The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  We cannot just wipe away the dark chapter of German history and Bayreuth’s history. Indeed, I believe the lessons that we have to draw from it are even more important than what Wagner has to tell us in his work. We have learned to distrust absolutist doctrines of salvation whether they come from the right, or from the left or out of Bayreuth. We have learned that subjecting oneself unconditionally to a man, a work or a nation leads into the abyss.

  At least some of those present felt the president had struck the right note in the right place at the right time (although one could well argue over just what it was that Wagner did have, as Scheel put it, ‘to tell us in his work’). But for old-guard Wagnerians the address was a shock and a scandal. Instead of being treated to a paean to the Master, or at least to such cosy platitudes as tend to be offered on ‘official’ birthdays, they had been forced to hear about Hitler, guilt and antisemitism on the hallowed ground where, as the brothers had put it in 1951, political discourse was taboo and art alone counted. Nor was the Fest-spielhaus ceremony the only centenary event to cause Wagner fans dismay, if not near-apoplexy. Far from it. Traditionalists had long feared the worst on learning that the centennial Ring was being put in the hands of two Frenchmen – the producer Patrice Chéreau, who had next to no operatic experience, and the conductor Pierre Boulez, that former Wieland protégé whose Parsifal performances in Bayreuth (from 1966–70) had been widely felt to lack weight and grandeur. These fears seemed massively confirmed when the Chéreau–Boulez anti-capitalist version of the tetralogy finally had its premiere, with prostitute Rhinemaidens peddling themselves around a hydroelectric dam and Hagen’s vassals brandishing sub-machine guns. In later years, be it remembered, this production was hailed for its imaginative insight as well as its thrills. But at its first showing in July 1976, the howls and fistfights that broke out dwarfed by far even the booing and stamping that had greeted Götz Friedrich’s ‘socialist’ Tannhäuser six years before.

  The ghosts of the past brought Wagnerians no more comfort than the affronts of the present. Just four days after the Scheel speech, Cosima’s long-inaccessible diaries – that million-word record of life with the Master between 1869 and 1883 – were unveiled (at least in part) at a Bayreuth press conference packed with German and foreign journalists. Interest was immense, not just because of the anticipated revelations but also thanks to the tortured history of the original books themselves (something hardly untypical in the Wagner family saga). Placed by Cosima in the care of her daughter Eva (Chamberlain) nearly seven decades before, the twenty-one elegantly handwritten volumes had been released for perusal to almost no one and – after a bitter scrap with the Wahnfried archivist Otto Strobel in the 1930s – Eva had passed the whole lot on to the town of Bayreuth for safety. She had even managed to exercise control beyond the grave, stipulating in her will that the diaries should be kept under wraps until thirty years after her death. Accordingly, the tomes thudded into the vault of a Munich bank and, despite flurries of litigation that finally delayed release even longer than Eva had intended, they were carted back to Bayreuth only in 1974. Thus Wieland, for one, never saw his grandmother’s magnum opus except, perhaps, in a few bowdlerised extracts that found their way into the Bayreuther Blätter when he was young.

  With the diaries ‘home’ again, a race began to edit and publish them in time for the centenary, then only two years away. In the event only half the contents, gathered together in a first 1,400-page volume, was ready for presentation ‘on the day’. The world had to wait another year for the rest. Even so, there was quite enough to applaud and appal in that initial chunk, covering as it did the eight years to 1877 – from the Tribschen era through to the first Bayreuth festival against the background of the Franco-Prussian war and the founding of a united Germany. Although much had already been known in general, and more suspected, about the Wagners’ trials and triumphs, Cosima’s ‘warts and all’ inside story caused many jaws to drop. Alongside the Master’s wild courage and sheer vitality, that even his fiercest critics could hardly fail to acknowledge, his rages and pettiness, his thanklessness and vindictiveness now emerged in excruciating detail. That Cosima had been a dedicated mistress, wife and muse was hardly news; but thanks to the ever more submissive tone of her entries, the history of her transition from a state of devotion to one of idolatry was chronicled as never before. Above all, it became clear for the first time how much antisemitism had been part and parcel of the Wagners’ life – in bursts and with contradictions in the Master’s case, implacably in that of the Hohe Frau.

  Scheel had touched only briefly on antisemitism when he spoke of Bayreuth’s role during the Nazi era, and Cosima’s diaries had been completed long before Hitler first visited Wahnfried – indeed, six years before he had even been born. Nonetheless, both events – the speech and the publication (not to mention Winifred’s film) – helped thrust into the foreground what was for Bayreuth the most tricky and painful of questions: how firm a connection might there have been between Wagner, Hitler and the Holocaust? In principle, of course, the issue was far from new. Thomas Mann, no less, had several times linked the Master’s work to the spirit of Nazism, most famously in 1949 with his statement that ‘There is much Hitler in Wagner.’ Theodor Adorno, too, had claimed to find specific evidence of the composer’s anti-semitism in the music dramas6 – a topic taken up sporadically by other writers. In Israel Wagner’s music had in any case long since been boycotted because of the association it was felt to have with the mass murder of the Jews.

  With the centenary, though, a fierce debate was sparked on the whole complex issue of Wagner, antisemitism and what Scheel called being ‘instrumentalised’ for an evil policy – all the more so since, alongside Cosima’s diaries, several other books were issued that gave embarrassing insights into Bayreuth’s past. In one, entitled Richard Wagner – ein deutsches Thema (Richard Wagner – a German theme), Hartmut Zelinsky, a Munich researcher, drew together a mass of hard-to-find historical material – much of it racist and nationalist – to document the Master’s pervasive influence during the previous hundred years. Even for those who rejected Zelinsky’s core thesis that the music dramas themselves were full of antisemitism, the evidence of a pernicious thread running from Wagner and Cosima through Chamberlain and his disciples to the ‘Third Reich’ looked hard to gainsay. Whether this was the crucial thread leading to Hitler and the Holocaust, or one among many, remains hotly in dispute.

  Another publication by a young historian, Michael Karbaum, was if anything even more explosive, although at first glance it did not seem so. Unexcitingly called Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festpiele (Studies in the History of the Bayreuth Festival), Karbaum’s book was one of a scholarly series commissioned several years earlier for the centenary and financed by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, a private foundation wholly independent of Bayreuth. From the first the planned volumes, covering such topics as Wagner’s concept of music drama and the changing style of festival productions, looked bound to be thorough and balanced but mainly of specialist interest. Karbaum, however, not only combined a scrupulous historian’s care for sources with a far from starry-eyed view of Bayreuth; he also managed to win the trust of Gertrud Strobel, daunting keeper of the Wahnfried archive (and widow of Otto Strobel who, in the same job, had run foul of Eva Chamberlain many years before). As a result he gained access to documents hitherto kept under lock and key – especially letters and memos from the Nazi era – and used pungent direct quotes from them to support a text of rare critical acumen.

  Wolfgang only got to learn just what was up when Karbaum’s completed manuscript, four years in preparation, was sent to him for perusal by the publisher in 1974. He was livid, to say the least – above all with the hapless Frau Strobel whom he accused of ‘presumptuously and arbitrarily’ handing over private material and of ‘violating every basic principle governing the relationship between employer and employee’.7 In his memoirs, Wolfgang stressed that ‘it has always been difficult if not
utterly impossible to divorce the Wagner family from the Bayreuth festival and regard them as two entirely separate things.’ He can never have written truer words. But he went on to comment that the documents Karbaum had uncovered ‘would at best have been a nine days’ wonder and thus of no further importance had not Adolf Hitler’s name kept cropping up in them’.8 That point is also true, although many will feel it belongs more to the prosecution than the defence.

  The irate festival director brooded over the manuscript until well into 1975, then returned it to the publisher without demanding changes. But astonishingly (and for Karbaum outrageously9) he passed on the documentation that went with it to Gottfried, who was feeding the eminent critic Hans Mayer with raw material for yet another centenary volume. It is hard to be sure why Wolfgang acted as he did, since he and his son were perennially at loggerheads. Did he conclude that, since the documents could hardly be prevented from reaching the public anyway, it would be better to go on the attack with them and show how ‘open’ the Wagners now were about their chequered past? Gottfried himself later maintained that, by poking about at Wahnfried and his granny’s home, he had already seen much of the stuff that his father slipped to him. Be that as it may, all three volumes – Zelinsky’s, Karbaum’s and Mayer’s – came to market in 1976, shedding much light into dark corners but leaving questions unanswered. In the meantime, Winifred had decided to put what ‘evidence’ she still possessed beyond the reach of any snooper. She gathered together her most sensitive private papers – believed to include letters from Hitler and a mass of material penned by Siegfried – and spirited them off to her favourite grandchild Amélie (an archivist daughter of Bodo and Verena Lafferentz) in Munich. There they have stayed ever since, at least as firmly guarded as Fafner’s hoard. Even Wolfgang is said to have had no access to them.

  Winifred evidently acted as she did, not just because of the fuss over ‘her’ film – resulting in her ‘banishment’ by Wolfgang – but because she was ever more suspicious of Gottfried’s motives. At first she had welcomed her grandson’s regular visits to the Siegfried-Wagner-Haus and his fascination with family history (of which his role in introducing her to Syberberg was one example). Gradually, though, she concluded that it was not just genealogical interest, let alone pride in tradition, that explained his constant presence on her doorstep. In that she was quite right. The inquisitive youngster who had stumbled so long before on first hints of the fateful family liaison with ‘Uncle Wolf’ had become an adult increasingly appalled as he dug more deeply into the past. Although Friedelind, the other great family rebel, had turned her back on Hitler she had never ceased to revere her father and grandfather. Gottfried, on the other hand, came to believe that there really had been a strong connection between Wagner’s antisemitism and the Holocaust – and that Siegfried too had been a link in the chain. In his view, the family had loaded terrible guilt on itself but had failed adequately to acknowledge it, let alone pay the price.

  Although Gottfried’s doubts began early on, his ‘conversion’ came only slowly. His work on Kurt Weill in New York and Vienna for his doctorate surely played a role. So did the friendship he struck up in France with open-minded relatives of his great-great-grandfather Liszt (always regarded at Wahnfried as greatly inferior to the Master). Meanwhile, almost everywhere on his travels but especially – of course – in Israel, he came into painful contact with Jewish victims of the Nazis. By the end of the 1970s he had retreated from Bayreuth altogether, taking with him only two remnants of the past: puppets he had made as a child, and (symbolically?) the chair that had been used in his uncle Wieland’s Parsifal to bear the guilt-plagued, salvation-seeking Amfortas into the hall of the Holy Grail.10

  Ashamed of being German, and a Wagner to boot, Gottfried at one point thought of changing his name and becoming a US citizen; but he finally dropped the idea, repelled by what he called ‘the obscene gulf’ in America between rich and poor. After years of roaming when it seemed he would find neither a home nor a role, he at last settled down near Milan with Teresina, his Italian wife, and Eugenio, their adopted son – formerly a victim of mistreatment and poverty in Romania. From that base Gottfried sought to foster dialogue between a new – post-Holocaust – generation of Germans and Jews and fired one verbal and written salvo after another at Bayreuth and its history. His fiercely accusatory autobiography of 1997, Wer nicht mit dem Wolf heult (He Who Does Not Cry with the Wolf) can be seen as a response to what he felt were the holes and distortions of his father’s memoirs, Lebens-Akte, issued three years before.

  Perhaps it was young Gottfried’s passion for prying and posing awkward questions that bit by bit stymied his relations with Wolfgang; or maybe it was because he was an unhappy child from the first that he began to seek out and rattle skeletons in the family cupboard. Whatever the truth of the matter early on, it was a much later shock that did most to seal Gottfried’s break with his father and Bayreuth. Amid the centenary celebrations of 1976, Wolfgang separated from Ellen, his wife of thirty-three years’ standing, and married his aide Gudrun Mack.

  The two women in Wolfgang’s life could hardly have been more different. Ellen (née Drexel), born in 1919, was a delicate former ballet dancer who had loved her career – at whose height in wartime Berlin she had met Wolfgang – but was privately shy and retiring. The Bayreuth festival public was aware of her, if at all, as a dainty, smiling presence, hovering near her husband on the Green Hill and – in the early years – clucking over her restless little son and daughter. She did not even try to involve herself in the family business and privately felt vulnerable before her formidable relatives, especially the domineering Winifred and (until she was driven away) the hyperactive Gertrud. Wolfgang’s new wife, twenty-five years his junior, fitted the pattern of strong Wagnerian women far better. Born Gudrun Armann in East Prussia in 1944, she was a tireless organiser with a forceful manner and a manifest will to climb the Bayreuth ladder. She had managed to win the grudging respect of the hypercritical Wieland during her early days in the festival press office, and later further improved her Wagnerian credentials when she married Dietrich Mack, a scholar who co-edited the Cosima diaries. In 1976 she became the boss’s secretary, his personal assistant – and his spouse.

  Ellen never really recovered from the blow of divorce. Unable at the age of fifty-seven to find a new career, let alone go back to the world of dance, she first moved in with Winifred – who was at odds with Wolfgang over her own ‘banishment’ – then retired on a modest income to her birthplace of Wiesbaden. There she pondered the past, rereading and adding commentaries to voluminous diaries (another as yet unpublished source of family history) that she had kept ever since her engagement in 1942. In some ways, Gottfried felt closer to his mother as an adult than he had done in childhood, and her fate brought him lasting pain. When she died in a nursing home near Wiesbaden in 2002, he had her body taken to his new home town in Italy for burial. A photo of her, as a four-year-old sprite cavorting to a theme of Puccini, never leaves his desk.

  Gottfried’s elder sister Eva was naturally also shocked by her parents’ split, in principle with still more cause. Since Wieland’s death a decade before she had acted as a close aide to her father and had emerged as a far more likely choice than her brother to take over one day on the Green Hill. With the divorce, though, she was out – her place taken by her new stepmother who was just one year older than herself and who knew the festival ‘ropes’ from the inside as well as anyone bar the boss. The professional and emotional double blow might well have felled a fragile soul, but Eva was anything but that; on the contrary, in her pragmatism and toughness (a ‘lady with sharp elbows’ as one of her former associates puts it) she was her father’s child. Wasting few words of sorrow or blame, she marched off and carved out a career as a music agent and consultant on singers to houses as renowned as Covent Garden and the Met. More than two decades were to pass before she really crossed swords with her father over the Bayreuth succession.

  Wi
th his remarriage shortly before his fifty-seventh birthday, Wolfgang began a new life and went a long way towards drawing a double line under the old one. In the years to come virtually all his paternal affection was to be lavished on his and Gudrun’s only child, a daughter born in 1978 and named Katharina Friderike. Did the fond father expect that the blonde little girl, who displayed much of his energy and next to none of his temper, would one day become Mistress on the Green Hill? Perhaps not at first, because it was plain that even if Katharina were to show enough talent for, and interest in, the Bayreuth directorship, she would not be ready for it until well into the next millennium. By that time, her father might be dead, her mother shunted aside and the succession settled some other way. But what other way? Whenever the touchy question came up, Wolfgang snapped that he saw no young (pre-Katharina) Wagner able to take on the top job or even willing to work hard to get it – as he had had to do.

  This charge was plainly absurd. It was true that none of the younger set had been through the kind of intensive training that Wolfgang and Wieland, albeit in different ways, had enjoyed during the Nazi era under the benevolent eye of ‘Uncle Wolf’. It was also true that Gottfried’s efforts to forge a career in the theatre had proved sporadic, and had hardly been helped by the running feud with his influential father. But after an erratic start and a brief marriage that ended in divorce, the once-unruly Wummi – he of the ‘Ingres portrait’ scandal – had thrown himself with unexpected resolve into the theatre business, working as director and stage designer on literally dozens of productions at home and abroad. Although not blessed with his father’s exceptional talent, he gained far more varied experience over the years than either Wieland or Wolfgang had had when they founded ‘New Bayreuth’. Rashly, though, he failed to keep his own counsel or at least to content himself with seeking allies behind the scenes. In 1984, when the festival director reached what many regarded as the ‘natural’ retirement age of sixty-five, Wummi told an interviewer that he firmly aimed to take up the Bayreuth sceptre and that Wolfgang could not stop him. The ‘real tragedy’ of the situation, he claimed, was not so much that his uncle felt nothing for his late brother’s children as that he felt nothing for his own – Eva and Gottfried.11