The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Perhaps. Work with Wieland was never straightforward and it could end abruptly, with no thanks or even explanation given. Kurt Overhoff, once so close to ‘the heir’ and hopeful of a key Festspiel role, was coldly spurned early on – like Shakespeare’s Falstaff when his erstwhile chum Prince Hal became king. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, post-war Germany’s most renowned baritone, was not invited back after the 1961 season – apparently, he indirectly learned later, because he had argued with Wieland about his impractical headgear as Wolfram in Tannhäuser.11 The conductor Joseph Keilberth, a festival stalwart in the early years, was dropped so summarily that he later looked pained at the very mention of Bayreuth.12 It is true that to intelligent outsiders like Haas or the British publisher Victor Gollancz, who came to chat with him in his office between acts, Wieland seemed courteous and serene even if his work had just been hissed. Once in a while he would show real delight – when, for instance, he saw an artist had at last grasped what he wanted or that a scene he had long prepared seemed (at least for the moment) to be ideal. But to those who crossed or merely disappointed him he could be bitterly ironic and vindictive, his icy calm suddenly erupting in crude invective. Wolfgang was only one of many to suffer from Wieland’s cynicism and scorn – but suffer he surely did. Even Nike, who adored her father and deeply admired his work, admits that she would not have liked to have had him for a brother.

  Fame did not bring Wieland more equanimity; on the contrary, his exasperation seemed to grow with age and experience. Perhaps the more he grappled with his grandfather’s works the more he felt persuaded (like Furtwängler at the end of his life) that the music had an emotional range no staging could adequately reproduce. Besides, with his new Holländer in the 1959 season he had served up once over all the staple dishes regarded as permissible in the Bayreuth diet (the Ring plus six others) and was about to embark on a second round. And then? Was the struggle to produce novel – let alone ‘perfect’ – cuisine with the same ingredients at the same table doomed to go on indefinitely, in harness moreover with a co-chef whose recipes he scorned? In a bid to pep up the menu he pondered bringing the Master’s early Rienzi to the Green Hill for the first time, but after giving the piece, heavily cut, a trial production in Stuttgart he regretfully dropped the idea.

  Growing artistic frustration with the Bayreuth straitjacket aside, Wieland badly needed more cash. He had a wife and four teenaged children to support, he faced the heavy costs for personnel and upkeep at Wahnfried and, unlike his mother and brother (but disastrously like his grandfather), he had no sense of thrift. When it came to staying in hotels, buying gifts or choosing clothes, only the best would do. As like as not Wieland would pay bills with a wad of banknotes that he drew almost absent-mindedly from a trouser pocket, as though signalling that ‘there is plenty more where that came from.’ There was not. His income naturally rose with his growing workload as an itinerant producer, but it failed to keep pace with his spending. Finally, in 1960 he tried to break free by applying for the post, quite prestigious and anyway steadily paid, of director at the Städtische Oper in West Berlin. The bid failed. Officially it was argued that Wieland would be unable to give the Berlin house the attention it deserved because of his Bayreuth commitments; unofficially, rumours abounded of intrigue against him. Whatever the truth, Wieland would probably not have made a go of the job. Wolfgang had what it took to run a business, artistic or otherwise. His brilliant but moody, introverted, impractical brother did not.

  Through all these peaks and troughs, Gertrud – adolescent sweetheart turned wife and mother, dancer and choreographer – was Wieland’s closest, most enduring partner. Perhaps in the end she was also his biggest victim, although that description does scant justice to her role during much of a long and admittedly fraught relationship. Outsiders, even regular visitors to Bayreuth, usually underestimated the part she played – not surprisingly since she worked mainly in the background and her name popped up in the programme books, if at all, as a choreographer and (more vaguely) ‘production assistant’. As for Wolfgang, he later insisted that there ‘is no truth in Gertrud Wagner’s recurrent assertion that she made an indispensable contribution to Wieland’s productions’.13 One can argue about the word ‘indispensable’ but Gertrud’s role was undoubtedly a vital one, as Wieland himself acknowledged (albeit rarely in public). When a detailed account of his work was published in 1964, he handed his wife one of the first copies with the dedication, ‘This should really be a book about you – without you there would be no picture and no concept.’14 Nearly two decades before, early in the ‘Nussdorf era’, he had written that letter to her acknowledging that ‘Without you I would never have found my way to the theatre.’15 These were surely more than empty phrases. Wieland was never one to dole out undeserved praise, not even to Gertrud – perhaps especially not to her.

  Of the two partners Gertrud was the more forceful and decisive – possibly the more independent-minded. It was she, drawn by her longing to make dancing her life, who had left Wieland and Bayreuth for Munich back in the 1930s; she who at the start of the war was already well on the way to a career of her own when Wieland was still dithering between painting and music; she who – from those very first productions in Altenburg and Nuremberg in the early 1940s – would time and again sweep aside Wieland’s doubts with a brisk ‘Das schaffen wir schon’ (We’ll manage it all right). As in the cold, cramped quarters of the post-war Nussdorf chalet, so later in Wahnfried’s spacious living room; the two would study scores together, swap insights, argue (often fiercely) – he usually sprawled in a chair, she prancing about showing how life could be breathed into a concept or an image.

  Truth to tell, at the start of ‘New Bayreuth’ Wieland was still something of a novice, despite his stage experience in the war years. Astrid Varnay, his first Brünnhilde and Isolde, recalled that although ‘he well knew what he wanted (seen pictorially) he was unable to show it to us physically. Each and every emotion was carried out with clenched fists, outstretched arms, straddle-legged … I, for one, couldn’t imitate or make use of these gestures.’16 Later, of course, he became far more adept, learning from the artists he chose and helped mould but also, in the first place, from his wife. It goes almost without saying that Gertrud in turn learned mightily from him; not just in Bayreuth but ‘on the road’ in productions at home and abroad. Even their holidays were ‘working’ ones, notably those they often took on the North Sea island of Sylt where the fierce gusts and the boom of breakers blew away cobwebs and fostered fresh ideas. The children on the whole were left to their own (de)vices.

  No wonder Wolfgang, for one, looked balefully on this potent pair. Back in the 1930s and into the early war years he had got on well with Gertrud, sometimes – thanks to his sense of fun – better than the often sullen Wieland did. That had changed by the time the couple married, at the latest. Wolfgang began to feel, not without reason, that the ex-girlfriend was starting to ‘take charge’ of her new husband and to treat him, ‘Wolfi’, as the ‘little’ brother-in-law. ‘Die Weiber lassen wir draussen’ (Let’s keep the women-folk out), he tried to insist to Wieland, above all with a wary eye on Friedelind, when the two of them discussed restarting the festival after the war. In the history of Bayreuth, though, Weiber had never proved excludable for long. In the event it turned out to be Gertrud, far more than the long-absent Mausi, who took Wolfgang’s place in an artistic partnership he felt by rights belonged to him; at least, she did until yet another woman burst on the scene and began to replace her, offstage as well as on.

  Wieland’s extra-marital affairs were long an open secret in Bayreuth. Gertrud got to know of them at the latest in 1954 when she returned early to Wahnfried from work on the Green Hill (rehearsing, as it happens, the erotic writhings of the Tannhäuser bacchanalia) and discovered her husband in flagrante.17 She was surely hurt but she can hardly have been dumbfounded. Wieland had proved especially enticing to the opposite sex since his schooldays, he had often scorned the ‘bourgeois’ ins
titution of marriage, he had continued to ‘dilly-dally’ during what amounted to his engagement and he had torn the ring off his finger immediately after the wedding. When finally caught out by Gertrud, he argued that as an artist he needed an ‘open relationship’ and encouraged her to seek the frisson of an occasional affair too. According to members of the family and close friends, Gertrud sought to follow this advice once in a while but the results evidently brought her little joy. For years she suffered from strange allergies and regularly consulted a psychiatrist. Throughout, though, she continued to work with her husband, if anything more intensively than ever, and seems to have assumed that his ‘flings’ would not threaten the special bond between them.

  Nor did they do so, at least not until 1960 when the soprano Anja Silja – a former child prodigy from Berlin with boundless self-confidence, a strident voice and a cheeky tongue – breezed in to audition for the part of Senta in Holländer. Bayreuth was in a fix because Leonie Rysanek, the previous year’s Senta, had pulled out and with only a few months left to the start of the new festival season no adequate substitute had been found. According to one version, fiercely rejected by Anja, it was Gertrud herself who persuaded a reluctant Wieland that the unlikely candidate, just turned twenty and with no Wagnerian stage experience behind her, would be simply ideal for the role.18 Anyway the girl was hired. She sang Senta that summer, making one of the most triumphant debuts in Bayreuth’s history, and later she and Wieland became lovers. Thus began a long liaison that with its mix of high passion and near farce – as well as phenomenal artistic achievement – gave as much fodder over the years to gossip columnists as to opera buffs.

  Those who never saw die Silja perform on stage (she amazingly continued to do so into the new millennium) may well wonder what all the fuss was about. Her complete recordings of major roles are relatively few, but they are enough to reveal a voice that for lack of loveliness takes some beating. Wieland, for one, compared its metallic timbre to that of a child’s trumpet. That, though, did not bother him – let alone the precocious Anja – and it would very likely not have bothered his grandfather, who set at least as much store by dramatic veracity as beauty of tone. For his very first Senta in 1843 (and his first Venus in Tannhäuser in 1845) the Master had chosen Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, a soprano whose acting he found so riveting that it more than made up for the fact that, as he once flatly put it, she had ‘no voice’. Wieland clearly had this historical precedent much in mind. According to Anja, he signed and gave her a copy of what purported to be Schröder-Devrient’s memoirs (only later discovering to his shock, she says, that the book was a pornographic novel issued under the great diva’s name).19

  Wieland was not the first seasoned professional to be enthralled by Anja’a talent and he was far from the last. Already in the late 1950s the young soprano had appeared before Georg Solti, then music director at the Frankfurt Opera and heading for world fame, to give what the maestro recalled decades afterwards as ‘the most astonishing audition I have ever held’.20 He engaged her on the spot. In the 1960s the veteran Klemperer insisted that she be the Senta in his recording of Holländer in London because ‘musically and dramatically she is extraordinary’.21 But it was Wieland above all who made Anja a star, drawing out of her in a phenomenal range of parts far more than even she thought she had to give. Within less than six years she took nearly twenty roles in close to forty of his productions – from Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Isolde, Senta and Eva, Elsa and Elisabeth to Richard Strauss’s Salome and Elektra; from Beethoven’s Leonore (in Fidelio) and Verdi’s Desdemona (in Otello) to Berg’s Marie (in Wozzeck) and Lulu. She sang neither with the warmth of predecessors like Kirsten Flagstad and Frida Leider, nor with the heroically ringing tone of her contemporary Birgit Nilsson; but she habitually performed with such intensity and pathos that even her vocal idiosyncrasies seemed to be part and parcel of the roles she took – or rather, of the characters she became. In her prodigious ability to turn an apparent weakness into a strength probably her nearest rival was Maria Callas, except that Callas stuck mainly to the Italian repertoire, her stage career was ending as Anja’s began – and she had no one constantly at her side with skill like Wieland’s.

  There was naturally a high price to be paid – professionally and personally – for this near symbiosis between Wieland and his Wunderkind. From the start, critics warned that by taking on such heavy and varied work so early in her career Anja would prematurely lose her voice for good. They were wrong but inevitably the pressure, intensified by the emotional stress of her affair with Wieland, did tell and she had to drop out of performances with embarrassing frequency – much to the delight, admittedly, of other aspiring sopranos for whom standing in for die Silja became something of a cottage industry. Such strains apart, even many well-wishers happy to acknowledge Anja’s rare talent pointed out that she was neither faultless nor ideal for every role she took. Wieland, though, would not hear a word against her. Colleagues who failed to share his fixation tended to be ignored or dumped. When the Brussels Opera proposed taking someone other than Anja for a forthcoming Tristan und Isolde, he retorted that the house would have to do without him as producer. Brussels backed down. When Sawallisch, a Bayreuth mainstay for years, threatened not to conduct the planned new Meistersinger in 1963 if ‘Fräulein Silja’, were booked as Eva, Wieland simply shrugged. Sawallisch made good his threat and, indeed, never worked again on the Green Hill.

  Anja claimed that the Bayreuth boss saw in her the Wagner type he had always sought – that of the self-sacrificing damsel ready to give up everything and endure everything thanks to her boundless love. Wieland himself was rather more explicit about what (artistic esteem apart) inexorably drew him to the vivacious nymph less than half his age. She was, he once wrote to her, just like the idealised girls of his early drawings – ‘very long legs, blonde, red-blonde, somewhat ephebic (albeit with bosoms!!!!) – don’t be angry, I’m long since over that stage.’22 His feelings for her, he said, were in part like those of a father with a lot of Pygmalion thrown in. He might have added that, at the start anyway, she seemed so refreshingly uncomplicated: answering back at rehearsals when others treated him with a deference close to servility, shrieking with glee during games of mini-golf behind the Festspielhaus, joining in the raucous fun at a local beer festival. That he was widely seen as the victim of a classic mid-life crisis and was the object of countless nudges and winks, Wieland well knew. He was even able to look on his plight with a wry smile, comparing himself to a roaming Franconian bear of little brain that was rather fat, unstable and inclined to lose its hair with age. The beast could, however, be coaxed from its lair with honeyed words or perfume and it became amenable when stroked.23

  If Wieland really did see Anja as wholly self-sacrificing then he deceived himself. Although she poured all her talent and many tears into the roles he fed her, that was not so much a sacrifice as the voracious embrace of a near-unique chance. Most young singers could only dream of such crucial backing and lightning fame at the start of their careers. It was not, though, stage success that Anja most yearned for, it was Wieland himself (though admittedly it was hard to disentangle the two). Convinced he was locked into a marriage that had long since broken down, she fought to detach him altogether from his wife with desperate energy but no lasting success. Gertrud continued her work with Wieland and was therefore constantly on hand, even for those productions ‘on the road’ in which, almost inevitably, Anja starred. Twice over on the sidelines of a fraught Ring in Cologne, the two women confronted one another and fruitlessly tried to ‘clear the air’. Gertrud told her challenger to surrender and look instead for a nice doctor who was fond of music, advice that might be thought to show she had either lost contact with reality or somehow kept a sense of humour. In fact by this time she was plunging from bouts of furious activity to ones of deep depression, well aware that she was fighting not just for her husband but for her work – her life. Anja, needless to say, retorted that for her only
Wieland would do.24 For all her adaptability, the role of ‘the other woman’ was not one to which she was remotely suited – not even when it could be played out against more or less idyllic settings across Europe from Paris to Sorrento. Hotel rooms were no substitute for a shared base, let alone for a home.

  Just once Anja spent the night with Wieland in his spartan bedroom at Wahnfried, an event she says both of them in retrospect judged ‘uncomfortable and wrong’. She also stayed with him in the charming but impractical farmhouse on Sylt that he had rashly bought in 1963, in theory for Gertrud. The lady of the house was not present but her rival had the uneasy feeling that, somehow, she was. Nor did a bungalow near Bayreuth that Anja used for long spells before and during the festival turn out to be an ideal ‘love nest’. Wieland visited her there often but rarely for long and never overnight. Furious at his premature departure she once pursued him back to Wahnfried in the darkness, constantly banging the front of her car against the back of his. Wieland sped on steadily as though unaware or uncaring, a typical reaction to her frequent tantrums and one that made her angrier still. Rarely, but then frighteningly, he too would explode – for instance on a nocturnal country drive during which Anja repeatedly refused money he offered her to buy a dress she coveted but thought too dear. Incensed, Wieland finally hurled the banknotes out into the gloom, stamped on the accelerator and bundled his dumbfounded mistress out at her door. That night she hardly slept a wink. Early the next morning, though, she drove back alone to the spot, found all the notes sticking to a field wet with rain and dumped the lot on Wieland’s desk. He promptly bought her the dress and she kept it, like an heirloom or a trophy, ever afterwards.25