The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Even the question often put in jest by theatre folk – ‘Did Tietjen ever (really) live?’ – is not wholly straightforward to answer. To close associates, including Walter, a fleeting smile and a few warm words showed that the man could indeed ‘come alive’ once in a while. Some women, Winifred among them, found him utterly charming. To a less favoured circle, though, Tietjen seemed a phantom figure; nondescript in appearance, near-impossible to pin down in conversation and extraordinarly adept at covering his tracks. So much is sure. Tietjen became the grey eminence of German theatre during the Weimar Republic, he stayed at the top throughout the Nazi era despite intermittent harassment, he sailed through post-war denazification and then pursued his career even (very briefly) in Bayreuth. Yet his tale has received nothing like the attention it deserves (an omission far more painful than that involving von Gross, a key figure for Bayreuth but hardly beyond). Perhaps the challenge of pinning down a phantom, even one so potent, has proved too daunting – or perhaps those most involved felt they would compromise themselves by telling what they knew.

  At least a few clues can be dredged from Tietjen’s own brief autobiographical essay, slanted and full of holes though that is.11 His skill at slipping out of tight corners no doubt came from his father, a widely travelled diplomat, and much of his aptitude for music from his British mother, who taught him the piano. Precious little colour seems to have rubbed off on him from the exotic cities of his early years, Tangiers where he was born in 1881 and Constantinople where he was partly raised; but he did pick up languages easily, even Arabic, and at first wanted to become a diplomat like his father. Instead he plumped for music, partly thanks to a chance meeting with the legendary Nikisch, partly because serious eye trouble forced him to lie in the dark for months, reflecting on his future and becoming still more sensitive to sound. In his twenties he was already accomplished enough to put on an entire Ring cycle as conductor and producer in the provinces, and ambitious enough to write to Cosima telling her he yearned to do the same in Bayreuth. It took him nearly three decades more to achieve his aim but this was a man well able to wait – and to pounce when the time was ripe.

  Contemporary reports and his few recordings suggest Tietjen was an efficient rather than an inspired maestro, but his productions won widespread praise for superb organisation and (much more surprising) imaginative flair. One great admirer was Siegfried who was bowled over by the Lohengrin Tietjen put on in Berlin in 1929. Siegfried in any case believed that it took producers equally at home on stage and in the orchestra pit, like himself, to draw the most from his father’s works. On seeing the Berlin Lohengrin, original in concept but never betraying the flow of the music, he felt his view handsomely confirmed. Should anything happen to him, he advised Winifred, then Tietjen would make an ideal artistic adviser at Bayreuth – at least until the children were grown. Did it cross Siegfried’s mind that Tietjen of all people might be able to offer an effective defence against the voracious ‘Wolf’? If so, it was an inspired thought.

  Alike though the two men of the theatre were in some ways, Tietjen had attributes Siegfried sadly lacked (or could not be bothered to develop); administrative skill amounting to genius and an ultra-sensitive nose for power. To read his memoir you would think that Tietjen rose to the top mainly because important people begged him to take on one difficult job after another in which he then happened to be able to shine. He was, he claims, amazed to be appointed as a young man to direct the smallish opera in Trier close to the border with Luxembourg, he later slipped into the top job in nearby Saarbrücken, he had a wonderful time running the opera in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) and gave that up only with reluctance to go to the Städtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg. It was not long before he was also in charge of the more prestigious Staatsoper (formerly the Court Opera) on the Unter den Linden avenue, and finally he became manager of all Prussian State Theatres (not opera houses alone), thus extending his influence far beyond Berlin. He has warm words for Walter, Klemperer and, not least, Max von Schillings, whom he replaced, sadly he says, at the State Opera. He also pats himself on the back for ensuring that the Jewish conductor Leo Blech was able to draw a full pension after being driven into exile by the Nazis. Tietjen surely did help Blech and others, but just as surely his career and motives were murkier than he suggests. No doubt it would be naive to expect more frankness, even in an account compiled and published long after the Second World War.

  Few things better illustrate Tietjen’s knack of ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hounds’ than the brief, tumultuous history of Berlin’s Kroll-Oper at the Platz der Republik. Strictly speaking the Kroll was an offshoot of the Staatsoper and was financed out of the latter’s budget, but Tietjen kept it on a long artistic leash which Klemperer, the music director, used to the full. Daring, uncompromising, and massively persuasive, Klemperer even managed to attract Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s brother-in law and a distinguished composer in his own right, to the Kroll team ‘merely’ as an assistant conductor. For four years from 1927 audiences were treated to (or sickened by) a rich diet that mixed Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, Janácek and other ‘moderns’ with bold productions of classics including Wagner. Traditionalists and, above all, the Nazis loathed the Kroll but Tietjen stuck to his guns until 1931 (two years before Hitler came to power) when the house was closed for good, officially for lack of finance. Later Klemperer claimed the action had been taken because he was a Jew. Tietjen disagreed, saying that Klemperer’s ‘whole political and artistic direction’ had been responsible.12 That Tietjen himself had long seemed to identify with that very same direction caused him trouble with the Nazis but not lasting harm. By 1931, anyway, he had slipped into yet another fascinating role – advising Winifred and, bit by bit, coming to dominate her.

  It was Tietjen who had first encouraged Winifred to get Furtwängler to Bayreuth while warning her that the conductor was nothing if not a prima donna. What role he may have played in Furtwängler’s subsequent extended absence from the Green Hill is (as so often with Tietjen) far from clear. According to Friedelind, Tietjen had the confidence of both Furtwängler and Winifred (but never of Toscanini) and shuttled between them telling tales that strengthened his own position with each. That account seems plausible; at least it fits what is known of Tietjen’s tactics elsewhere. On the face of it, therefore, Furtwängler’s withdrawal in high dudgeon from the festival seems to cast doubt on Tietjen’s skill as diplomat and go-between – but does it really? With Furtwängler gone for years, and then returning more or less as a ‘guest’, Tietjen was left without a real rival at Bayreuth in artistic matters, let alone administrative ones. That might not have been his firm aim from the start; but he already knew his Furtwängler inside out from long experience in Berlin, and he surely sized up Winifred quickly enough to see that she and her prospective ‘music director’ would soon be on a collision course.

  Tietjen must have been vexed when Toscanini bolted for good in 1933 but he had evidently been expecting it and had sounded out Fritz Busch as a possible substitute. No doubt in the circumstances Busch looked a near-ideal candidate; neither foreign nor a Jew, long-time music director in Dresden and ranked by Hitler not far behind Furtwängler as a conductor. Unfortunately for Tietjen, Busch despised the Nazis and had fallen so foul of the local Saxon branch that, despite the Führer’s admiration, he had been driven out of his job. He promptly took his family abroad and stayed there, like his similarly principled musician brothers Adolf and Hermann, despite repeated bids to get him back. In his memoirs, he recalls a conversation in Italy in May 1933 with a deeply distressed Toscanini, who showed him Hitler’s ‘looking forward to seeing you’ letter. Busch wrote:

  What was depressing Toscanini, from his youth closely attached to the art of Richard Wagner, and its greatest interpreter, was anxiety for the future of the Bayreuth Festival. Feeling thus he asked me, ‘What will Bayreuth do if I refuse?’ ‘Then they will invite me, Maestro,’ I said. Toscanini was
speechless. ‘That is to say, they have invited me. Tietjen, who expects your refusal, has already taken steps.’

  I was delighted at his astonishment and added with a laugh, ‘Of course, I will refuse, like you.’ Toscanini shut his mouth, which had remained open from astonishment, and purred, in his warm, melancholy, voice, ‘Eh, caro amico!’ We were both silent and a feeling of great sorrow came over us.13

  With so many top conductors either sulking, already in exile or simply ‘unacceptable’ (a word in ever-increasing use), Bayreuth seemed doomed to hold its first festival in the Nazi era without a single baton star. Tietjen, though, did not give up. Suppose Bayreuth could secure the services of Richard Strauss, the ‘grand old man’ of German music, for at least part of the programme; what a coup that would be, albeit one inordinately tricky to bring off. Strauss, remember, had not conducted at Bayreuth (that ‘pigsty of pigsties’ as he had called it) since 1894, when he gave five performances of Tannhäuser. As a composer he had been a rival to Siegfried and, partly because of that, he had fallen foul of the Hohe Frau. Still, Siegfried and Cosima were now dead and Strauss revered Wagner’s music at least as much as ever. Moreover, he seemed less than squeamish when it came to acting as a high-level stopgap for colleagues who fell foul of the regime. In March, Bruno Walter had fled Germany after being threatened by the Nazis and barred from conducting a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. As Walter drily noted in his memoirs, his place on the rostrum had been taken by ‘the composer of Ein Heldenleben’ (A Hero’s Life) – Richard Strauss.14 Later the agent who had arranged the concert claimed Walter had, in fact, proposed that Strauss step in so that the event could go ahead and the orchestra be paid. Like so much else from those years in particular, the exact circumstances are no longer verifiable. At least there is no doubt that Strauss conducted and that he donated his fee to the Philharmonic.

  Finally Strauss stepped in for Toscanini, ‘for the sake of Bayreuth’ as he put it, just as he had done for Walter, supposedly ‘for the sake of the orchestra’. Tietjen (later the dedicatee of Strauss’s opera Die Liebe der Danae) prepared the ground with the utmost finesse and Winifred clinched the deal when, hand-wringing as it were, she visited the composer at his home at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Strauss agreed to conduct Parsifal, in the event shaving some forty minutes off Toscanini’s timing from two years previously, as well as a celebratory performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its choral finale extolling the brotherhood of man. Thanks to Hitler, who attended the festival for the first time in eight years and backed it in cash and kind, the erstwhile blocks of unsold tickets were snapped up after all. The Führer, it was claimed, had saved Bayreuth. It would be at least as correct to say that Tietjen had done so. It was he who had pulled the strings to get Strauss, who had drawn in vital staff and artists from his Berlin Staatsoper team (some, admittedly, already active at Bayreuth in Siegfried’s time) and he who had conceived the new productions of the Ring and Meistersinger, working hand-in-glove with his celebrated stage-designer colleague Emil Preetorius. As though that did not keep him busy enough, Tietjen also made his Bayreuth debut as a conductor, taking over several performances of Meistersinger from Elmendorff.

  ‘It would have been a pardonable error on the part of any casual visitor to Bayreuth to have mistaken this year’s Wagner festival for a Hitler festival,’ reported Walter Legge, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in August 1933.15 Legge was not referring only to the china plaques of the Führer and the copies of Mein Kampf filling shop windows all over town, but also to the audiences which, he felt, gave the impression that ‘since Hitler likes Wagner’s music, we are here too’ – an observation especially accurate, as it happens, with respect to most of the Nazi grandees in the Führer’s entourage. The British critic complained that Strauss and Elmendorff were inferior to Toscanini as interpreters (he even compared Strauss to an American tourist who sees everything in record time and feels nothing), but he nonetheless found both the orchestral playing and choral singing ‘electrifying’. Above all he praised the staging as far beyond anything to be seen at Covent Garden, claiming that ‘even those of us who have watched with interest the development of Emil Preetorius as a scenic artist and of Heinz Tietjen as a producer have been astonished by the dramatic strength and stark realism of these Bayreuth productions.’ The two Germans, Legge enthused, ‘give dramatic truth, and Wagnerian dramatic truth will outdo any other form of theatrical art.’

  Legge was a perceptive critic with a fine ear. He also had a persuasive tongue and a keen, not to say ruthless, business sense – attributes most fully displayed after the Second World War when he founded the Philharmonia Orchestra and, as a record producer of genius, got Furtwängler to London to put the whole of Tristan und Isolde on disc. There is thus every reason to take seriously his report on the 1933 festival, including that special praise for Tietjen and Preetorius who henceforth dominated production and staging at Bayreuth. By no means everyone judged their work with such favour. Many of the old guard like ‘the aunts’ saw the creations of Berlin’s ‘terrible twins’ as newfangled, even heretical. Less hidebound Wagnerians, on the other hand, often felt Tietjen’s massed crowd scenes to be ‘over-produced’ – that is, too busy and cluttered. A kowtow to abominable Nazi taste perhaps?

  Hardly. Long before the Nazis came to power Tietjen had shown how he loved arranging masses of people onstage – as many as his budget would permit and arguably more than was always good for the piece in hand. Even so his work was and remained a world away from the pompous tub-thumping and overstrained pathos of a Nazi producer like Benno von Arent (who staged nothing on the Green Hill). The truth is that in Bayreuth, as in Berlin, Tietjen and Preetorius usually managed to offer enough stage evidence to underpin Wagner’s story, but not so much that it would smother the allegory behind it. That was the case for much of their Ring, as well as for their new Lohengrin from 1936, their Tristan from 1938 and to some extent for their Holländer from 1939. When the artists were also up to scratch, as they clearly were in that Lohengrin conducted by Furtwängler with Franz Völker in the title role and Maria Müller as Elsa, the result was unsurpassed by any stage anywhere.

  Much of that was registered – or at least foreshadowed – in Legge’s report of 1933. Even so, the English critic cannot quite have realised how all-pervasive Tietjen’s influence really was nor, perhaps, have appreciated the full irony of the situation; namely, that at Bayreuth’s first ‘Hitler festival’, the biggest accolades were deserved by a producer and a stage designer who were regarded with the utmost suspicion by most Nazis and who (like Furtwängler) never joined the party. For insight into all that, Legge would have needed to uncover intimate details about Winifred’s relationship with Tietjen, which at that stage was far less widely remarked upon than her long-standing ties with ‘Wolf’. He would also have had to seek clarity on a matter at least as opaque – the real roles played by Wagner and Bayreuth in the power structure of the ‘Third Reich’.

  10

  All the Reich’s a Stage

  Although the Nazis put on many viler propaganda shows than the one dubbed the ‘Day of Potsdam’ that they staged on 21 March 1933, none was ever better managed or more crushingly effective. For Hitler the success of the event was not just welcome but badly needed. At that time he had been chancellor of a coalition government for nearly two months and his party had emerged stronger from the nationwide election of 5 March. Nonetheless, despite their terror tactics during the campaign, the Nazis had still won ‘only’ 43.9 per cent of the vote (after 33.1 per cent in the previous poll just four months before) and hence remained well short of an absolute majority in the Reichstag.

  In other words, the new chancellor looked far from dominant. Many people thought he would soon fail like his two immediate predecessors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, each of whom had lasted in office for only a few months. Liberals, Social Democrats and communists naturally loathed Hitler and the churches were wary of him
. The officer corps looked down on him, a mere ex-corporal, while fretting that the Nazis’ ‘private army’ of SA stormtroopers, close to half a million strong, was emerging as a real rival to the regular army. Business and industry were now pumping more cash into Nazi coffers after a slow start, but many bosses still worried about what the ‘socialist’ component of ‘National Socialism’ might mean for private enterprise and profit. As for the conservative partners in the coalition, they thought that having helped Hitler to power they would be able to pull the strings to which he would dance – or rather, as vice-chancellor von Papen more graphically put it, to push him into a corner until he squeaked.

  It was, as we now know, others who were soon forced to squeak – and worse. But in mid-March Hitler’s position was still shaky even within his own party, rent by personal and ideological rivalry barely visible to a public used to near-ceaseless displays of unity by brown-shirts on the march. The ‘Day of Potsdam’ changed much of that, although the Führer had to wait rather longer to crush or slaughter his Nazi rivals like Ernst Röhm, the SA boss who was looking dangerously autonomous. Organised down to the last detail by Goebbels, newly appointed minister for ‘Public Enlightenment and Propaganda’, the Potsdam spectacle was officially billed as an inauguration ceremony for the Reichstag elected a fortnight before. In the event it bolstered Hitler’s backing among conservatives, further neutralised his leftist opponents (hundreds of whom were already being jailed and/or murdered), disarmed many middle-of-the-road sceptics and heralded the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany for sixteen years.