The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Overhoff had no easy time of it. Although Wieland claimed to be desperate to learn he at first resented the hours lost to his painting, telling his exasperated tutor that as a means of expression ‘it is colour and form that count, not words and music’.4 It took him a while to acknowledge that, of course, they all counted. For an aspiring ‘com-pleat’ opera producer aiming to recreate the Master’s Gesamtkunstwerke something else counted too – the ability to match onstage action to music and text. For Wieland, at least at the start, that was a real problem. Colour and form he knew much about, the mysteries of music and libretti he could unlock with Overhoff. But for all his artistic skill and imaginative insight, he did not have a feel for the rhythm and movement that could give life to the stage pictures he saw in his mind’s eye. Luckily, though, he was very close to someone who had just the gift he lacked.

  Gertrud Reissinger, Wieland’s dark-haired, lissom girlfriend since Bayreuth schooldays, was born to dance. At home she swayed and pirouetted to music almost before she could walk, at school she much preferred gym to books. Where she got this urge to perpetual motion was a mystery; certainly not from her father Adolf, an authoritarian schoolteacher who revered Hitler, nor from her long-suffering mother Luise, nor from her uncle Hans, an opportunist architect who slipped easily from designing bombastic piles for the Nazis to proffering humbler structures to post-war clients. Hans’s Haus der Deutschen Erziehung (House of German Upbringing), a Nazi temple whose converted remnants can still be spied in the heart of Bayreuth, drew the exclamation ‘Really lovely!’ from Hitler when he toured the forbidding interior in 1936. Neither Gertrud’s family background, nor her schooling, nor her Wahnfried connection turned her into a keen Nazi, but she was no critic of the regime either. Her world was dance. All else, including her boyfriend, was secondary. When her family moved to Munich in 1934, she went along eagerly although she was then seventeen and had been linked to Wieland for years. In the Bavarian capital she had the chance to join the Dorothee Günther dance school, one of the country’s finest, and that counted most. Desperately short of cash, she was taken on at a reduced fee because of her manifest talent.

  Despite their separation, Wieland and Gertrud stayed in contact and when he too moved to Munich in 1938 (to a studio close by the Günther school) they picked up more or less where they had left off in Bayreuth. The relationship had changed all the same. Gertrud was still happy to sit as Wieland’s model, but she was now a young woman with four years in the ‘big city’ behind her and good career prospects. She was anything but domineering by nature and when it came to arguments with Wieland, as it often did, she usually got the worst of them; but in her own beloved field, and especially in the art of choreography, she had a passion and flair hard to resist. In spite of himself, Wieland digested what she said, saw how she made a musical phrase visible in movement, even, at her behest, reluctantly learned to dance. At times his studio became a miniature ballet school, with Gertrud inviting up her girlfriends to waft about to records of Ravel and Debussy (two of the many composers disdained at Wahnfried) while Wieland looked on with mingled irritation and fascination.5

  Spurred by his own gifts and ambition, as well as by Overhoff’s teaching and Gertrud’s example, Wieland became increasingly impatient to try his hand as a fully fledged producer, not as a stage or costume designer alone. He was surely influenced too by what he saw at the Nationaltheater in Munich, a house with a Wagner tradition that went back to the Master himself and King Ludwig. Invited to rehearsals by the fine if flamboyant music director, Clemens Krauss, Wieland admitted later that the experience showed him there were other worthwhile ways of staging Wagner besides Bayreuth’s. Since Munich’s productions were far from daring that hardly seems a revolutionary remark – though no doubt it caused the arch-conservative aunts Daniela and Eva, who died in 1940 and 1942 respectively, to turn in their graves. But coming from the Master’s eldest grandchild, it did suggest that before long a wind of change might be blowing through the corridors of the Festspielhaus.

  Much firmer, and to old-school Bayreuthers more troubling evidence emerged in 1943–4 when Wieland finally made his debut as a producer with the toughest possible challenge, an entire Ring cycle. Astonishingly enough, for over a year he worked on two different productions of the tetralogy more or less simultaneously. One of them, in Nuremberg, was grand, costly and for the most part traditional, but not quite complete: war pressures forced the house to shut before Rheingold could be staged. The other production at Altenburg, a smallish town in Thuringia, included all four parts of the cycle and was far more intriguing. Dark, spare, almost skeletal, it foreshadowed Wieland’s mature style in paring away clutter to aid concentration on the core of the drama. Then, as later, some critics were scandalised, which did not seem to bother the producer one jot – rather the opposite. Just how Wieland came to take that imaginative leap forward in Altenburg is hard to say. He later claimed he had been forced to adopt a novel approach because the modest house lacked resources, but that cannot be the whole story. Plenty of cash was available, thanks not least to Goebbels, who had fixed Overhoff’s appointment as music director in Altenburg so that the Bayreuth ‘heir’ could gain practical experience there. No doubt the propaganda minister thought that by so doing he would eventually be better able to extend his influence to Bayreuth itself, still effectively the preserve of Tietjen and Winifred. Instead, by indirectly helping Wieland find his way as a producer, he unwittingly did the post-war festival a big favour.

  By now Wieland and Gertrud were married – a natural outcome, one would think, for two young people with complementary talents who had felt drawn to one another for more than a decade. Wieland, though, did not give up being single without a struggle. In the months before the wedding he was even testier than usual and flirted still more blatantly with other girls (including a fetching blonde Wolfgang brought home to Wahnfried) as though challenging Gertrud to break with him, which at least once she nearly did. As for the ceremony itself, it was held – with a bare minimum of celebration – not in Bayreuth but at a registry office in Nussdorf, a sleepy nest on the shore of the Bodensee (Lake Constance) where Winifred had bought a holiday chalet years before. On the day, 12 September 1941, Wieland turned up in an open-necked shirt and afterwards demonstratively pulled the ring off his finger. Might he, in fact, not have married Gertrud at all had it not been for intense pressure from his mother? Winifred did indeed yearn for grandchildren and made it mighty clear that she felt it was time for her eldest son to face up to his dynastic responsibilities. She may even have feared that, like Siegfried, Wieland might be sexually drawn to men and that for safety’s sake he should therefore be propelled post-haste into fathering an heir. If that really was her concern, no reliable evidence has come to light showing it was justified. Besides, for all his bad grace and fear of commitment Wieland surely knew better than anyone what he had in Gertrud and what he stood to lose if she slipped away. In the event she bore him four children and played a key role in his productions starting with that first Ring in Altenburg, sometimes as choreographer and always as his closest ally and critic. Although he by no means invariably acknowledged her contribution later, he was far from unaware of it. ‘I don’t need to tell you’, he wrote to her during a period of enforced separation in 1946, ‘that without you I would never have found my way to the theatre. You have helped me so much and can help me a lot more.’6

  A few weeks before that unspectacular wedding in Nussdorf, the doors of the Festspielhaus had closed on Bayreuth’s second ‘war festival’. Not surprisingly fewer works than in peacetime had been on offer – ‘merely’ Holländer under Elmendorff and the Ring conducted by the ubiquitous Tietjen (his last appearance in the Bayreuth pit apart from a brief, astonishing comeback in 1959). The striking thing is not that the programme was shorter but that the festival was still being held at all. Back in early 1940, Winifred had told Hitler that with so many musicians and technical staff already at the front or on a war footing, there was
no way performances could go ahead in the summer. The Führer, though, insisted that Bayreuth must not suffer closure as it had during and after the First World War, and pledged that essential personnel would be made available. When Winifred retorted that, even so, there would be next to no audience, Hitler agreed to fix that as well. He too, he joked, could not perform to an empty hall.7

  So it was that for five summers, from 1940 to 1944, tens of thousands of fighting men, factory workers, medical staff and the like were shuttled into town by the Kraft durch Freude organisation to imbibe the Master’s works (and attend compulsory lectures about them) on the Green Hill. Despite her initial worries, Winifred soon came round to this handy arrangement. The festival itself was freed of bother over transport, lodging or even of the need to sell tickets. Kraft durch Freude saw to all that. Besides, decades later Winifred still enthused about the special quality of those wartime audiences with their many ‘plucky soldiers and officers’, lots of them crippled and unable to struggle to the Festspielhaus without aid. These were no random conscripts to the Bayreuth cause, she stressed with pride, but true Wagner fans who had earned the right to seats thanks to their special contribution to the war effort.8 Nazi propagandists had often spouted in similar vein. Inspired by a festival public that had looked death in the face, they claimed, singers and players rose to still greater heights and in turn fired those who heard them with new courage. The 1941 film Stukas, praised by Goebbels for its ‘wonderful air footage’, rammed the point home by showing how a dejected dive-bomber pilot regained the will to battle after a strong dose of Wagner at Bayreuth. On a rather more sophisticated note, it was argued that with audiences now being drawn from all sections of society and (thanks to the largesse of the Reich) attending free of charge, the festival was at long last matching the Master’s original high-minded vision.

  Most of this was rubbish. Naturally those who streamed or hobbled to the ‘war festivals’ were glad to get out of the line of fire or off the production line for a while, and some of them surely liked what they heard. Whether even the Wagnerites among them preferred to devote their precious free time to the Master rather than to friends and family is another matter. At any rate this was anything but the kind of public – enlightened pilgrims in a kind of neo-Hellenic society of the future – that Wagner had dreamed of a century or so before. Nor would he have thought much of a Bayreuth programme from which both Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde were excluded in advance, the former because the Nazis found it ‘problematic’, the latter because the spectacle of the dying hero in Act III was felt too dispiriting. Finally, in 1943 and 1944 Holländer and the Ring were dropped too and Meistersinger alone was programmed. By that time Bayreuth’s civilian resources were running thin even with the Führer’s backing and members of the SS’s ‘Wiking’ division, decked out in medieval costume for the occasion, had to be drafted in to swell the ranks of mostly jolly Nurembergers onstage.

  Against this bizarre, not to say macabre, background a struggle for control of the festival erupted that in ferocity and duplicity surpassed any that had gone before, even the ones at the start of the Cosima and Winifred eras. Since those involved in it included Nazi leaders as well as Wagner family factions and their various backers, many details are naturally murky, but the main cause of the conflict is plain enough: Wieland’s resolve to make Bayreuth his future after all, and quickly too. That meant dislodging the Tietjen–Winifred duo and, incidentally, Preetorius as well, whose stage designs Wieland felt wrongly conceived. This would be a tough task, but then the Bayreuth ‘heir’ did not lack allies. Among them were the erudite Otto Strobel, director of the Wagner archive, and his wife Gertrud who ran to Wieland with chapter and verse whenever Tietjen–Preetorius productions deviated even a jot from the instructions handed down by the Master. The unhappy Overhoff was urged to collect similar ammunition and soon found himself not just caught in family crossfire but embroiled in a seemingly unfathomable intrigue. For a brief span he was even called up for military service, a shock Wieland ascribed to string-pulling by Tietjen to deprive ‘the heir’ of his music tutor. As a result it came to a shouting match, overheard and diligently noted by Frau Strobel, on the lawn at Wahnfried in the summer of 1941. Wieland and Tietjen traded charges while Overhoff and a tearful Winifred stood helplessly by.9

  What really lay behind Overhoff’s sudden call-up and his equally sudden return to his music post? Perhaps just a bureaucratic blunder, but Wieland’s suspicions cannot be wholly dismissed. Tietjen had powerful backers in Berlin – above all Göring, his ‘protector’ at the Staatsoper. Wieland on the other hand was favoured by Goebbels, who despised Göring and longed for the day when he could put the Staatsoper, and ultimately Bayreuth too, under his thumb. Although it may seem barely credible that Nazi bigwigs sparred over such matters on the home front while putting to flame much of Europe, the evidence that they did so is overwhelming. In a way, Göring, Goebbels and Co. were simply following in the footsteps of their art-obsessed Führer. The Overhoff affair could therefore have been just one skirmish in the broader campaign for personal aggrandisment through control over culture.

  Whatever the truth, thanks to Hitler’s special backing Wieland had a unique advantage; at least he seemed to and often talked as though he did. The reality was rather different. He did indeed see his mentor regularly in Berlin right up to the closing months of the war, evidently bewailing what he felt was wrong with the festival and stressing his role as ‘heir’. On one occasion he held a long pow-wow with ‘Uncle Wolf’ at the Chancellery while Tietjen, also hoping to discuss Bayreuth business, waited vainly in an ante-room. That incident alone would seem to show who had the most leverage where it counted. But although Hitler treated Wieland like a son, and even seems to have backed his unilateral demand for a change in some festival plans, he did not yet regard the young man as experienced enough for the Bayreuth throne and did not intervene decisively to put him there. Perhaps Hitler also felt wary of handing Goebbels a clear victory at Göring’s (not to mention Winifred’s) expense by booting out Tietjen. Of the Bayreuth top trio that had emerged after Siegfried’s death, the only one to go before the war’s end was Preetorius. Denounced for corresponding with Jews abroad, he was interrogated by the Gestapo in late 1942, forbidden to work and escaped a worse fate only thanks to Hitler’s belated intervention. Preetorius suspected that Wieland had acted against him in these machinations, details of which remain sparse to this day.

  Meanwhile Wolfgang naturally sought a share of the power in Bayreuth and had cause to feel that he too had backing at the top. In 1942, for instance, the festival’s future came up at an ‘animated’ conversation ‘Uncle Wolf’ held over lunch with Wolfgang and Verena at the Osteria Bavaria, his favourite Munich restaurant (where he had first met Unity Mitford). According to the official note-taker, Hitler observed that while Wieland was specially suited musically to take on the Bayreuth heritage, Wolfgang promised much on the technical side.10 It is unclear whether Wolfgang felt altogether happy still to be docketed as a ‘second string’, but he evidently did not feel that anything was to be gained by seeking to drive out Tietjen precipitously. On the contrary, he had already bluntly warned his brother in the autumn of 1941 that his tactics threatened to leave the festival high and dry, with Tietjen likely to withdraw in dudgeon and Wieland unable to fill the vacant shoes. Half a year later he returned to the attack, accusing his brother of getting Hitler to agree to a change in festival programming without consulting Winifred (or, presumably, Tietjen) – a charge Wieland bitterly rejected as a ‘malicious slander’ in a letter he drafted but never sent.11

  Whatever his personal feelings about ‘Heinz’, Wolfgang’s interventions seem hardly surprising. Had Tietjen really been driven ignominiously from Bayreuth, the impact would have been grave not just on the festival but almost certainly on the training course the ‘little brother’ was pursuing at the Berlin Staatsoper. And that course was going well. Wolfang was not only gaining a thorough insight into the
business of running a huge theatre (as Wieland was not) but he was learning plenty on the artistic side too. By 1944 he was ready for his first Staatsoper production, a staging of his father’s Bruder Lustig – renamed Andreasnacht since a cheerful title hardly fitted the mood in the increasingly bomb-scarred capital. That debut was less challenging than Wieland’s a year earlier with those Rings in Nuremberg and Altenburg, but Wolfgang carried it off well anyway. He had a further reason to be grateful to the Staatsoper. It was there that he met Ellen Drexel, like Gertrud a pretty and accomplished dancer, and married her in 1943. Wolfgang was thus following closely in his brother’s footsteps, professionally and personally. There was a difference though. Unlike Wieland’s wedding ceremony, Wolfgang’s was held in Bayreuth – at the Siegfried-Wagner-Haus adjoining Wahnfried. It was as though Wolfgang was underlining his attachment to a home and family tradition about which his brother had, at the very least, grave doubts.

  Tietjen, meanwhile, bobbed and weaved with his habitual aplomb, aware that he was fighting not just for his jobs in Bayreuth and Berlin but possibly for his life. Just how risky he felt his situation to be emerges from a memorandum he drew up in December 1941 for ‘Haus Wahnfried’ – in the first place, therefore, for Winifred.12 In it he proposed three possible ways of ending the tension over who should run the festival, the first being that he would simply resign forthwith. If this occurred, though, he warned that he would make use of a full account he had drawn up for the Führer of all that had happened since he, Tietjen, had become involved with Bayreuth in 1931. He had placed the document in a sealed envelope that, should any ill befall him, would be handed on to Hitler by a person of trust. This scheme, of course, amounted to a threat, since no one knew better than Tietjen the often unpalatable inside story of the festival and the family during the ‘Third Reich’. Alas, the account to which he referred has gone missing (assuming it ever existed), like so much material in Tietjen’s connection.