If the obdurate Wolfgang had needed encouragement to dig in his heels more firmly, which is admittedly unlikely, then his nephew’s stinging public remarks supplied it. Pragmatically concluding that he was, after all, no irresistible force in the struggle for supremacy on the Green Hill, Wummi dropped theatricals and retreated to Mallorca with Marie Eleonore (Nona), his love of many years standing. There the two of them settled down on a spacious hillside finca and set up a thriving business building, restoring and fitting out choice properties for well-heeled clients. If Wummi pined for Bayreuth glory lost then he gave no sign of it, and in Eleonore he seemed to have found the ideal partner – a lively blonde, skilled as an interior designer and with a perfect pedigree. Born into a family of East Prussian aristocrats, she was not quite six years old when the Nazis slew her father – Count Heinrich von Lehndorff – for his part in the abortive 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Unlike Gottfried, Wummi was no crusader against Bayreuth’s past, but he surely relished being linked to a family that – in marked contrast to his own – had tried to rid the world of the abominable Führer.
Practical stage experience such as Wummi had gained was obviously useful to any potential ruler on the Green Hill, but it was by no means a ‘must’. If it had been, then neither Cosima nor Winifred would have qualified. Nor would Wolfgang, had outstanding originality as a producer been regarded as a prerequisite. Of the young aspirants who did not follow Wummi’s career choice, both Eva with her international opera contacts and Nike with her sharp intellect and literary skill were clearly eligible for the shortlist of any unbiased judge. Had the assertive Wolfgang and Wieland daughters joined forces and (a tough but not impossible condition) quelled mutual friction in their common cause, they might even have turned out to be Bayreuth’s ‘dream team’. They would surely have been a daunting one. As a family rival ruefully put it, ‘No man alive would stand a chance against those two if they got together.’
Wolfgang, though, was not to be budged – least of all by charges from interested parties that he was getting too old for the job. On the contrary, the longer he stayed in charge the more he came to seem as immutable a part of the Bayreuth landscape as the Festspielhaus in which he spent most of his waking life. Not that it was mere stubborness that kept him in place. The Wolfgang who had had a head for business even as a child and who had later kept the festival solvent while his brother earned most of the plaudits, now used all his canniness to bolster his position at the top. In one key move, he founded Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH (Bayreuth Festival Ltd.), of which he became the sole director and single shareholder and into which the assets of the festival were drawn. Under the 1973 charter of the Richard Wagner Foundation, the festival boss enjoyed artistic autonomy but also bore full responsibility for ensuring that the festival stayed viable as a business enterprise. By setting up the new limited-liability company in 1986, Wolfgang helped shield himself (and indirectly his family) from such risk as he had so far run as a private entrepreneur.
This unspectacular but effective coup was followed four years later by another. In June 1990, a contract was signed under which the Foundation leased the Festspielhaus to the Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH; not, in itself, a striking event – except that Wolfgang saw to it that the lease, like his employment contract with the GmbH, was open-ended. In practice this meant that he could not be replaced against his will, even if the Foundation board were one day to insist that it was time for a change. Theoretically his position could be made almost untenable and reasons found for naming a successor over his head; but under the terms of the lease he could not actually be ejected from the Festspielhaus unless he misused or damaged the place. If this confrontation scenario had been thought through, board members might have realised that the festival could eventually be doomed to have a hamstrung director with a theatre and a designated director without one.
In 1990, though, next to no one pondered over what (wrongly) seemed so theoretical a nightmare. When the lease was signed Wolfgang was just two months short of his seventy-first birthday and, it was thought, would probably bow out of his own free will before very long. Some board members did begin to have qualms a year later when the elderly boss, asked how long he planned to stay on, noted that Adenauer had become chancellor at the age of seventy-five – and had kept his job for fourteen years. On the whole, though, there seemed no compelling need to worry about the current director, let alone to start looking for a new one. Wolfgang might be overbearing and cantankerous but he knew the business from top to bottom – every stone and every creaking board in the Festspielhaus, every clause in every contract. Besides, the festival was manifestly doing well. Demand for the fifty thousand tickets available each year exceeded supply by up to a factor of ten. Wouldn’t the Master himself have been thrilled?
Winifred did not live to see Wolfgang achieve so impregnable a position, but she did make her peace with him before she died. From 1977 she was allowed to re-enter the Festspielhaus and the following year she took a trip to Milan to see her son’s production of Tristan at La Scala. On the whole she liked it, but then she had always preferred Wolfgang’s work to Wieland’s – let alone to the newfangled efforts by ‘communists’ that in her view now desecrated the Bayreuth stage. (‘There are still places free in the asylum,’ she is said to have snorted after suffering through part of the Chéreau Ring.) Although she continued to see her old USA friends and receive some young neo-Nazis too, the publicity she now aroused was minimal and gave the festival director no new headaches. Nor did her conduct bring a split in her perennially fraught relations with Friedelind, not even during the Syberberg affair itself. While the storm over the film was still blowing, mother and daughter went on a tour of Britain together looking for details of their ancestry. Naturally Mausi deplored Winifred’s inability to change (the feeling was mutual), but the links that bound her to her mother, so often tested to the utmost, proved too strong to break – ever.
When the end came, Winifred was some way from home. While on a Christmas visit to Verena and her family at Nussdorf (by the Bodensee), the old woman was taken seriously ill and moved to hospital in nearby Überlingen. There she died on 5 March 1980 at the age of eighty-two – clear of mind and unsentimental to her last breath. Before the burial on 10 March in Bayreuth’s municipal cemetery, her body was taken first to Wahnfried to ‘lie in state’, thence to the Green Hill for a ceremony with fulsome speeches and music performed by members of the festival orchestra and chorus. Outwardly, then, the procedure matched the one followed after Wieland’s death in Munich fourteen years before. This time, though, feelings were far more mixed. For many of the clan, the loss of the matriach brought at least as much relief as grief. Besides, hadn’t the deceased been pilloried only a few years before for her pro-Hitler remarks, and banned from the very place where she was now being honoured? The long-serving president of the Bayreuth ‘Friends’, Ewald Hilger, delicately hinted at this inconvenient history when he remarked that Winifred had never been ‘guilty of the sin of cowardice in expressing her opinion’.12 That was surely true. As for Bayreuth’s lord mayor, Hans Walter Wild, he stressed that Winifred’s name would be ‘for ever’ closely linked with the festival she had led with energy up to 1945, and with the town of which she had been an honorary citizen. Sadly, that may prove true too.
Friedelind survived her mother by just eleven years. To the end she remained as generous, impetuous and headstrong as ever, if anything more so thanks to the big family payout in 1973 that had made her a woman of means. Her former landlord and landlady in New York were given the trip of their dreams – to Israel, first-class and all expenses paid. Her old friend Isabella Wallich, desperate for cash to keep her recording company afloat, was saved in the nick of time when Mausi – apparently on impulse – phoned from a petrol station somewhere in Germany to offer funds.13 The masterclasses that had foundered in Bayreuth were restarted with a still more ambitious programme, this time in Yorkshire. Alas, they too did not last, scuppered when local-authori
ty backing for the project fell through. Instead, Friedelind redoubled efforts to promote her father’s little-known music – heading an international Siegfried Wagner Society, financing recordings and organising public performances. Of the latter, probably the finest was the concert rendering of the opera Der Friedensengel (The Angel of Peace) given at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1975. Stars including the sopranos Martha Mödl and Hanne-Lore Kuhse were in the cast, and more than thirty descendants of Wagner and Liszt (many meeting for the first time) were in the audience.
When seized with enthusiasm, as she usually was, Mausi could overrun the strongest doubter. She even managed to persuade a deeply reluctant Leonard Bernstein (who famously claimed to ‘hate Wagner but on bended knee’) to join her on a visit to the Master’s grave at Wahnfried. What she really needed was a loyal business adviser with the canniness of her younger brother and the firmness to rein her in when she was in full flight. Not surprisingly, such a paragon did not come her way. She never married, but in Neill Thornborrow – an English pianist who as a teenager had attended her masterclasses in Yorkshire – she won a disciple who became like an adopted son to her. Indeed, he was often assumed to be her real son by those who saw the two of them together and thought they saw something Wagnerian in his features. ‘Who’s the father?’ a Bayreuth diva was once nosy enough to demand of Friedelind. ‘Parsifal,’ she shot back, adding with a nod at Neill, ‘and he’s Lohengrin’ – a joke maybe only Wagner cognoscenti can fully savour. It was this young Englishman whom Mausi, unorthodox to the last, eventually made her sole heir. All her belongings – books, letters, manuscripts, scores, pictures and her piano – went directly to him and were henceforth carefully preserved at his home in Düsseldorf, where he heads a theatrical agency. Much of her capital, as she stipulated, was used to set up a trust fund to finance cheap loans for promising young singers. Some of those to benefit have since made it to the Bayreuth stage.
Friedelind died of cancer at a clinic in Herdecke, a town in the Ruhr area of North Rhine-Westphalia, on 8 May 1991. She was seventy-three. Her body was not brought to Bayreuth, nor did an official ceremony in her birthplace mark her passing. She was cremated and, as she had wished, Neill Thornborrow took her ashes to Lucerne and scattered them there at a spot that she had asked not to be disclosed. Mausi had settled down in the Swiss city, close to the lake, some years before. She had no longer been keen on shuttling to America and had felt far from at ease in Germany. Besides, from her terrace she had an uninterrupted view across the bay to Tribschen – that idyllic villa where her grandfather had spent probably his happiest times, where her father had been born and where she herself had found refuge decades before from ‘Uncle Wolf’ and his pack. For the Wagner rebel and rover, Lucerne with its beauty and its memories was an appropriate place to rest at last.
19
Time Future?
By the turn of the century – and of the millennium – the Wagner clan had become a widely scattered one. Eva lived in some state in Paris with her French husband Yves Pasquier, a film producer, and their son Antoine Amadeus, born in 1982. A year earlier Nike too had had a child – a daughter named Louise – by a Frenchman and later married a Swiss musicologist, Jürg Stenzl. From her spacious apartment hired by the Vienna State Opera, the ‘bluestocking’ of the family fired off one learned article and biting commentary after another, aimed mainly at displacing the solidly entrenched ruling caste in Bayreuth. Wits noted that the name ‘Nike’ was not only that of the Greek goddess of victory (and of much-fancied running shoes) but also of a largely outdated American missile system. It remained to be seen in the case of the Wieland daughter which of those associations proved the more apt.
From his base in Italy, Gottfried kept up his remorseless campaign to reveal the dark side of family history while in Mallorca his cousin Wummi enjoyed sun, sea and business success – Wagnerian strife, real or staged, far from his mind. Even those members of the clan who remained in Germany were, to a lesser extent, part of this diaspora. Of the brood that had grown up in Bayreuth in the 1950s, Daphne pursued her career as an actress in Munich, Iris hers as a writer and photographer in Berlin. Of the older generation, Verena still dwelt at her chalet home by the Bodensee as she had done since the war. With her husband Bodo long dead and her five children married, she was a solitary figure – but a spry and far from self-pitying one. As for Wolfgang, it almost goes without saying that he continued to live and move and have his being on the Green Hill, flanked by his strong-willed wife Gudrun and their increasingly self-confident daughter Katharina. On occasion he did travel far afield, but virtually always in the service of the Master – even on a trip to Hawaii, the rather unlikely home of one of the world’s most devoted Bayreuth fan clubs.
Bit by bit over the years, most Wagnerians had come to conclude that nothing less pressing than death would part the festival director from his post. In 1998 insiders had pricked up their ears when Wolfgang told them he would not stay on ‘as a mummy or a robot’, but it was hard to tell whether that remark had been meant as a pledge or a joke. Hence the surprise when in March 1999, five months before his eightieth birthday and two months before Katharina’s twenty-first, the old man announced it was time to start the formal search for a new director. Did that imply he was ready, after all, to accept whichever candidate the board of the Foundation in its wisdom decided was best? By no means. It meant that he aimed to see Gudrun, then aged fifty-four, take command at some as yet unspecified point and hold the fort until, with luck, Katharina was ready and able to move in. Naturally he also planned to hold himself available, in the background as it were, to give his wife and – if he lived long enough – his daughter the benefit of his unmatched experience. To critics who later accused him of striving to keep his own branch of the clan in power no matter what, Wolfgang snapped that he had never seen the Gudrun-based solution as the only possible one.1 But since he failed to specify another, at least in public, few people took this claim seriously.
Thus began what one of those most closely involved bitterly called ‘a farce without humour’. The show did, in fact, have comic moments – for instance when a top representative of the Foundation compared the choleric Wolfgang to Rumpelstiltskin, that unsavoury Grimm wizard who created gold from straw but then, in a rage, destroyed himself. To anyone with a fairly long memory, the newly joined Battle of the Bayreuth Succession also had its ironic side. Half a century before, Wolfgang had urged his brother to help keep the family’s Weiber (womenfolk) at bay in the running of ‘New Bayreuth’. Now Weiber were ineluctably advancing to dominate the field, latching on to the tradition begun by Cosima and continued by Winifred. With Gottfried and Wummi standing aside, each for his own reasons, the struggle for the top job turned out in the first place to be one between Gudrun, Eva and Nike.
Admittedly each of these Valkyries had powerful male support – in Gudrun’s case from Wolfgang, in Nike’s from Elmar Weingarten, seasoned manager of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Eva’s choice of running-mate – Verena’s youngest son Wieland Lafferentz – was almost too clever, since his qualifications were arguably even better than hers. Born in 1949, he had trained as a conductor, worked in orchestral administration in Dresden and now ran the prestigious Mozarteum in Salzburg. By teaming up with Eva, with his mother’s blessing, Wieland gave notice that the Lafferentzes were by no means in Wolfgang’s pocket as some commentators unkindly claimed. It eventually became clear, though, that he was not in Eva’s pocket either. Urgently wanting more detail about future plans than his partner felt willing or able to give, the punctilious Mozart man broke with her and made his own bid for the Bayreuth crown.
Not surprisingly the Foundation saw no need to look beyond the family for someone who might be, as the statutes put it, ‘more suitable’ for the directorship. So many members of the clan were already chasing the prize – all but one of them, moreover, with impressively familiar physiognomy. Eva’s strong features recalled those of the Master, Nike looked like Cosima
reborn and Wieland closely resembled the youngish Franz Liszt. Only Gudrun, of course, lacked this superficial but not negligible advantage. On the other hand she had had vast practical experience on the Green Hill and seemed to guarantee relatively risk-free continuity. Of all the aspirants, it was Nike (with Weingarten) who produced easily the most far-reaching strategy for change and this was, in part, her undoing.2 Far from everyone on the board could be called outstandingly imaginative or even well-versed in Wagner theatre, and when the Wieland daughter presented her vision of the festival’s future at a meeting with her judges, numerous eyes around the table were seen to glaze. Her scornful public statements – describing Wolfgang’s Bayreuth as a Wagnerian ‘mishmash’ and Gudrun as ‘the laughing stock of the nation’ – did not help her cause either.
The Wagner Clan Page 45