To cut a long and painfully complex story short, on 29 March 2001 the board all but unanimously chose Eva as the next director and called on Wolfgang to step down after the 2002 season. It could have saved its breath. Already aware several months before that Gudrun looked unlikely to get the post, Wolfgang made plain that he regarded as unsuitable all the other candidates (or combination of candidates since, at one time, a ‘troika’ between Eva, Nike and Weingarten was mooted). Furious, the board members – especially the pace-setting Bavarian culture minister Hans Zehetmair – sought ways of prising the obdurate director out of his job, notably by threatening to cancel his Festspielhaus lease. But armed with the open-ended contracts that the Foundation itself had given him years before, Wolfgang was in no real danger, and after a few months Eva announced she was no longer available. Busy as a vocal talent-spotter for the Aix-en-Provence festival, she had no time to campaign fruitlessly against a father who, as she put it, still treated Bayreuth as his private fiefdom although the family had signed away ownership three decades before.
Naturally this debacle was covered at length and with glee by the press, even by those parts of it that were normally culture-shy. Growl though it might, the Foundation had been embarrassingly exposed as a paper tiger. Wolfgang could not be removed but he had achieved nothing – on the contrary, he had suffered a defeat at least as painful for his ambitious wife as it was for him. Suppose he were to die in the near future, or for some other reason be unable to carry on. Was it likely that the initially rejected Gudrun or the still unproven Katharina would be enthroned by the very body he had so thoroughly humiliated? Would Eva after all take up the crown she had stopped chasing? Would the whole selection rigmarole start again, perhaps with other or extra candidates? If so, who would have the authority to run the festival in the meantime? What Bayreuth now needed, it seemed, was some selfless figure from outside who was acceptable to all parties (family and Foundation), who knew the whole Wagner canon backwards, who would be ready to work at Wolfgang’s side and who would take over on an interim basis if the director himself dropped out. It was hardly to be expected that such a paragon could be found – but found he was in the person of Klaus Schultz.
The new arrival – former viola player, dramaturg and manager all in one – had been a Bayreuth devotee, not to say fanatic, for much of his life. Born in 1947, he had managed as a teenager to smuggle himself into the orchestra pit of the Festspielhaus to watch the legendary Knappertsbusch at work, an intrusion old Kna spied from the corner of his eye but decided to ignore. After spells heading opera houses in Aachen and Mannheim, Schultz took over the Gärtnerplatz theatre in Munich, staging among other things Das Liebesverbot – one of those early works by the Master never given on the Green Hill. Professionally he admired Wolfgang’s managerial skill but he had known Wieland’s wife Gertrud well too, and had made a touching speech to her children and other mourners when she died in 1998. In late 2001 he emerged as an intermediary between the fuming foes Wolfgang and Zehetmair, and after a three-way meeting in Munich he found himself with an extra job – modestly defined as that of ‘freelance associate to the Bayreuth festival management’. In practice, that meant he was Wolfgang’s right-hand man and would, if fate so decided, step into his shoes for a temporary, albeit unspecified, period.
With Schultz’s appointment most of the heat went out of the succession dispute. Wolfgang stayed at the Bayreuth helm; Eva flitted between Paris and Aix; Nike – although never dropping her claim to the Green Hill – took charge of the summer festival in Weimar, an underfunded but imaginative offering of music, art and drama centred on the music of her great-great-grandfather, Liszt. Deprived of new thrills from the older members of the family, the press turned its attention to Katharina, now a rewardingly photogenic young lady far more relaxed with reporters than her father had ever been. With a ready smile and a toss of her blonde hair, she easily parried every question about whether she aimed to become the new (antiquated term!) Hohe Frau. But since she had long worked as an assistant in the Festspielhaus, had joined her parents in greeting the VIP’s at the start of every season and had studied theatre in Berlin, it did not seem rash to conclude that she had her eye on the Bayreuth crown. Besides, from 2002 she became a producer in her own right – of Wagner in Würzburg and Budapest, Lortzing in Munich, Puccini in Berlin. Finally in 2007 she admitted she would like the Bayreuth directorship “if the conditions are right” and sought to back her claim by tackling a new Meistersinger on the Green Hill that same summer. Her maverick production drew jeers as well as cheers, but at least it kept her more than ever in the news.
Concentration on Katharina in the succession saga was natural enough but it had its drawbacks – not least for her. Inevitably her every new production was burdened by excessive expectations, positive and negative. A halfway imaginative bit of staging was promptly interpreted by well-wishers as Wagnerian genius showing through, modest flaws were damned by critics as evidence that the girl got work only through daddy’s string-pulling. The truth was that Katharina had learned her theatrical handiwork well, that she could handle a team smoothly but firmly and that she had plenty of ideas, only some of them silly. If the invitations she received from one opera house after another were in part extended thanks to her father (and it would be naive to assume they were not), her productions themselves could hardly have differed more from his. One might almost conclude from her Holländer and Lohengrin that she was deliberately striving not to follow in her father’s creative footsteps. If so, that was not unwise. When Wolfgang stepped down as a producer in 2002 (with Meistersinger!), his stagings in Bayreuth had been shown more than 460 times. Few if any of them made an indelible impact.
As a producer, then, Wolfgang was far from irreplaceable. Happily he either realised that himself or was too busy to do still more stage work, instead pulling in a string of notable outsiders – from Götz Friedrich to Patrice Chéreau, from Harry Kupfer to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, from Peter Hall to Werner Herzog, from Alfred Kirchner to Heiner Müller. As a director, though, Wolfgang’s like will never again be seen in Bayreuth, let alone elsewhere. Whoever takes over will certainly not get a contract for life from the now chastened and wary board, nor be able to run the business side more or less single-handedly. The days of ‘management by walking around’ on the Green Hill will be gone for good. Katharina’s stage experience is obviously useful preparation for Bayreuth, but that alone does not qualify her to run the show. Like any future boss there she will need a partner to handle the ever more complex economic and budgetary side, ideally someone who knows the music business inside out but who will not get in her hair over artistic policy.
That, though, is the relatively straightforward part of the task. The tougher one is to decide where the festival should go from here. Many Wagnerians, of course, claim it should not go anywhere. With demand for tickets still vastly exceeding supply, it is argued that change is unnecessary and might well do harm. That view is misguided. It is true that Bayreuth has an all-but unique atmosphere it is well worth trying to preserve. Where else can one hear the works of a great composer given in the theatre he built in the town where he lived and is buried? And if in principle a member of the family is able as well as willing to run the show, so much the better. Suppose the Salzburg festival (admittedly less monomaniacal – as well as far dearer – than Bayreuth) found a Mozart descendant to manage things, wouldn’t it snap him or her up? That said, Bayreuth badly needs to look to its laurels. Although the festival chorus remains unsurpassed, casts and orchestral playing at least as fine and often better can regularly be heard elsewhere – from Munich to Vienna, from Berlin to New York. As for the production side, naturally Bayreuth cannot often generate an outstanding homegrown talent like Wieland; but Wolfgang’s policy of drawing in one outsider after another, originally sensible and necessary, has run up against its limits. The festival has long since ceased to set trends: it follows them and seems not to know which if any it prefers. Too often, moreover, th
ere is a manifest disparity between the approach of the producer and that of the conductor to the work in hand – a flaw that in Bayreuth, of all houses, could and ought to be avoided. For most people who gain entrance to the sanctum after waiting perhaps a decade for a ticket, these ills are hard to admit. But in Nike’s harsh description of the festival as a ‘mishmash’ there is sadly much truth.
Katharina believes a big part of the answer to the festival’s future lies in an artistic partnership between herself and the talented maestro Christian Thielemann, long a Bayreuth regular. That might seem to make sense. But although the two have known one another for years and generally get on well, giving any one conductor – however fine – a preponderant say on the Green Hill could court disaster. The case of Karl Muck, who thought he was indispensable and who intrigued against gifted colleagues like Fritz Busch, is warning enough. That apart, Nike’s proposals – largely pilloried or ignored since she put them to the board – make a good starting point for a new ‘New Bayreuth’ strategy. For one thing, she favours drawing the Master’s early music dramas into the Bayreuth canon and building each season around a particular theme – underlining, say, the huge leap in technique and outlook that Wagner took between Die Feen, his first stage work, and Parsifal, his last. Seminars and performances of related compositions would be organised on the sidelines, new works commissioned, open-air concerts held and – perhaps – a less lavish Whit-sun season added, mainly for young people. In the context of a broadly based summer academy, Friedelind’s masterclasses would be reborn and would bear her name.3
Impractical, extravagant, rule-bending if not rule-breaking: those are some of the (politer) objections made to Nike’s scheme. Her great-grandfather would have recognised them all only too well. It is, of course, impossible to say which ideas the Master would embrace or deplore if he lived now, but it is worth stressing yet again that it was not he who laid down the repertoire on which Bayreuth perennially insists. Perhaps he would emigrate to America, as he pondered in his last years, and make his works available for IMAX film theatres in multi-channel sound – a visual and acoustic miracle the Festspielhaus hardly begins to approach. This was, after all, the man who exhorted: ‘Kinder! macht Neues! Neues! und abermals Neues!’ (Children! Do something New! New! and yet again New!).4 His work thrives more than most people’s on risk and dies easiest through routine. Even in Nike’s long list of novel proposals, though, one vital element is missing. As it happens, the authoress herself indirectly drew attention to it in quite another context.
On 5 November 2005, the Vienna State Opera celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its reopening after the war. The occasion was not quite as historic and thought-provoking as the Bayreuth centenary of 1976, although for the Austrians the house on the Opernring is a national symbol equalled, perhaps, only by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (whose members are drawn from the ranks of the opera orchestra itself). Nonetheless, the anniversary was marked by a speech almost as controversial as the one that President Scheel had delivered on the Green Hill nearly three decades before. In one way the Vienna address was more striking than the Bayreuth one since it came not from a distinguished outsider but from an absolute insider – namely Ioan Holender, director of the venerable house since 1992.
As many of his listeners shifted uncomfortably, Holender recalled that the man appointed to head the opera at its rebirth in 1955 had been the very same one who had held the job in the last years of the ‘Third Reich’. Moreover, the person chosen to produce the work that was given at the reopening premiere (Beethoven’s Fidelio) had been in charge of all Prussian theatres under the Nazis. No one in Holender’s audience needed reminding who was meant. The individuals in question were not exactly unknown in Bayreuth either. The Fidelio producer had been the ubiquitous Heinz Tietjen and the bounce-back director Karl Böhm (who had also, incidentally, taken over at the Dresden Opera after Fritz Busch went into exile from the Nazis in 1933). It was with Böhm that Wieland Wagner had aimed to produce a wartime Ring cycle in Vienna, but the plan could not be implemented and the house itself was bombed almost to bits in 1945. A Wieland/Böhm Ring did finally emerge, however – two decades later in Bayreuth.
Holender claimed simply to be taking a historic excursion, not sitting in judgement; but he went on to stress that after the war influential posts had been returned to those enjoying them under the Nazis and had not been offered to refugees from the Nazis. Most people saw that observation as anything but non-judgemental and reacted accordingly. One of the messages that flooded in to the opera as a result of the speech described the director as a ‘characterless pig who really ought to be put down’. Many others, happily, took a different tack. One in particular praised Holender for referring unmistakably to the ‘dark side’ of what in 1955 had been so ‘heavily symbolic’ an event, and for urging more readiness to face up to painful history. This response was signed by none other than Nike Wagner and her husband. It could hardly be more applicable to Bayreuth itself – a place of symbols if ever there was one and anything but open about its past.5
There are many things to deplore in the Wagner family saga; among them Richard and Cosima’s antisemitism (his sporadically vicious, hers implacable), the racist evangelism of Chamberlain – and the Bayreuther Blätter, Winifred’s adoration of Hitler. They make for a peculiarly nasty tale. But in sum they do not show, for all the reasons set out earlier and despite strongly framed claims to the contrary, that the Master was particularly to blame for the Holocaust (the ‘Wagner’s Hitler’ thesis). The evidence does not even support the related fable that is still more widely believed – that Wagner’s music was specially palatable to the Nazis. Many twisting roads led to the ‘Third Reich’ and one of them, well trodden but – nonetheless – only one, passed through Bayreuth.
If the clan were to be sent to trial on its long, unlovely record, a defence counsel would no doubt plead extenuating circumstances. That is, it is true, a problematic line of argument. An extenuating circumstance for evil can almost always be claimed, be it late nationhood or a lost job, be it the Versailles treaty or childhood mistreatment, be it hyperinflation or a hopeless love affair. If everyone is somehow a victim then, ergo, there is no culprit – or at most, perhaps, one. Ich bin’s nicht, Adolf Hitler ist es gewesen (I’m Not Responsible - It Was Adolf Hitler), as the title of a long-running Berlin play has it. Still, in the case of the Wagners a fair jury might well consider the defence reasoning persuasive. In their antisemitism Richard and Cosima were (admittedly influential) children of their time, and would, alas, have been so in most places in most times. Chamberlain and Winifred were two displaced Britons who sought to compensate for their early, desperate unhappiness with a specially fervent love of Vaterland – and Führer. As for Winifred’s offspring, they had been little more than toddlers when the thrilling ‘Uncle Wolf’ burst on the scene. Is it any wonder that, with one exception somewhat later, they adored it when he became the top person and helped them on their way? Besides – a question that ought to be humbling – how would one have behaved oneself in similar circumstances?
What, though, when the war is over, when the dictatorship has been crushed and a working democracy born? Are circumstances still extenuating? When Winifred made her film with Syberberg, she had had thirty years to ponder the evidence that her friend Wolf had fostered murder and banditry on a colossal scale; that among countless other crimes he had decimated – with massive active and passive help – much of the Germany he and she professed to love. When Wieland died, he had had more than twenty years to come clean on his real record during the war years – as one who had been treated by the Führer like a son and who, straining after what he regarded as his full Bayreuth birthright, had used his privileged status to the very end. Wolfgang had had almost half a century to think over the past before, in his ill-structured and evasive memoirs, he concluded that he and his brother had had ‘no reason to put on sackcloth or beat our breasts with remorse’. If ever a vital chance were missed for co
urageous reflection, this was it. It is not good enough simply to shrug off Winifred’s execrable stance (let alone to find merit in her Nibelungentreue), nor to claim that Wieland’s and Wolfgang’s post-war work in Bayreuth justified their silence about what had gone before. The erstwhile Mistress of Bayreuth pressed on as incorrigible as ever and the brothers ducked responsibility behind the formula, ‘Here it’s art that counts.’
Doesn’t that judgement amount to victimisation? Plenty of foreign Wagnerians were only too happy to flock to ‘New Bayreuth’ in 1951. Rival foreign recording companies vied with one another in the Fest spielhaus in that opening year to capture the music dramas in all their tonal splendour. Evidently none of these enthusiasts agreed with Franz Beidler that, so soon after the Nazi era, the rebirth of a festival closely associated with Hitler was morally indefensible. Why pick on Wieland and Wolfgang, then, for failing to say ‘Sorry, but now we consider our recent past we realise we should not be doing this’? Why even pick on Winifred when uncomfortable questions about responsibility and guilt deserve to be put in a far wider context? Weren’t the British among the appeasers who let Hitler’s Germany become strong in the first place? Didn’t occupied France not so much acquiesce as vigorously collaborate in the deportation of Jews to the death camps? Didn’t Swiss banks profit handsomely from looted Jewish wealth? Didn’t the Americans as well as the Russians snap up Nazi experts after the war for their rival military purposes? The list can easily be extended. Besides, when ‘New Bayreuth’ was born the Germans were already becoming much-needed allies. ‘Denazification’ was, if not exactly a dirty word, at least a highly inconvenient one.
It is, then, far from the Wagners alone who have a shameful past to face up to – but that painful truth does not let them off the hook. Bayreuth is no provincial puppet show. Its artistic standards rise and fall but for much of its 130-year existence it has been the flagship, some would say the battleship, of German culture. As President Scheel observed, it is an institution in which Germans can see themselves reflected and its errors have been those of the whole nation. For once speaking rather too diplomatically, Scheel claimed that ‘those responsible’ for Bayreuth had not noticed that ‘they were being instrumentalised for an evil policy’. He might rather have said that the Wagners were closer to Adolf Hitler than any other family in the ‘Third Reich’, that they and their festival joyfully accepted his patronage, that they did not consider carefully whether the policy for which they were being ‘instrumentalised’ was evil or not, and that they later showed next to no remorse – in Winifred’s case just the opposite. What never came was the frank admission that ‘We made a terrible mistake. We deeply regret it. We will explain as best we can how it happened, above all as a warning to those who come after us.’
The Wagner Clan Page 46