The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Had he gone on in the same lightish vein, Siegfried might have carved out a niche for himself not least because he offered a contrast of programme to the daunting dramas of his papa. Instead he confounded the expectations raised by his debut with a stream of works that were either ambiguous like Bruder Lustig (1904), or that dealt with deeply troubling themes such as child murder in Schwarzschwanenreich (The Realm of the Black Swan, 1910), suicide in Sonnenflammen (Flames of the Sun, 1912), adultery in Der Heidenkönig (The Heathen King, 1913) and, constantly, illegitimacy. Even his brief cantata Das Märchen vom dicken fetten Pfannekuchen (The Fable of the Thick, Fat Pancake, 1913) is more macabre than playful, telling of a pancake that flees the women cooks who want to gobble it up but finally sacrifices itself to famished children. Siegfried did not, of course, try to explain how far personal experience played a role in his choice of material; perhaps he did not always know, or want to know. At any rate he disappointed many erstwhile fans and raised questions his embarrassed family was not keen to have bandied about – then or later.

  Although he too suffered some grave setbacks even before the First World War, Siegfried’s old rival Richard Strauss was in a much stronger position. He did not have to bear comparison with a genius father nor was he subject to blackmail because of his private life. But in a Weimar world throbbing to the likes of Schoenberg and Weill, Krenek and Hindemith, both Siegfried and Strauss (not to mention an arch-conservative like Hans Pfitzner) were increasingly viewed as ‘old hat’, especially by the young. Even the work of the Master himself was felt by some to be out of tune with the times, despite gripping new productions and the enthusiasm of fine conductors – especially Jews like Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Leo Blech. Siegfried usually failed to show despair but that is surely what he felt; despair at eternally composing ‘for the bottom drawer’, at having to conduct, year in year out, in one provincial centre after another at home and abroad for fees far less than the commercially adept Strauss commanded. All that he tended to pass off with a wave of the hand and an ironic remark, noting on one occasion that the best thing about conducting was that one could get to visit Italy more often. But once in a while the truth broke through. ‘God grant that my children be protected from the wish to be artists,’ he wrote in 1920 after a setback in Dresden. ‘They should rather become town clerks than go through all the disappointments that are mine.’21

  Much of this recalls the ambivalence of the Master himself; the esteem for Jews and jealousy of them; the patriotic feelings mingled with resentment that Germans for the most part failed to offer more support. To that extent Siegfried was indeed Richard’s son. What he wholly lacked was his father’s often ferocious passion and inner compulsion to tell the world of every twist and turn in his thoughts and feelings. On the contrary, in Siegfried’s view the less the world knew about him (above and beyond what he indirectly revealed in his music) the better. ‘Spineless’, Goebbels harshly called him, which is right to the extent that Siegfried strove to avoid conflict even when he might have done better to stand and fight. Typically, he passed off his own lack of obvious heroism with irony, although he could not resist giving himself a modest pat on the back too. ‘My parents named me Siegfried,’ he noted in his memoirs. ‘Well, no anvils have I smashed, no dragons have I slain, no sea of flames have I traversed. Nonetheless I hope I am not wholly unworthy of the name, since fear at least is not in my nature.’22

  Fear perhaps not, but utmost caution – even in his last years, when Siegfried must at least have sensed where Germany might plunge if the Nazis were to win control. For a dinner in 1929 to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, Siegfried placed on every guest’s plate the libretto of his new opera Das Flüchlein das Jeder Mitbekam (The Little Curse that Everybody Bears). Nothing special about that, apparently, except that one of the nastiest characters in the piece is a robber baron called Wolf. Is that how Siegfried saw Hitler and how, by this time, he wanted others to see him? Probably. He did not live to complete the music for Flüchlein but even if he had done so it seems doubtful that the Führer would have been keen to see the piece staged. On the other hand, Siegfried had two years earlier produced an opera called Die heilige Linde (The Sacred Linden Tree), which seemed tailor-made to appeal to the Nazis and their fans. Set in the third century AD, it pits mainly worthy Germans against tricky foreigners, it is full of mythology and (supposed) heroics, and it ends with massed choral appeals for a fatherland cleansed of ‘evil spirits’ for the next millennium – a ‘thousand-year Reich’, as it were. But whatever the apparent message of the libretto, easily the finest music goes to those ideologically on ‘the wrong side’ – the Italians – who thus emerge as far more intriguing folk than the tub-thumping Teutons. It is hard to believe that Siegfried was unaware of this. Anyway, the work was never given under the Nazis and, indeed, had to wait more than seventy years for its premiere.

  A few months before that birthday party at which he made public the Flüchlein libretto, Siegfried drew up a will. Strictly speaking it was the joint will of his wife and himself, but it seems that Winifred only saw the full text when called upon to sign it before a lawyer. Sign it she did, although not every element of it can have pleased her. Siegfried stipulated that should he die first Winifred would be his sole heir and take over the direction of the festival, but that if she later remarried she would have to give up the direction and would lose most of the inheritance, which would then be divided equally among the four children. He also specified that only works by his father should be performed in the festival theatre. On the face of it that was a self-evident condition, but it was not one that the Master himself had formally imposed; indeed (as outlined in Chapter 4) he had at one time indicated otherwise. Siegfried, however, tried to leave absolutely nothing to chance. By pinning down not only how the inheritance was to be handled after the Winifred era but also just what the festival theatre was always to be used for, he cannily helped cement the family’s future claims to ‘its’ festival. This point took on special weight after the Second World War when plans were afoot to dispossess the Wagners and to use the theatre for performances of non-Wagner works.

  As for that clause about remarriage, did Siegfried really have Hitler specifically in mind when he drew it up? Perhaps the elements in his work mentioned above might just be coincidence, not covert warnings. As usual, interpreting ‘Fidi’ is like questioning the sphinx. All in all, though, it seems likely that having failed to keep Wolf out of Wahnfried, let alone openly oppose his march to power, Siegfried did try to stop his abhorrent rival from making the festival his own. If that was his intention he only half succeeded. Winifred never married the Führer or anyone else, but the festival became firmly identified with Hitler all the same.

  9

  Three Funerals and a New Broom

  Of the old Wagnerian guard still entrenched when Hitler and his cronies began to pay court at Wahnfried, Chamberlain was the first to die. ‘Shattering scene,’ the tireless chronicler Goebbels scribbled in his diary in 1926 a few months before the end came. ‘Chamberlain on a couch. Broken, mumbling, with tears in his eyes. He holds my hand and won’t let it go. His great eyes burn like fire. Greetings to you, our spiritual father. Trail-blazer, pioneer! I am deeply stirred. Leave-taking. He mumbles, wants to speak, fails – and then he cries like a child! Farewell! You are with us when we are close to despair.’1

  That Goebbels, like Hitler (and indeed the Kaiser), felt near-religious awe for Chamberlain comes as no surprise. More striking is the fear he hints at that the Nazi movement, for all its initial success, might have no more of a future than the ailing figure on the couch. Against all the odds, the Weimar Republic had begun to seem almost healthy for the first time since the war. Inflation had been brought under control, a somewhat better reparations deal with the allies had been negotiated, the occupation of the Ruhr had ended and the country was close to admission to the League of Nations. In sum, prospects for extremists looked bleak, especially for the Nazis, with Hitler still wi
dely banned from making political speeches although long since out of jail. Goebbels himself faced the task, seemingly hopeless at the time, of bolstering the party in hostile, strongly Social Democratic Berlin. In fact, the country’s new-found relative stability was fairly soon to be smashed, especially by the stock-market crash of 1929 and subsequent recession. But naturally the ratty little Nazi with the club foot and silver tongue had no inkling of that when he made that depressing pilgrimage to the party’s gradually expiring ‘spiritual father’ in Bayreuth.

  When Chamberlain died at last, on 9 January 1927, the Nazi leadership milked the event for all its propaganda worth. In a long obituary the party newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, contended that the deceased had passed on an inexhaustible stock of spiritual weapons for the struggle for ‘the coming Third Reich’. As for the funeral itself, the Nazis simply stole the show, although plenty of notables were on hand like Prince August Wilhelm, a son of the Kaiser, and the exiled Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, that staunch Wagnerian who had been one of Isadora Duncan’s nocturnal visitors in Bayreuth more than two decades before. One group of brown-shirted stormtroopers bore the coffin from the morgue to the hearse and another, carrying a huge swastika-bedecked wreath, led the mourners tramping through the streets. Black flags fluttered everywhere. Hitler, present with Rudolf Hess, seemed so overcome with emotion that his words of tribute were barely audible.

  All the adult Wagners were on hand apart from Cosima, who was in no physical state to attend and was anyway barely able still to distinguish between the dead and the living. Long largely blind and now suffering frequent hallucinations, she nonetheless remained queen bee in her upper chamber at the Wahnfried hive. ‘Greet Houston for me,’ she urged the still-grieving Eva two years after Chamberlain’s funeral, ‘we are very close – I think we met before on another star.’ On other occasions she asked where Liszt and Loldi (Isolde) were, even whether Richard Wagner were alive – to which Daniela diplomatically replied ‘Yes Mama, he lives!’ Sometimes she would cry out in the night, relive her battles to achieve worthy stagings of Wagner’s works, lament Jewish ‘hatred for the German character’. Sometimes she would break into French, loudly complaining that ‘Je suis d’une grande mélancolie, je suis d’une grande mélancolie.’ Just once, in 1929, she confessed that ‘I want to die.’ But she lived on another year.

  It wasn’t all gloom. The four children loved to scamper upstairs to their grandma and ‘play doctor’, pretending to take her temperature with a pencil, feel her pulse and comb her still-thick, silver hair. Then they would wheel her chair onto the balcony where she could bask in the sun and listen to the birdsong. Daniela and Eva took it in turns to sit with her throughout the day and, when he was at home, Siegfried came up for a chat every afternoon. Cosima particularly enjoyed Fidi’s attention, once exclaiming with apparent innocence that ‘you are more like a daughter to me than a son.’ In those last years she also seemed in part to come to terms with her past. Of Marie d’Agoult, the mother who shelved her, she admitted that, after all, ‘there was something heroic about her,’ and of Hans von Bülow, the husband she deserted, that he would have been ‘the only competent’ person to work with her in Bayreuth. It is sometimes said that when the end came, on 1 April 1930, Cosima’s last words were ‘Forgive, forgive,’ uttered with Hans in mind. That is false, if the notes of Cosima’s remarks diligently taken by the two daughters are anything to go by. According to Eva, Cosima muttered ‘As God wills’ and ‘Wonderful’ before breathing her last; according to Daniela, in this case perhaps a cooler chronicler, ‘Mama’ followed up ‘Wonderful’ with ‘Pain’ thrice repeated.2 Whatever the truth about that, the statistics of Cosima’s remarkable life are not in doubt. From her birth as an illegitimate child in a Como hotel room to her death as the Hohe Frau of Bayreuth, she survived for ninety-two years and three months. After Wagner expired in Venice, she stayed a widow for just over forty-seven years.

  Ironically Siegfried, the ever-solicitous son, was not on hand when his mother died. Unable to resist the temptation to work at La Scala, Milan, Italy’s finest opera house, he had accepted an invitation to produce and conduct the whole Ring cycle there in March. Siegfried well knew that soon afterwards he faced specially taxing preparations for the summer festival in Bayreuth, but he reckoned that in the wake of the Milan exertions he would be able to take a break to recover in Greece. He never got the chance. Alarmed by a cable from Wahnfried saying Cosima’s condition had worsened, he and Winifred scrapped the Greek trip and took a night-sleeper home. They arrived too late. ‘Mama’ already lay surrounded with flowers on her bier, hair combed, hands folded and looking, as Siegfried put it in his diary, ‘young and beautiful, as [she had done] thirty years ago’.3 After the funeral ceremony at Wahnfried a hearse bore the body briefly to the festival theatre, the house Cosima had exulted and suffered over so much longer than the Master who built it, and thence to cremation. ‘A fine ceremony there too,’ Siegfried noted, ‘despite an annoying, albeit well-meant, speech from a somewhat drunken enthusiast. Around an hour with friends in hotel, then journey home.’4

  From his unimpassioned, near-offhand, comments you might think Siegfried took his mother’s death almost in his stride. A photo snapped soon after the funeral could give the same impression; Winifred dressed all in black, from her driver’s cowl to the tips of her elegant shoes, Siegfried in light-coloured jacket and plus-fours, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. But all that simply serves to confirm an old rule – that the deeper Siegfried’s emotion, the less he was inclined to show it or able to express it in words. Equable as ever throughout those dismal April days, he nonetheless looked, as one prescient eyewitness put it, ‘as pale as death.’

  Italy helped, as usual. By the end of the month, Siegfried had made off again over the Alps to relax in his favourite way; hobnobbing with Blandine, Manfredi and other members of the Wagner clan’s Italian branch, dining well but not wisely and revisiting art and architecture he had loved since childhood. In an admission that would probably have gone too far even for his Italophile father, he claimed that on hearing parts of Lohengrin, Tristan and Tannhäuser, he saw pictures in his mind’s eye by Raphael, Titian and Correggio. Götterdämmerung he linked to the work of Tintoretto. Left to himself, perhaps Siegfried really would have made good the threat he uttered in his latter years to ‘close the shop’ and emigrate to Italy for good. But there were the children to consider, Winifred too, although she was well able to look after herself. Besides, in 1930 he was at long last set to realise his greatest festival ambition – to create and present a new production of Tannhäuser.

  With its theme of the artistic outsider struggling between the demands of the flesh and the spirit, with its near-Italian lyricism and with the special challenges it posed to stage – from the orgy on the Venusberg to the great crowd scenes at Wartburg castle – Tannhäuser was the Wagner opera that Siegfried found easily the most intriguing, albeit not the most fully realised. But because of the problems and especially the cost involved, the work had not been given at Bayreuth since that turbulent summer of 1904, when Isadora Duncan had choreographed the orgy and Siegfried had conducted all five performances. In 1924 there had barely been enough cash on hand to restart the festival with tried and tested productions, let alone to risk a new Tannhäuser. Siegfried pencilled in the work for 1927 but then regretfully substituted the less costly Tristan. By 1930, though, the money had been raised – thanks above all to Winifred, who organised a special Tannhäuser appeal and presented her husband with the proceeds of 100,000 marks for his sixtieth birthday.

  Siegfried could thus go ahead and in so doing he dropped nearly all his familiar caution, engaging an avant-garde choreographer (Rudolf von Laban) and a notably international cast: Sigismund Pilinszky (Hungarian) as Tannhäuser, Maria Müller (Czech) as Elisabeth and Ivar Andrésen (Swedish) as the Landgrave. Above all he booked Arturo Toscanini, the first foreigner (Isolde’s Swiss husband apart) ever to conduct at Bayreuth. The latter decisi
on enraged hard-line Wagnerians and especially Karl Muck, that fine but fiercely jealous conductor who had first appeared in Bayreuth in 1901 and who regarded his own interpretations as uniquely close to the Master’s wishes. Muck, now seventy, stormed and intrigued against Toscanini (as he had in 1924 against another top conductor, Fritz Busch, who never returned to Bayreuth), but Siegfried refused to budge. He had admired the Italian maestro ever since hearing his Tristan in Milan decades before, but he had hitherto bowed to pressure from traditionalists who argued that the Bayreuth pit was no place for a non-German – not even for the most famous conductor of the day, which Toscanini by this time surely was. Now he stood firm, as though aware he would not get another chance if he buckled this time.

  Siegfried was already hard at work with the singers at Wahnfried even before official rehearsals began at the festival theatre in June, but his troubles really started when Toscanini arrived in a blaze of (mainly adulatory) publicity to take on not just Tannhäuser but Tristan too. Muck, booked as usual for ‘his’ Parsifal, felt more than ever sidelined and had constantly to be soothed by Winifred, who had a real way with the old man, to stop him making good threats to resign. Meanwhile Muck’s similarly choleric new rival threw tantrums from his very first rehearsal, incensing the players with charges of incompetence and unsettling singers who could not match his swift tempi. Siegfried was all diplomacy, smilingly asking the ‘caro maestro’ to remember that a ‘rough German’ text could not be handled like a ‘flexible Italian’ one, quietly switching one or two of the less deft instrumentalists and trying to ensure that the eager but ailing Pilinszky did not sing himself out before the first night. Up each day from seven a.m. until well after midnight, snatching snacks between crises, chainsmoking and subject to sporadic asthma attacks, Siegfried finally collapsed clutching at his heart during a Götterdämmerung rehearsal in mid-July. A few days later the festival began with the first of five performances of Tannhäuser that were widely hailed as among the greatest triumphs in Bayreuth history, partly because of the singers (the strenuous Pilinszky largely excepted) but above all thanks to the conductor and producer. Siegfried saw none of it. He died peacefully in hospital on 4 August aged just sixty-one, exactly four months and three days after his mother. At a memorial concert on 8 August Muck and Toscanini for once collaborated, the former conducting the funeral march from Götterdämmerung, the latter the Siegfried Idyll – that birthday present ‘with Fidi birdsong and orange sunrise’ for Cosima from ‘her Richard’, premiered on the staircase at Tribschen sixty years before.