company. When I had Toscanini’s full attention and was talking about something I reckoned to know about – Richard Wagner’s opera on film – I felt liberated, stimulated, by his company. But as the talk grew more political I had felt excluded by their cosmopolitan liberalism. It was all right for them (in this sentence ‘them’ was not a euphemism for the Jews, just for my immediate company), for them there was always abroad. But what about us, the Germans stuck in this country, which was determined to lurch from one bankruptcy to the next lunacy to the next? What about us?
So I was sulking – involuntarily – as Friedelind imitated her English teachers and bandied about English phrases, which made Frida and Toscanini and the others laugh but which I simply did not understand.
Perhaps it was because I did not understand the English jokes and because I was sulking that I was the first to see Wieland Wagner coming into the dining room at the Golden Anchor. All the tables had been taken, so that you could see the waiters looking at the boy and wondering where he intended to place himself. Indeed, in my mind there floated for a few seconds the possibility that he had decided he’d get a better lunch if he left Wahnfried and scooted off to the town’s best hotel. The fact that he was not ‘properly dressed’ – he had an open-necked shirt and no coat on that hot summer day – might have been attributable to his family’s incurable bohemianism, but even the Wagners minded their ps and qs in the sedate old Anchor. Besides, it was his expression and not his clothes that told Wieland’s story and it took only a few seconds to read his stricken face. ‘Mausi,’ he said, coming up to his sister. ‘Mausi – it’s Daddy.’
Rehearsing Götterdämmerung on the stage of the Festspielhaus he had shuddered into unconsciousness and when some hours later in hospital an embolism finally brought his heart to a sudden halt, Brünnhilde continued to call out to the dead body of her Siegfried; the ravens – not the puppets used in the theatre but huge black-winged creatures – fluttered around him, poised for flight back to Valhalla. They played the music of Siegfried’s funeral in the Festival Theatre on the day they buried the body of our Fidi in the town cemetery as Brünnhilde mounted her steed and rode bravely into the flames, and as the music of the Rhine reasserted the enduring world of nature at peace when the vain human striving for power had been cast aside.
Wolf did not come to the funeral. Winnie told us all that he had telephoned her to say it was better he stay away. He did not wish to cause her any embarrassment by making Fidi’s obsequies ‘political’. I had no doubt at all that these feelings were perfectly sincere. Though Siegfried had entertained very mixed, decidedly satirical views of Wolf and his antics, the satire was not reciprocated. H was slavish in his devotion to the Wagner name.
Winnie was never more magnificent in my eyes than in those days and weeks after her husband died. She was a thirty-five-
year-old widow with four children to care for – but she made sure that the Festival went on and that she should be in charge of it.
On the very day after Siegfried died I rose early and cycled down to the theatre. Some instinct told me that she too would be up early and, sure enough, when I reached her husband’s office, there I found her in a black dress seated at his desk. If I were not already in love with her I should have fallen in love that morning. Her abundant hair was neatly brushed and arranged in a bun at the back of her exquisite nape. Her hooded triangular eyes were sad, but not red, not yet. They had a look of sleeplessness but at this stage of the day lack of repose, rather than making her torpid, was acting as a stimulant. ‘I thought you’d come,’ she said to me. ‘Thanks.’
She was seven years older than I was but suddenly we seemed of the same generation.
‘I’m expecting visitors.’ She smirked and for all her air of sorrow I recognized that love of a fight which was so much part of her Celtic nature.
‘Oh?’
‘Fidi’s will,’ she said and lit up. The next few words were borne on the diagonal lines of smoke coming from mouth and nostrils. ‘He drew it up a couple of years ago. He named me as his outright successor as Director of the Festival. That means all this’ – the hands and the cigarette were waved over the desk, then in the air to indicate the entire Festival Theatre – ‘is my responsibility, raising the money, paying the chorus, paying the orchestra, hiring the principals, negotiating with the conductors…’
After a silence I said, ‘I’ll help you.’
Her laughter was not unkind, but she laughed. ‘I gather we’ll receive a little delegation from the mayor at nine a.m.,’ she said firmly. ‘His worship the mayor and his corporation think they know better than my husband how to run an opera festival…’
She asked me to stay for the mayoral visit. The mayor came in person, a sweating, porcine man whose pink neck tried to burst from his winged collar and whose pince-nez made red marks on each side of his greasy nose. There was a great deal of ‘gracious lady … honoured lady…’ but their meaning was clear. ‘We have found you an … ahem … Mr Town Clerk, you have the particulars, I believe.’
‘Certainly, Mr Mayor.’ The town clerk, also in winged collar and frock-coat, was as dry and yellow and lean as the mayor was moist and round. ‘… in a very salubrious – as you might say – neighbourhood.’
‘Neighbourhood!’ exclaimed the mayor. The word might just have been coined, so novel did it seem to him. ‘I think, Mr Town Clerk, we’ll ask you to speak to this one…’
‘Thank you, Mr Mayor. Gracious lady. We – that is to say I. That is to say the Corporation on behalf of all the people of Bayreuth – offer our most heartfelt … but felt it would be wrong to let this day go by … too big a matter for … Richard Wagner not just the possession of his immediate family, but of the world … The town would like to offer you for your lifetime occupancy of … A very handsome accommodation … The Villa Wahnfried could become a Richard Wagner museum … The papers, musical scores, diaries and memorabilia would be … ahem, in the public domain.’
Writing down these words of the town clerk thirty years after he spoke them, writing them moreover in a Communist country, they do not seem so very unreasonable. I gather that Wieland is doing wonderful productions at Bayreuth these days, but isn’t there something absurd about that theatre having turned into a family fiefdom? But the mayor and town clerk chose to make their tactless proposals within hours of Fidi’s death. That was why I felt so proud of her when she rose to her feet behind her desk – she was fully six inches taller than the mayor – and said, ‘Gentlemen, I am grateful for your concern. My husband and I restored this Festival single-handedly after the war. We financed it from loans and donations raised in America and this year, largely thanks to the enormous popularity of Herr Toscanini, we shall be looking at a very healthy profit; all of which, I need hardly tell you, will be reinvested in next year’s Festival. I do not believe in public sponsorship for the arts.’
The moist, plump mayor showed himself unexpectedly ready for this claim: ‘There, dear lady, you differ from your distinguished father-in-law who not only enjoyed the royal patronage of King Ludwig II but who also openly advocated state funding – taxpayers’ money! – being used to subsidize operas.’ He tried his best. He pulled himself up in his chair, he stuck out his waistcoat and watch-chain, he said he was only anxious to preserve for all time what the Wagner family had so gallantly begun. He asked what would happen, perish the thought, if the gracious lady herself … none of us immortal … Surely it would be better if the responsibility for running the archive, the house, the Festival itself and the theatre should not devolve upon one pair of shoulders … a mother’s shoulders … a young mother’s … a, dare he say it, a woman’s shoulders.
When the mayor and the town clerk had gone, she seemed quite in control of herself, even prepared to joke about it. We made some inroads into correspondence and about mid-morning, when we had a pause and coffee was brought in, Friedelind turned up at the office. There was nothing so very unusual about this, since early infancy the children had treated this theatre as their playground, but today was different. It had not occurred to me until she appeared that there was anything strange, on the day after a father and husband died, about mother and children spending the morning separately.
Friedelind had grown since her absence in England. If not yet as tall as her mother, she was, even though only twelve years old, now a woman, not a child, and when she came into the office there was something about her that even since yesterday, when she heard the sad news in the Golden Anchor, now marked her as a mature being: it was a seriousness I had never seen before. In any other circumstance a meeting with the mayor and town clerk would have been an occasion for Winnie to do a comic turn, to amuse her daughter with imitations of their pomposity, but now she had risen from Fidi’s chair and came towards her daughter as she entered the room. ‘Oh, Mausi.’
‘Oh, Mutti.’ Friedelind threw open her arms. It was she who had come to comfort her mother. As her daughter enfolded her in her arms, Winnie burst into tears. You could tell that they were the first tears since Siegfried died, deep sobs coming from the depths of a broken heart. Her children had lost a father but they still had one another, and Winnie and their membership of a family. But in some senses Winnie was alone again. She had lost the man who had rescued her from her outsider’s life in 1915, and as she wept piteously she was, for those ten or fifteen minutes, once again the orphan Senta from the East Grinstead orphanage.
* * *
Hearing one’s own name always alerts the ears, as when, in a crowd, you hear a nanny or a mother calling it out, only to realize that she is calling a child of the same name, an experience I always find alienating, disappointing: for a few split seconds one had believed oneself wanted, loved. But on this occasion there was no doubt at all that when Winnie, on the telephone, used my name she was speaking about me. ‘I couldn’t say anything about it in front of N———!… Yes, yes, naturally … It will be public knowledge eventually. Wolf, I don’t quite know…’
The conversation upon which I had chanced was evidently an important one, for she had come into Fidi’s inner sanctum at Wahnfried away from the rest of the family in order to conduct it. And she had not risked using one of the telephones at the Festival Theatre. ‘I do not want to have to discuss it in public, but I wanted you to know…’
Just to the right of the door into Fidi’s sanctum sanctorum was a walk-in closet where files, stationery, semi-obsolete works of reference and the like were kept. Its door was open and I slipped inside, confident that without switching on the light I could both avoid knocking into a filing cabinet and hear what was going on. ‘… because…’ Her laugh was coquettish, positively flirtatious. And this was – what? – only a few days after the funeral.
‘The terms are clear,’ she was saying. ‘Fidi has left me in sole control of the Festival. I am the sole owner [Besitzer
in] of Wahnfried, of the furniture, fittings, all the Wagner material which the mayor wishes to be put into a museum … Yes, yes, I told you, he thought he would…’
There was a long pause in which Wolf was clearly saying what he would like to have done to the mayor and corporation.
‘Not if,’ she replied, ‘when. But you will have more important things to … Ah!… No, no, the scores, the diaries, the letters, the entire archive is mine, as is the control of the Festival, the choice of directors … conductors … everything. So you see, dear Fidi has left me with a very deep responsibility and I do know how much this shows he trusts me … I shall rely on you, Wolf … I shall rely on you to advise me about everything … No, everything … Fidi always said we should involve Tietjen … Tietjen…’
The mention of the word seemed to have a strange effect on her telephone receiver. Even from the cupboard I could hear the rasping voice of Wolf expressing himself at great length on the suitability – much more likely the unsuitability – of her choice of artistic director of the future Festivals.
‘You could make that very objection to my presence here, Wolf … Well, if you say that Tietjen isn’t German … His father was German, it was his mother who was English … And I am completely…’
She laughed … ‘Tietjen directed his first Ring when he was twenty-five years old. When Fidi and I went to the Berlin State Opera last year, Fidi was really impressed by the way he’d been working with Furtwängler and Preetorious … Yes … I feel I owe it to … Yes, Wolf, I know, but Fidi made it clear he trusted Tietjen…’
Another very long disquisition on Tietjen’s qualities seemed to follow.