The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  It is tempting to see a direct link between Cosima’s death and Siegfried’s, to surmise that the son just could not live on without the mother he adored, but that explanation is too simple by half. In the course of his adult life, Siegfried wrote the music and librettos for fourteen complete operas and began work on several more; he conducted sixty-two performances at Bayreuth alone (including eleven complete Ring cycles) and countless others in opera houses and concert halls elsewhere. He acted as a vocal talent scout with a fine ear for subtlety as well as power, and as a producer with an artist’s eye for staging. He ran the festival after Cosima stepped down in 1906 and got it going again six years after the war. At the end, with failing health, he was doing more than ever. A multi-talent with a deceptively casual air, then, who worked himself to death – is that the verdict? Not quite, because as the Master’s son he also bore the burden placed on him of unfulfillable expectations, and as an active bisexual he faced the ever-present threat of scandal. He gave few hints of inner tension but tension there surely was; all the more searing, no doubt, because bottled up and only partly released in his (frustratingly ill-acknowledged) compositions. That element too, unquantifiable though it be, belongs to the diagnosis of the workaholic who so swiftly followed his mother to the grave.

  Prolific composer though he was, Siegfried was largely out of step with his time although Arnold Schoenberg, no less, praised him in 1912 as ‘a more profound and original artist than many today who are more famous’.5 Rather backhanded praise, perhaps, but praise all the same. Sometimes too long, often with over-intricate plots, unexpectedly hard to perform, Siegfried’s operas at their best can nonetheless bring an audience cheering to its feet – on the rare occasions, that is, when the works are given at all. As a producer Siegfried was hardly ‘the greatest of his time’ (Friedelind) but he was good enough to win admiration from the most talented of peers like Max Reinhardt. Siegfried’s Tannhäuser is widely, probably rightly, hailed as his finest stage achievement but his Lohengrin and especially Meistersinger – both before the war – were bolder steps forward for Bayreuth in the immediate post-Cosima era than is often acknowledged.

  Nor is it true, as is sometimes claimed, that the festival was becoming a shambles under Siegfried until Toscanini arrived to lick it into shape. That the Italian indeed achieved great things is clear from the near-complete recording of Tannhäuser made at Bayreuth in August 1930 (the month Siegfried died) – fully prepared by Toscanini although conducted, for contractual reasons, by the younger and far less renowned Karl Elmendorff. But the Bayreuth recording of much of Tristan made two years earlier, also under Elmendorff, is orchestrally exemplary, and renderings of excerpts from Parsifal, conducted in 1927 by Muck and Siegfried, are among the finest ever committed to disc – flowing, dramatic but never superficial. Reopened Bayreuth had its cash troubles, dowdy sets and in large part deplorably nationalistic public; but in the main it offered, on the evidence available, performances of high rank. The signs are that by 1930 Siegfried was trying to make a firmer declaration of independence, both artistically and, via his will, vis-à-vis Hitler (who came neither to Cosima’s funeral nor her son’s). Might Bayreuth, then, have played a different role in the Nazi era if Siegfried had lived? Perhaps – but not, all things considered, a very different one. Taking on Wolf eyeball to eyeball came to Fidi no more naturally than slaying dragons.

  The morning after Siegfried died, Winifred went straight to his office and issued her first orders as the new festival director. There seemed no doubt about her right, indeed her duty, to take over – at least according to the will her late husband had drawn up and that he and she had signed just a year before. Besides, she was already deeply involved in festival affairs, well beyond mothering awkward artists like Muck and dealing with reams of correspondence on Siegfried’s behalf. The success of the Tannhäuser appeal showed her ability to orchestrate fund-raising on a big scale, and she had even been aiming to take half a year off to study business management. Instead, Siegfried’s sudden death meant she had to ‘learn on the job’ and, with an energy that drew gasps of fury and respect, she started to do just that. Parts of the festival theatre and restaurant were revamped, a kind of press department was set up (for ‘propaganda’, Winifred privately explained) and the basis of a proper archive was laid. Siegfried’s ‘bachelor house’ next to Wahnfried was also converted, the better to receive important guests – not, initially, Hitler though he regularly stayed there later.

  Old-guard Wagnerians hated changes anyway, even the ones gradually made by Siegfried, but he at least had been the Master’s son and almost until his death he had basked in the aura of the enfeebled but revered Hohe Frau. His widow enjoyed no such protection. Foreign-born, she was seen by the hardliners as fitted neither by blood nor talent to act as chief guardian of the Bayreuth grail. Exactly these charges had been levelled at Cosima after the Master’s death nearly half a century before, but that was an inconvenient fact the critics chose to ignore. Winifred, anyway, showed no more willingness to back down than her late mother-in-law had done. When the town of Bayreuth with unseemly haste proposed that Wahnfried be turned into a museum and the family moved to ‘alternative accommodation’, she scornfully refused and underlined her independence by paying for her husband’s funeral. Strictly speaking the town should have footed the bill because Siegfried had been an honorary citizen.

  Inevitably Eva and Daniela, known to the children as ‘the aunts’ and to many Bayreuthers as ‘die Dynastie’, were among Winifred’s fiercest foes. The two of them had long been at loggerheads with their sister-in-law but they had proved indispensable all the same, for years visiting Wahnfried every day (and many nights) to look after their mother. Now, within months, they lost both their key nursing role and the backing of their brother (who incidentally had helped boost their incomes with ‘perks’ from festival funds, a practice Winifred soon stopped). Daniela remained the festival’s costume designer and wardrobe mistress, the job she had held for more than two decades, but it seemed plain that she too would eventually be swept away by the new broom on the Green Hill. In a bitter note written in 1932 that found its way into the Wahnfried archive, she charged that the festival had been gripped by a spirit of commercialism from the moment Siegfried had entered his grave. Respect, piety, tradition; all that, Daniela bewailed, now counted for next to nothing. The new building work ruined the look of the theatre and (a dig at Winifred as mother) the children clambered all over the place like hooligans. Worse still, Daniela and Eva later learned to their horror that a new staging of Parsifal was projected for 1934. In principle, a planned revamp of the Bühnenweihfestspiel ought to have been good news. The sets, virtually unaltered since the 1882 premiere, looked almost comically tatty and were even dangerous. But ‘the aunts’ insisted that no change whatever could be made to a staging ‘on which the Master’s eye had rested’ and organised a petition that attracted more than a thousand signatures.6 Their campaign failed, but naturally it brought still frostier relations with Wahnfried’s new mistress.

  Winifred pushed on regardless of the hostility she faced from the start, scoring what looked like a great coup as early as 1931 when she signed up Wilhelm Furtwängler – acknowledged as Germany’s foremost conductor despite much strong (not least Jewish) competition. The Berlin-born son of a famous archaeologist, Furtwängler had reached the peak of his profession in 1922 at the age of only thirty-six, taking over the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from the legendary Arthur Nikisch. Although a champion of modern music with more than 180 contemporary works in his concert repertoire, a fact barely reflected in his recordings and now usually forgotten, it was above all for his searching, seething renderings of the Austrian-German classics that Furtwängler was renowned. By hauling him aboard as Bayreuth’s ‘music director’, Winifred seemed to win a near-guarantee of the festival’s long-term success, not least at the box office. All the more so since she simultaneously appointed the multi-talented Heinz Tietjen, who already ran a bewild
ering number of opera houses and theatres in and beyond Berlin, as Bayreuth’s ‘artistic director’. Tietjen in fact turned out to be the far more vital, indeed fateful, catch but at the time it was Furtwängler who grabbed most of the headlines.

  Briefly, things went well. Although, like Tietjen, booked to take on his full role only two years later, Furtwängler happily agreed to make his Bayreuth debut with Tristan in the coming 1931 season. As Toscanini was returning to conduct Parsifal (taking over from Muck who had stumped off in a huff and never returned) as well as Tannhäuser, Wagnerians could look forward to a ‘dream festival’. All the more so since the two conductors made for a study in contrasts – the Italian with his precise beat and insistence on the letter of the score, the German with his bizarre but miraculously effective baton technique, all flutters and jerks as though a water-diviner were being employed to find hidden treasure beneath the notes. Bayreuth audiences would not be able to see what was going on in the covered orchestra pit, but they were clearly in for a feast of comparative interpretation of the highest class. That, indeed, is what they got, but not quite in the way expected. Furtwängler opened the festival with a lithe, translucent Tristan; superb in its way but, thanks to the singer-friendly Bayreuth acoustic, less crushing orchestrally than fans of the conductor were used to elsewhere. Meanwhile Toscanini, often thought a speed merchant, produced a ruminative Parsifal that to this day ranks as the slowest in Bayreuth’s history.

  Then the trouble started. The two conductors, along with Elmendorff who was in charge of the Ring, were due to give a benefit concert in memory of Siegfried. At the last moment Toscanini pulled out in a rage and left town, returning to give the rest of the festival performances for which he had been booked but swearing never to conduct at Bayreuth again. Just why he took such umbrage remains unclear. It is claimed he was furious because an audience had been present against his wishes at a rehearsal, but there was surely more to it than that. He was suffering great pain in his right (conducting) arm; as a fierce anti-fascist he had been roughed up by Mussolini’s blackshirts during a recent concert tour in Italy; and – probably above all – he was more than irritated by the presence of Furtwängler as Bayreuth’s new, much-fêted ‘music director in waiting’. A year earlier the (positive) festival news had been all Toscanini, now it was mostly Furtwängler – thanks not least to the brilliant management and publicity skills of the German maestro’s long-time personal assistant Berta Geissmar, a Jewess later forced by the Nazis to flee the country.

  Furtwängler saved the concert by taking on Toscanini’s part of it as well as his own (he had originally wanted to conduct the whole thing anyway), but he made trouble too. Winifred was ready, even eager, to seek the best possible help but as Siegfried’s successor she felt she had the right to the last word. Furtwängler, though, was anything but a ‘team player’. He was often nervous and indecisive in business (and political) affairs, hence the huge influence of Frau Geissmar who once struck a pen from his hand when he was about to sign a contract she judged unwise. But when it came to making music he was filled with a near-Bayreuthian sense of ‘holy mission’ and regarded compromise as heresy. Besides, neither he nor Winifred was the soul of diplomacy. When she tried to tell him how far he could go as director and muttered in passing that ‘no one is indispensable’, he wrote a haughty letter in early 1932 telling her that, on music, she was frankly an amateur. Since she nonetheless reserved the right to overrule him, he felt unable to take up the director’s job as foreseen. Clearly incensed, Winifred (the former ‘Senta’ Klindworth, after all!) retorted that she had worked closely with Siegfried for fifteen years under Cosima’s eye and that she knew her Wagner very well, thank you. ‘With the expression of regret, I therefore release you, as desired, from your promise,’ she pronounced. ‘Perhaps a way will be found all the same for you to conduct in Bayreuth.’7 A way was found, but not until four years later.

  Winifred’s plight seemed all the worse because the errant Furtwängler was not just Germany’s favourite conductor but Hitler’s. How would ‘Uncle Wolf’, who had already thrown a tantrum in 1931 on learning of Muck’s ‘treachery’, react to the news that his Winnie had let such a great catch slip through her fingers? Fortunately for her, she got a chance to put her side of the story during a long car drive in early May 1932 and Hitler took it well – in part, no doubt, because the outing included a jolly reunion with the Wagner children. The Nazi leader had been unable to see them for nearly a year and he greeted them, as usual, as though they were his own.

  That pleasure aside, Hitler had other reasons to be upbeat. Although he had recently lost the race to become Germany’s president against the octogenarian incumbent (and ex-field marshall) Paul von Hindenburg, he had polled more than thirteen million votes compared with his opponent’s nineteen million. His whistlestop election campaign had made him even better known (there sometimes seemed to be half a dozen Hitlers simultaneously on the stump) and his party was well set to become much the strongest in the Reichstag. For many Germans Hitler now offered the ‘last chance’ – as Nazi placards plastered everywhere put it – to give the country international clout again and deliver it from crushing unemployment. Some change for the ex-jailbird of Landsberg and for his Nazis who four years before had scraped together only 2.8 per cent of the national vote! Hitler’s post-putsch change of strategy (from armed struggle to a superficially legal ‘march through the institutions’) was paying off handsomely at last, helped by the opportunism of monied conservatives who thought they could use the Nazi boss’s charisma for their own ends.

  Goebbels, also present at that May get-together with Winifred and her children, was at least as buoyant as his boss. He even speculated that by the summer of 1933 when the next festival was due (1932 was a performance-free year), the Nazis might already be in power. That turned out to be right. In the meantime, though, Winifred was still in dire need of a star conductor. Toscanini saved the day, or seemed to, by finally yielding to her entreaties and agreeing to return after all to conduct Meistersinger as well as Parsifal. The notion that Toscanini would in effect replace Furtwängler was hard for Bayreuthers to take; but they contented themselves with the thought that, thanks to his services to the Master, the Italian was more or less an honorary German anyway. Anyway, hadn’t Chamberlain himself decisively shown that the great figures of the Italian Renaissance were pure Aryans?

  Alas for Winifred, when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and persecution of the Jews began in earnest, the outraged Toscanini called off his festival plans – despite a letter from Hitler saying how much he was looking forward to seeing the maestro in the summer. Three years after Siegfried’s death, the new mistress of Bayreuth faced a debacle; no Muck, no Furtwängler, no Toscanini, a Führer livid because he had been rebuffed and, thanks mainly to the artistic uncertainty and political upheaval, precious few ticket sales. But Winifred still had a trump card in the person of Tietjen – a wily, hugely influential figure who deserves a close look here, or at least one as close as his enigmatic personality allows.

  Heinz (Heinrich Vivian) Tietjen was, according to Bruno Walter who worked with him in the 1920s at Berlin’s Städtische Oper (Municipal Opera), ‘one of the strangest persons with whom life has ever brought me into contact. In spite of our meeting almost daily for four years, I cannot say that I ever came to know this impenetrable man.’ In his memoirs, written some two decades later, Walter goes on to describe Tietjen as ‘of medium height, with drooping eyelids, a constant sideways look of his bespectacled eyes, a narrow-lipped and tightly compressed mouth, and a nervously twitching face. Never a spirited or spontaneous – to say nothing of an interesting – word came from his lips.’8 Hardly a flattering portrait, but that is no surprise. Walter finally dropped his job as music director at the Opera because he felt that Tietjen, the general manager, was plotting behind his back (which was probably true) and making promises he never meant to keep. And yet, along with all his bitter words, Walter could not help acknowledging th
e ‘self-sacrificing spirit’ with which Tietjen strove ‘to have all my artistic wishes fulfilled, though they must frequently have been inconvenient to him’. He concluded that ‘I am not angry with him. I like to recall the minutes of his frankness and am ready to forgive the hours of his opacity.’9

  Walter’s confessed inability to identify ‘the man behind the mask’ was almost universally shared. Was Tietjen a Social Democrat, as some top Nazis charged, or a Nazi sympathiser, as many – not just left-wingers – claimed? Was he a traditionalist because of his dominant role in Bayreuth, or was he a modernist because he backed contemporary opera, especially in Berlin? Was he pro-Jewish because he worked closely for years with artists like Walter and Klemperer, or antisemitic because he (in the main) stood by when the Nazi persecution began in earnest? In old age, Klemperer recalled that when he went to Tietjen in 1933 to say he was fleeing the country that very day, he got no reaction from his long-time colleague and boss beyond conversation about health and diet. ‘Imagine,’ Klemperer snorted, ‘this man knew I didn’t have a penny in my pocket and that I would never come back. And he was only interested in diets. Terrible, terrible.’10