The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  The Wieland children – Iris (born in 1942), Wolf Siegfried, known to all and sundry as ‘Wummi’ (1943), Nike (1945) and Daphne (1946) – had a far easier time of it, at least at the start. Like Winifred’s ‘dissonant quartet’ back in the 1920s, they cavorted shrieking in the Wahnfried garden and clambered about the Festspielhaus more or less at will. At festival time they would be propelled, spick and span, into the family box, but as the day’s performance wore on and on the bored little brats would start to whisper, tickle one another and giggle. Once in a while Wieland would react with a brief, fearsome burst of wrath, but in general he tolerated (or failed to notice) his children’s antics and did not try to thrust the works of the Master down their throats. When Gertrud with her passion for dance proposed that the kids be given small parts in the music dramas as flower maidens (in Parsifal), Bacchic nymphs (in Tannhäuser) and the like, Wieland at first said no because the idea smacked of nepotism. In the end Gertrud won her point and the children, partly through their onstage involvement, partly through watching Wieland’s rehearsals, gradually concluded that their great-grandfather’s stuff was not so bad on the whole. Not that they often put records of Wagner on the turntable at home, and they virtually never did so when their parents were away. More likely, since the ‘American way of life’ with its petticoats, popcorn and pop music had percolated through even to the Festspielstadt in the 1950s, it would be the strains of Elvis Presley or Bill Haley and his Comets that thumped and twanged through the chambers of the house the Master built. Another favourite, something of an ironic choice in the Wagner family context, was German pop singer Heidi Brühl’s sentimental ditty ‘Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh’n’ (We Never Want to Part).

  As for Hitler and the Nazi era, the topic rarely came up in the Wahnfried household, not because it was taboo but because the children long assumed their dad had been on ‘the right side’ and therefore had no nasty secrets to conceal. When he mentioned the ‘Third Reich’ at all, Wieland did so either with evident disgust or bitter irony. Besides, didn’t much of the press at home and abroad from 1951 hail him as the great innovator who by sweeping away traditional stage paraphernalia was creating a new and thought-provoking ‘Wagner for our time’? Didn’t he turn to left-wingers and Jews like Ernst Bloch and Adorno for inspiration, and encourage them to write for Bayreuth? To childish eyes, and even many adult ones, Wieland was thus a man of the present and future with no real past to atone for. Granny Winifred, on the other hand, had clearly been on ‘the wrong side’ – and still was. She talked to the Wieland brood about American ‘propaganda’ against Hitler, just as she had to Gottfried, and in her correspondence with old Nazi friends she would fondly refer to ‘USA’ – shorthand not for the United States of America but for ‘Unser Seliger Adolf’ (Our Blessed Adolf). After moving back in 1957 from her Oberwarmensteinach ‘exile’ to the Siegfried-Wagner-Haus, thus becoming the closest possible neighbour to Wahnfried, she even took to giving tea parties for the likes of Emmy and Edda Göring (widow and daughter respectively of the former Reichsmarschall) and Ilse Hess (wife of Hitler’s former deputy, languishing in Berlin’s Spandau jail). Wieland warned his mother forthwith that he planned to build a high wall across the garden between her domain and his, and he was as good as his word. For the children it seemed plain who stood for the murky but evidently abominable past and who shunned it.

  What, though, did Wieland really think and feel about his own role up to 1945? That remains largely a mystery. According to Wolfgang, neither he nor his brother needed to indulge in remorseful breast-beating over their personal records during the ‘Third Reich’.4 At any rate they did not do so. But every time Wieland went to and fro between Wahnfried and Festspielhaus he had to pass close to his former bolt-hole, the Lafferentz ‘institute’ linked to Flossenbürg concentration camp. Did he feel any shame or disgust as he sped by? If so, he bottled it up. Not only were few people aware that the new co-director on the Green Hill had worked at the ‘institute’; the very fact that the place had existed at all was largely ignored or forgotten. It was not until the late 1980s that a happily inquisitive Bayreuth schoolgirl, Karin Osiander, jogged memories with details about the Flossenbürg offshoot that she unearthed for a history essay. Local journalists took up the topic and a thorough account by independent researchers was finally published in 2003.5 Three years earlier the town of Bayreuth itself had got round to erecting a memorial plaque – inconspicuously sited on the fringe of a car park.

  His own experience at the ‘institute’ apart, what passed through Wieland’s mind when he learned of the fate of those specially courageous souls who had dared to oppose Hitler: Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, hanged in the Flossenbürg camp just before the war’s end, or Hans and Sophie Scholl, Munich students guillotined in 1943? The Scholls were both younger than Wieland, but the leaflets they and other members of the Weisse Rose (White Rose) resistance movement covertly distributed were startlingly accurate about Nazi crimes, including the mass murder of Jews. Was the Bayreuth ‘heir’ less well informed despite (or perhaps because of) his special nearness to Hitler? Was Wolfgang? Or did they feel these were not matters of personal concern? After the war, or at least after ‘denazification’ had run its course, perhaps both brothers assumed that memories of the ‘Third Reich’ would steadily fade and embarrassing questions would become ever less likely. If so, that was an illusion they shared with many other Germans, especially in the 1950s – a comforting one, no doubt, but an illusion all the same.

  Although Wieland spoke little of the all-too-recent past, his visible efforts to distance himself from it did not stop with his stage work. Venerable Wahnfried itself, still scarred and patched on the outside, had to yield within to the passion for clean lines and minimal clutter of the new Master and his hyperactive wife. Rooms were combined and made lighter, airier, the sofa given a bright new cover, family heirlooms banished to cupboards. The transformation may well not have been to Wolfgang’s taste (let alone Winifred’s) but the younger brother had no say in the matter, nor did he want one. He had set up house in the cramped quarters of the gardener’s cottage well before Wieland returned to Bayreuth from his post-war ‘exile’ on the Bodensee, but he made no bid to take over the family seat or, later, even to share it. After a while he forbade Gottfried and Eva to play with his brother’s children on the grounds that they were rowdy and foul-mouthed and in 1955, to general surprise, he bought a villa on the Green Hill just a few steps from the Festspielhaus. It was a typically shrewd move. Wolfgang seemed to be leaving his brother to ‘rule the roost’, but then Wahnfried still needed a lot of repair and was anyway expensive to run – in the long run probably too expensive. Leaving sentiment aside, and Wolfgang was anything but sentimental, the old place was frankly something of a millstone. With the new home that was to stay his base henceforth, Wolfgang placed himself strategically at the centre of the festival action and put several miles between his own family and his brother’s across town; all Wagners, of course, but increasingly separated by parental enmity like Montagues and Capulets.

  Did things have to go so wrong? On the surface, at least for the first few years, they seemed to be going very right. Under ‘new management’ the festival manifestly went from strength to strength – like the Federal Republic itself with its stable-looking government and burgeoning ‘economic miracle’. By no means everyone approved of Wieland’s productions or even of Wolfgang’s less daring ones, but Wagnerians in Germany and far beyond had a fine time arguing fiercely about them and each year tickets became harder to come by. Already in 1953 average festival ticket sales reached eighty-six per cent of the house’s capacity, and Lohengrin, Wolfgang’s long-awaited first effort on the Green Hill, was wholly sold out. Funds from state sources as well as private sponsors were flowing in too, so that although more cash was still needed to renovate and modernise no one seriously suggested any longer that the show would not go on. For this success the brothers were initially given roughly equal credit. In
fact, to most outsiders Bayreuth seemed to have the perfect team: Wieland the thoughtful, temperamental visionary, Wolfgang the good-humoured, level-headed business partner who, moreover, was no slouch on the artistic side. Lucky the enterprise, it was felt, that had such a tandem to run it!

  For a host of reasons, professional and personal, that picture was too rosy by half. Even before ‘New Bayreuth’ was born, remember, Wolfgang had had cause to feel resentful of the big brother and ‘heir’ who had been dispensed from active service by Hitler, who had tried to flee abroad when the war was clearly lost and who for a time had seemed ready to make common cause with the ‘treacherous’ Friedelind. He, Wolfgang, had stuck to his post in Bayreuth in 1945, he had done most to head off the takeover bid by ‘Cousin Franz’ and he had stood down from artistic endeavour in 1951 to handle the business side. He dearly hoped to stage a production of his own the following year but Wieland had other plans and pushed them through with no real consultation. That set a pattern. The younger brother felt excluded from ‘fireside chats’ at Wahnfried on festival strategy and fumed that he was often left with the consequences when the plans went wrong.6 By 1953 when Wolfgang was finally able to make his debut, Wieland had long since hit the headlines (and not only of the arts pages) with ‘his’ Ring, Parsifal and Tristan, the weightiest works in the Wagner canon. Wolfgang evidently hoped for advice on preparing ‘his’ Lohengrin but Wieland gave none, seemingly embarrassed that his brother was trying to make his mark on the Bayreuth stage at all. Aware of the tension between her sons, Winifred urged Wieland by letter to offer a helping hand because Wolfgang – ‘the poor chap’ – needed aid but could not bring himself to ask for it.7 Her intervention achieved nothing. His mother was about the last person that Wieland felt disposed to heed.

  If Wolfgang had clearly lacked all aptitude for theatre (as his foes inside and outside the family have often claimed), if he had limited himself to applying to the festival those managerial skills that would have taken him to the top in almost any business, the partnership with his brother would have been less fraught – albeit never easy. But since childhood, when he had pounded away in his workshop at home for a hobby, Wolfgang had been drawn to the nuts and bolts of stagecraft; he had learned a lot, mainly under Tietjen’s tutelage, at the Berlin Staatsoper and in 1944 he had successfully produced one opera there himself (his father’s Bruder Lustig). He might well have gone on to take charge of other pieces if the war had not forced the house to close a few months later. He was a tireless worker with an elephantine memory and for the most part he got on well with artists as well as stagehands. Naturally he wanted to show what he could do on his home ground, not just by balancing books but by facing up to the ultimate challenge of his grandfather’s works.

  Unfortunately for Wolfgang, he was up against a brother who from that very first Parsifal in 1951 was widely hailed as a theatrical genius – admittedly one capable of silliness and even perversity and not always quite as original as his greatest fans seemed to think. When Wieland trumpeted that the Master’s music dramas had to be freed, above all through the imaginative use of lighting, from the ‘sticky syrup’ of traditional staging with its mediocre, naturalistic sets and slovenly routine, that sounded exciting, even shocking, to many Wagnerians descending on ‘New Bayreuth’.8 But it was very much what Adolphe Appia, so firmly shunned by Cosima, had been preaching well over half a century before and what innovative houses like the Kroll under Klemperer had practised – before the Nazis came to power. Even the Tietjen–Preetorius team had been more inventive in Berlin and Bayreuth than many post-war commentators, keen to put distance between themselves and the ‘Third Reich’, cared to acknowledge.

  If Wieland, then, was not so much a revolutionary as a selective traditionalist with a restless mind, he was nonetheless one of the two most influential opera producers in Germany after 1945 (along with the Austrian-born Walter Felsenstein, who reigned for many years at the Komische Oper in East Berlin). At their best, his stark but symbol-laden stagings could haunt the memory as disturbingly and durably as the music they went far to match. Decades later many of the scenes he conceived were still the standard against which newer efforts tended to be measured and found wanting; the menacing outline of the wizard Klingsor in Parsifal, spotlighted in space like a white spider in a gigantic web; the phallic monolith towering above the doomed lovers in Tristan; the passionate ‘outsider’ Tannhäuser, dwarfed by the intimidating décor in the hall of Castle Wartburg and looking as vulnerable on the chequered floor as a lonely pawn on a chessboard. Wieland tended to shrug off Wagner’s own, detailed stage directions as hints rather than instructions, but time and again people left the theatre feeling that what the grandson had shown them was what the Master must have meant. Nor was Wieland’s success confined to Bayreuth. As his fame grew he became more and more busy in other houses, especially Stuttgart, and often in other repertoire – Gluck and Beethoven, Verdi and Richard Strauss, Berg and Orff. Wolfgang, for the most part, stayed at home minding the Bayreuth baby.

  At times Wieland miscalculated. For one thing the lighting he favoured, especially in the early years, tended to be so subdued that key elements of the staging vanished in the gloom. Wags claimed the thrift-conscious festival was trying to save on electric power as well as scenery and in 1951, at least, there may have been something to that. More plausibly, in his single-minded drive to blot out all that was superfluous and force audiences to focus on the core of the dramas, Wieland indulged in overkill – led astray partly by the ultra-acute eyesight he had enjoyed from birth and honed as painter and photographer. He simply saw more than others did – more even than his close collaborator Paul Eberhardt, a veteran lighting technician with whom he worked exhaustively in the Festspielhaus, often right through the night. If old bulbs were exchanged between rehearsals for new ones of the same power, as like as not no one later would notice any change in the intensity of the lighting – bar Wieland who would start to fume and fiddle again with a scene that had seemed just right before.

  That technical issue apart, Wieland’s approach to staging Wagner was influenced by more complex factors to which he did not always admit. Clearly there was much in his grandfather’s work he found not just superfluous but melodramatic and distasteful. When the critic Willy Haas asked him why he failed to show the end of the dramas as the Master had wished – no Senta leaping from a rock in Holländer, for instance, no swan arriving with a boat to bear off the hero in Lohengrin – Wieland responded that his interlocutor must have had a bad seat. ‘I would have much preferred him to tell me frankly’, Haas wrote, ‘that the final scenes of many Wagner operas got on his nerves … and that he concealed as far as possible the culminating point.’9 In Meistersinger, it was not just the final scene that got on Wieland’s nerves but most of the preceding ones too. In his debut production of the piece in 1956 he removed so many signs of old Nuremberg that it would have been next to impossible for anyone to follow the plot who was coming to the work for the first time (and even in Bayreuth such people do exist). In his second attempt in 1963 Wieland put in more visual clues but, stretching the evidence of the score to breaking point and sometimes beyond, he drew the characters mainly as fools, boors or hooligans. He found several elegant explanations for these bizarre (non)realisations of what is usually seen as Wagner’s most humane and naturalistic drama, but the most revealing one was that he wanted to avoid presenting Meistersinger as ‘a dangerous mixture of Lortzing and the Reichsparteitag’.10 In other words, here above all, he was trying to erase memories of the ‘Third Reich’ and almost certainly, although he naturally did not say so, to exorcise the ghost of his late benefactor ‘Uncle Wolf’.

  Finding the ‘right’ conductor proved almost as tough a task as achieving an ‘ideal’ staging. Ironically it was the veteran Knapperts-busch with his bias towards slow tempos and massive pathos, just the kind of thing Wieland eschewed, who appeared most often in the pit during the first years of post-war Bayreuth (ninety-five times un
til his death in 1965). This was a double irony, even, since Kna despised Wieland’s productions – ‘unprecedented nonsense’ was one of the trenchant maestro’s kinder descriptions – and boycotted the festival in 1953 because of them. He returned a year later, drawn by the ‘spirit of Richard Wagner’, as he put it, and thanks to coaxing by Wolfgang who thought more of Kna’s approach than his brother did. On the face of it odder still, one of the conductors of Wieland’s 1959 Lohengrin – for just three of a total of seven performances – was none other than Heinz Tietjen, making his first (and last) appearances in the Bayreuth pit since the Kriegsfestpiele of 1941. Had the ‘heir’ suddenly concluded that his former bitter foe, now Intendant (director) of the Hamburg Opera, was specially gifted with the baton after all? He had not. Two years earlier the canny old man had offered Wieland a production in Hamburg, one of the country’s top houses, and in turn had extracted the pledge of a guest appearance as conductor in Bayreuth. Winifred, at least, was overjoyed.

  Broadly speaking, Wieland favoured the lighter, lither sound – ‘Wagner via Mozart’, some called it – achieved by conductors like the seasoned Karl Böhm, the young Wolfgang Sawallisch and the (Belgian-born) Frenchman André Cluytens. The latter – significantly, as a non-German – was given charge of that first ‘Meistersinger without Nuremberg’ and his passionate, propulsive Tannhäuser was judged by the Bayreuth boss to be without peer. Most of all, though, Wieland came to admire the avant-garde French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who surveyed the most complex of scores with a coolly analytical eye and who (although he had teething troubles in Bayreuth) could guide players through them with the skill of a traffic cop at a busy crossroads. The admiration was mutual. Perhaps if Wieland had lived longer his fledgling collaboration with Boulez, largely confined to a production of Berg’s Wozzeck in Frankfurt in early 1966, would have flowered into a durable partnership.