The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Maybe Wieland needed such Sturm und Drang, or thought he did, to stay creative; maybe it was in part what killed him. If it is really true that too much stress can prove fatal, then by the mid-1960s at the latest Wieland was a marked man. For all his work and fame beyond Bayreuth, he seemed chained indefinitely to sharing festival productions with a brother he regarded as inept. It may also be that, despite or because of his silence on the topic, he suffered inner torment over the specially privileged role he had enjoyed during the ‘Third Reich’. That is quite feasible but, as matters stand, unprovable. He was surely plagued by the still heavier debts he had run up buying the house on Sylt, and in his emotional life, above all, he felt trapped. According to Anja, he latterly promised ‘to think’ about marrying her – she his Isolde, his Lulu, his femme fatale – but evidently thinking was as far as he got. Even when his four children, now young adults, begged him in a joint letter to end the anguish – with a divorce if need be – Wieland still could not make up his mind. He replied that he had as much ‘love and esteem’ as ever for Gertrud, that he also felt ‘sincere’ love for Anja and that he loved them, the children, above all. His inability to choose, he claimed, was born of sheer ‘perplexity, not cowardice’.26 Earlier he seems to have been just as ‘perplexed’ but in a letter to Anja he had put his position rather differently. While he could no longer live with Gertrud, he wrote, he could not live without her either.27 In other words he felt there was no way out – or rather, only one.

  In June 1966 an attack of nausea forced Wieland to break off a Bayreuth rehearsal and return to Wahnfried to rest. At the time no one panicked, least of all Wieland. He had suffered feverish colds earlier that year and, as usual, he had been working and travelling almost endlessly. He and others assumed the bout of weakness would pass and that he would soon be back preparing the season’s offerings, especially Parsifal, in which Boulez was making his tensely awaited Bayreuth debut. They were wrong. After tests in a local hospital he was moved in early July to the Universitätsklinik in Munich for specialist treatment. For more than three months hopes were raised and dashed, plans laid and scrapped. It is unclear just when doctors realised there was no hope – that Wieland had a malignant tumour they considered inoperable and that invaded both lungs. At any rate the family was not told until the very end. Wieland, it seems, was never told but it is hard to believe he never guessed. Although he long used his hospital room like an office and was even able to take breaks – on Sylt, for instance, and in Anja’s (usually empty) Munich flat – towards the end he coughed much blood and was confined to bed. He died just after four o’clock in the morning of 17 October, not quite three months before his fiftieth birthday. Gertrud and the children were with him.

  As for Anja, she arrived at the clinic about an hour later by taxi from Vienna where she had been singing the night before in the premiere of a new production of Jacques Offenbach’s Hoffmanns Erzählungen (Tales of Hoffmann).28 Wieland had encouraged her to keep working, no matter what, and she had been busier than ever that year – taking half a dozen roles, large and small, in Bayreuth alone. She had snatched what time she could with him and had kept in constant touch by phone, but she too had not realised how serious his condition really was. Had she done so, no doubt she would have cancelled at least that Vienna engagement – in which case her life might well have taken a different turn. According to Anja, ten days before Wieland died the conductor preparing Hoffmann, André Cluytens, told her during a break in rehearsals that he was deeply in love with her. She confessed to feeling bowled over by this revelation. The elegant and charming maestro, whose skill on the podium Wieland himself so much admired, was a married man thirty-five years her senior. Did any of this percolate through to the patient in Munich? Indeed it did, because Anja phoned Wieland right away and told him. He heard the news with, she says, ‘astonishment but understanding. Whether or to what extent he saw a danger in André’s feelings I do not know. He did not need to because at this time there was no “advance” on my part.’29 She admits that later her new suitor ‘taught me what passion is’, but their intense affair did not last long: André died just eight months after Wieland – of liver cancer.

  Wieland’s body was taken back to Bayreuth, first ‘home’ to Wahn-fried for a day or two, then up to the Festspielhaus for what had all the trappings of a state funeral. Flags were flown at half-mast, the coffin at the front of the stage was almost smothered in wreaths, political and other dignitaries made speeches, the festival orchestra played Wagner and the chorus sang Bach. Brilliant organiser that he was, Wolfgang got all that together, at Gertrud’s behest, in barely four days. A suitable ceremony, most people thought, for so famous, so talented, so tragic a figure. It is doubtful whether Wieland would have agreed – he who had learned the hard way deeply to distrust pomp and circumstance, who had sought in his work to strip away all that was conventional and inessential. Later the same day, 21 October, he was buried in Bayreuth’s municipal cemetery next to Siegfried – the father to whom in life he had never felt really close.

  Shocked as they were, Gertrud and the children did not fully realise how vulnerable their position had suddenly become. They were soon to learn. Under a contract signed on 30 April 1962, the two brothers had pledged that when either of them died the other would take exclusive charge of the festival and pay the widow of the deceased a pension. This accord now took effect and left Gertrud with hardly a leg to stand on. Although she felt better placed than anyone to develop Wieland’s artistic legacy in Bayreuth and elsewhere, she had precious little independent leverage, few effective allies and next to no money. Like his grandfather, Wieland had left no will, heavy debts and youngish offspring still needing financial support. In other words Gertrud found herself largely dependent on Wolfgang, the ‘little brother’ who had long deplored her ‘interference’ on the Green Hill and who had leverage in artistic circles far beyond Bayreuth. He stuck by his financial commitment to her but – unsurprisingly – massively opposed her efforts to step even partly into Wieland’s shoes. Nor did she receive any backing from her mother-in-law. Winifred held that the festival now had to be run by a single, firm hand and threw her weight behind Wolfgang. Besides, she saw next to nothing in Wieland’s (to her, mysterious and often repellent) productions that was worth preserving, let alone developing.

  At first Gertrud and her brood still had the use of Wahnfried, but after a while they lost even that. Apart from the interim break after 1945, the old place had functioned as a director’s residence and family home for nearly a century – from the days of the Master, through the Cosima, Siegfried and Winifred eras right up to Wieland’s death. The new festival boss now put an end to this tradition. Although he had long since settled into his villa on the Green Hill and did not dream of moving down to Wahnfried, he did not want his late brother’s family to be based there either. Arguing that the dilapidated pile had to be rebuilt as soon as funds could be raised, he put pressure on the occupants to quit. Winifred, firmly dug into her annexe behind the garden wall that Wieland built, fully agreed with Wolfgang. When the forester died, she shrugged, the forester’s children just had to move out. In fact Gertrud and her offspring were usually absent anyway, she in the house on Sylt, they studying, odd-jobbing or starting careers far from Bayreuth. But for all of them Wahnfried had remained the common focus point, the tangible link to the past and especially to Wieland. Losing it was a blow that still smarted decades later. For the children, as Nike put it, it was as though a trap door had suddenly sprung open beneath their feet, pitching them into the unknown.

  17

  End of Empire?

  When Wolfgang took up the Bayreuth crown in 1966 at the age of forty-seven, next to no one dreamed he would rule for more than four decades – much longer than any of his predecessors from the Master and Cosima through Siegfried to Winifred. The new monarch himself, unexpectedly alone on the throne he had so far had to share, would no doubt have scoffed at the very idea. It was not even clear at the start
that his kingdom would survive intact, let alone thrive. Wieland was gone and, like it or not, it was his work rather than his brother’s that had proved the special draw for most of those who had flocked to ‘New Bayreuth’ since 1951. Would the crowds still come, even when those thrilling, shocking, ever-evolving productions had been phased out for good? For Wolfgang, Wieland dead and already a legend looked likely to prove still more of a challenge than Wieland living.

  For the time being, it was true, the supremo on the Green Hill needed fear no serious challenge from the surviving members of the clan. Armed with the 1962 accord assigning him the succession should his brother die before him, Wolfgang was in a near-impregnable position; all the more so since he was backed privately and publicly by Winifred, still legal owner of the festival assets despite her (enforced) renunciation of the directorship seventeen years before. ‘Little sister’ Verena, mother of five and long resident by the Bodensee, had neither the ambition nor the experience to co-rule in Bayreuth. Wieland’s gifted widow Gertrud had both, but she was vulnerable and could be held at bay. Franz Beidler in Switzerland – ‘Cousin Franz’ – was no longer even a distant threat. He continued to criticise the festival whose ‘premature’ post-war start under the two brothers he had so deplored; but he did not renew his bid for a say in running the show, and he would surely have foundered had he done so.

  That left the pugnacious Friedelind, a regular presence especially after 1959 when she began running annual masterclasses on the sidelines of the festival. Winifred patronisingly welcomed these efforts on the grounds that they gave her ‘problem’ daughter something to do. Wolfgang glowered, fearing that his Atlantic-hopping ‘big sister’ aimed to muscle in on the festival proper via the back door. As it was, many outsiders assumed that thanks to her ‘Bayreuth Festival Master Classes Inc.’ (with offices in New York and the Festspielhaus) Friedelind had already become more or less a third force on the Green Hill. She had not, but for a time the success of her classes – probing every aspect of the art of opera from production and interpretation to history and architecture – suggested she might well forge a Bayreuth power base of her own at last. As even Wolfgang acknowledged,1 she attracted outstanding speakers and coaches – from ‘big names’ like Pierre Boulez, Astrid Varnay, Walter Felsenstein and Gian Carlo Menotti, to experts on lighting, acoustics and psychoanalysis. Alongside the stream of lectures and workshops there were trips by minibus (often to the communist east) to judge rare fare like Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron – even Wagner’s Rienzi, never staged on the Green Hill. Friedelind set a furious pace, selected the students herself and warned in advance that anyone interested in regular meals and sleep need not bother to apply.2

  The Master himself, fierce advocate that he was of the Gesamtkunstwerk approach, would surely have favoured these efforts. A century before he had vainly urged King Ludwig to flank the building of a Festspielhaus with – just as important – the founding of a school, in the first place to train singers but later to foster all musical and theatrical skills. Cosima and Siegfried had each sought to follow up the idea but neither had got far: indeed the exaggerated ‘speech-song’ vocalism that the Hohe Frau had sought to impose through her Bayreuth ‘style school’ probably had her late husband turning in his grave. Friedelind with her interdisciplinary classes came closer to matching the original scheme, and she would no doubt have come closer still had she been able, as she dearly wished, to absorb the summer classes into an all-year-round training centre. As a permanent seat for the proposed institution the ambitious Mausi had her eye on nearby Schloss Fantaisie, that ‘dream’ castle with its superb park next to which Wagner and his family had first lived on their arrival from Tribschen in 1872.

  Alas, as so often Friedelind’s artistic aspirations outstripped her ability to raise cash. This was partly because she lacked a head for figures, partly because she favoured the American-style system of private sponsorship that was not readily transferable to the German – or European – context, in which public funding plays a far bigger role. Wolfgang scorned his sister’s business naivety and in part he was right (although there would have been no Bayreuth festival, perhaps no Wagnerian music dramas at all, had the Master matched his own ambitions to his chronically empty purse). As for Wieland, whatever qualms he had about letting Friedelind gain influence on the festival itself, he had far more regard than his brother did for her talent and pluck. Besides, by the time her masterclasses began he was already looking for ways to reduce if not sever his own links with Bayreuth. When he died, Mausi lost not so much a real ally – the past had divided them too much for that – as an intellectual sparring partner whose questing spirit matched her own. Plagued by money troubles, her classes folded a year later – in summer 1967 – and she lost her only potential springboard, if not to the Bayreuth crown itself at least to greater influence at court.

  Although he thus ruled the roost largely unopposed, Wolfgang faced a nagging question that could become urgent at any time: what would happen when his mother died? True, the ‘old warhorse’ seemed as sturdy as ever when she cantered through her seventieth birthday in 1967; but even barring bad illness or an accident it was hardly to be hoped, or feared, that she would survive into her nineties as Cosima had done. When she was gone the inheritance would be shared out not just between her three surviving children but with Wieland’s brood too. Even if the trio of elders could reach accord on future strategy and finance for the festival, which was far from sure, there was no guarantee that the junior quartet, at odds with Wolfgang and chased from Wahnfried, would simply play along in harmony. Besides, as time passed the festival director became ever less hopeful that his own rebellious son Gottfried would ‘see reason’ and equip himself to take over one day on the Green Hill. In sum, with Winifred’s passing the festival would probably face its end as a family enterprise – and might even sink altogether under waves of enmity. Happily for Wolfgang, his mother was at least as aware of the danger as he was.

  *

  Scraps between siblings, confrontation between young and old, unease about the future – none of that is uncommon, particularly not in a clan that has owned and run its own business for almost a century. But when Wieland died the Federal Republic itself was on the brink of a painful upheaval and, as so often before, the state of the Wagner family faithfully reflected the plight of the country at large. The reasons for the ominous and mounting tremors at national level were many, but an underlying one was economic. In 1966–7, after a decade and a half of mainly rapid growth, the country slid into a mini-recession with a small contraction of Gross National Product in real terms (after inflation) and the number of people out of work tripling to half a million. By the grim standards of later decades those woes look pretty mild, but for the land of the Wirtschaftswunder that had virtually defined itself throughout the 1950s in terms of surging production, exports and living standards the upset seemed dire. Chilling memories were revived of pre-Hitler Weimar, with its closely related economic and political chaos – all the more so since the Federal Republic’s own democratic system had begun to look shaky.

  The Adenauer era was over. The old chancellor had reluctantly stepped down in 1963 after fourteen years of office, sadly sure like so many aged autocrats that he had no fit successor – although, truth to tell, his own touch as government leader had become far from sure. The top job then went to Ludwig Erhard, a Christian Democrat who lacked Adenauer’s iron but whose near-legendary economic skills seemed a guarantee that the boom of the 1950s would not go bust in the 1960s. Ironically, though, it was mainly thanks to a battle just three years later over how best to deal with a mounting budget deficit – itself linked to economic downturn – that the chubby, cigar-puffing chancellor lost power. At the height of the dispute the liberal Free Democrats stomped out of the government coalition in which they had been the junior partner, and Erhard lost his parliamentary majority. Wary of entrusting his own fate to the liberals, Erhard’s successor, Kurt Georg
Kiesinger, instead formed a ‘grand coalition’ with the Social Democrats – hitherto the Christian Democrats’ biggest rival. That put the ‘Sozis’ into government power at national level for the first time in post-war Germany, but it also left the country with no parliamentary opposition to speak of. Conservatives hostile to making any deals with the political left moved off to swell the ranks of the far-right National Democratic Party, which was winning more support anyway as the jobless total grew. Left-wingers shocked by the ‘sell-out’ to the right began to desert the ranks of the Social Democrats and many, especially the young, took to the streets.

  Two factors contributed mightily to this polarisation. The immediate one was the (‘Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh’) student revolt that swept much of the democratic world in the late 1960s, sparked mainly by the US intervention in Vietnam and fuelled by disgust over capitalism and ‘bourgeois values’ generally. In the Federal Republic this imported stimulus to youthful rebellion fatefully fused with a home-grown one – the intimidating ‘grand coalition’ and, in particular, its approval in 1968 of legislation giving the government special powers in a national emergency. Although the measure was circumscribed with parliamentary safeguards, many of its foes compared it to the Enabling Act that Hitler had used to win control of the Reich in 1933. It came, moreover, in an atmosphere made still more explosive by the death of a student, Benno Ohnesorg, shot by police during a demonstration in Berlin a year before. Not that the Berlin violence itself came as a bolt from the blue. It marked the (interim) climax of a long-growing confrontation between German youth and its elders – over many things but over the Nazi past in particular.