The Wagner Clan
THE Wagner CLAN
THE Wagner CLAN
The Saga of Germany’s Most
Illustrious and Infamous Family
Jonathan
Carr
Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Carr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
First published in England in 2007 by Faber and Faber Limited.
Printed in the United States of America
Printed simultaneously in Canada
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4847-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
To David,
my brother,
in proud memory
Contents
List of Plates
Preface
Family Tree
1 A Sublime but Glaucous Sea
2 Revolution and Reverse
3 Ugly Duckling and Swan King
4 The Fortress on the Hill
5 The Plastic Demon
6 The Spin Doctor
7 Odd Man Out
8 Wolf at the Door
9 Three Funerals and a New Broom
10 All the Reich’s a Stage
11 Dissonant Quartet
12 Mausi at Bay
13 War – at Home and Abroad
14 New Bayreuth?
15 The Road Not Taken
16 Sins of the Fathers
17 End of Empire?
18 Time Present and Time Past
19 Time Future?
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Plates
1 Cosima and Richard Wagner
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
2 Siegfried with his sisters
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
3 Richard Wagner’s children with Hans Richter
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
4 Henry Thode, Karl Muck and Siegfried in buoyant mood
5 Franz Wilhelm Beidler at his desk in Switzerland
Reproduced by kind permission of Dagny Beidler, Winterthur
6 Houston Stewart Chamberlain
7 Siegfried and Winifred strolling in Bayreuth
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
8 Siegfried and Toscanini before the Festival Theatre
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
9 Friedelind Wagner with Toscanini at Buenos Aires airport
© Archive Neill Thornborrow
10 Winifred with her Bayreuth team in 1936
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
11 Frida Leider as Brünnhilde
© Frida-Leider-Gesellschaft, Berlin
12 Leider with lions
© Frida-Leider-Gesellschaft, Berlin
13 Hitler with Verena and Friedelind
© Ullstein Bild, Berlin, SV-Bilderdienst
14 Hitler with Wieland and Wolfgang
© Ullstein Bild, Berlin, SV-Bilderdienst
15 Hitler greeting the crowd at the Festival Theatre
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
16 The Mewes development plan for the ‘Green Hill’
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
17 Wolfgang Wagner with his first wife Ellen
© National Archives of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation, Bayreuth
18 Winifred with her lawyer at her ‘denazification’ trial
© Revue, Hamburg
19 Wolfgang and Wieland before shattered Wahnfried
© Leo Schneiderhahl
20 Wolfgang’s and Wieland’s children at play
© Leo Schneiderhahl
21 Gottfried and his cousin Wolf Siegfried before Wahnfried’s main entrance
Courtesy of Wolf Siegfried Wagner
22 Friedelind Wagner visits the festival in 1953 with her mother
Winifred
23 Friedelind and the ‘Master’ in profile
Courtesy of Wolf Siegfried Wagner
24 Wieland’s Tannhäuser. The Bayreuth 1954 production, Act 2
© Bildarchive-Bayreuther Festspiele
25 Anja Silja as Venus in Tannhäuser, Bayreuth 1964
© Foto Lauterwasser, Überlingen
26 Gertrud Wagner née Reissinger at work in the festival theatre with her husband Wieland
© Foto Lauterwasser, Überlingen
27 Nike Wagner and Elmar Weingarten seeking a festival takeover in
Bayreuth © Nordbayerischer Kurier
28 Gottfried Wagner and Lotte Lenya in New York, 1978
© Gottfried Wagner private collection
29 Eva Wagner-Pasquier
© DPA Picture-Alliance
30 Wolfgang Wagner with his second wife Gudrun and their daughter
Katharina
© dpa Picture-Alliance
31 Wolfgang Wagner and daughter Katharina mull over the future
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to rectify any omissions or errors brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.
Preface
It is often said that more books have been written about Richard Wagner, probably the most adored and detested creative artist in history, than about anyone else bar Jesus Christ and Napoleon. That claim is hard to prove; but it is true that the literature by and about the so-called ‘Master of Bayreuth’ – composer and dramatist, essayist and architect, racist and revolutionary – is bewilderingly vast and breathtakingly contradictory. Less, but still much, has been written about Cosima, Liszt’s illegitimate daughter by a French countess, who left her pianist-conductor husband Hans von Bülow for Wagner, bore him three children and outlived him by forty-seven years. Yet what of the clan that Richard and Cosima founded? For well over a century – two world wars, Nazi dictatorship and foreign occupation notwithstanding – the Wagners have run the Bayreuth festival, played host to many of the greatest and ghastliest figures in the arts and politics and battled one another like the warriors in the music dramas they stage. For better or worse, they are Germany’s most famous family. Yet next to no serious attempts have been made to tell their story.
Even for those with little interest in history and still less in marathon music drama, the Wagner saga is absorbing in its own right. The greed and jealousy, plotting and scrapping in and around the ill-named family seat Wahnfried – which roughly translates as ‘Peace from Delusion’ – more than match the most lurid episodes of Dallas or Dynasty. Nike Wagner, Richard’s sharp-tongued great-granddaughter, who strongly resembles Cosima (in looks if hardly in character), refers to a ‘diffusely expanding family hydra, a selfish, pretentious mass with prominent noses and thrusting chins … in which fathers castrate sons and mothers smother them with love … in which men are feminine and women masculine and in which a great-grandchild nibbles on the liver of another great-grandchild’.1 To be strictly accurate, she should have added that at least some Wagners have been bless
ed with a sense of justice and an ironic humour uncharacteristic of the rest of the tribe. Beyond that human drama, though, the Wagner tale is a matchless mirror of Germany’s convulsive rise, fearful fall and resurrection over nearly two hundred years.
Richard Wagner himself belonged to what now seem very distant times; born in Leipzig in 1813 when Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops were at the gates, and dying in Venice in 1883 – twelve years after Germany achieved the unity he had yearned and fought for. His son Siegfried, on the other hand, forms a link to an era almost too close for comfort. Although he died in 1930, three years before the Nazis founded their so-called ‘Third Reich’, he lived long enough to see his family, especially his wife Winifred, become deeply involved with Adolf Hitler. Of Siegfried’s four children one daughter, Friedelind, despised the Nazis and fled to America, while the other, Verena, stayed at home and married a senior SS officer. After the war the two sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, were able largely to shrug off the family’s long liaison with ‘Uncle Wolf’ (i.e. Hitler), and in 1951 they restarted the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, the little town where their grandfather had started the whole show nearly eight decades before. Verena and Wolfgang have survived into the new millennium and the latter, at the time of writing (2006), continues to direct the festival despite sporadic bids to dislodge him.
Every summer, the celebratory start of the new Bayreuth season is one of Germany’s top social occasions – less dazzling than Ascot, more earnest than Glyndebourne, but with elements about it of both. At the Festspielhaus (festival theatre) set on a hilltop on the outskirts of town, Wolfgang, together with his wife and daughter, receive the visiting notables, like royals in residence, as crowds gape and cameras flash. Back in the 1930s Winifred stood on the selfsame spot amid a hysterically cheering throng to greet Hitler and his pack. When the very first festival was held, in 1876, it was the Master himself who received guests ranging from the Kaiser and the King of Bavaria to Nietzsche, Liszt and Bruckner – not to mention a swarm of monied grandees from whom Wagner hoped, largely in vain, to extract more funds for his deeply indebted enterprise. Audiences and artists come and go; a Kaiser gives way to a Führer who is followed by a string of (democratically elected) federal presidents; but the programme stays relentlessly the same – Wagner’s works (albeit not all of them), performed in the theatre that Wagner built and that is still run, although no longer owned, by a Wagner. Anyone looking for evidence of long-term continuity in Germany, no easy search, will surely find it in this unassuming corner of northern Bavaria.
In view of their role and history, it seems obvious to call the Wagners ‘German through and through’, or simply typisch Deutsch. What, though, do those words that trip so easily off the tongue really imply? Something specially good, or specially bad, or specially baffling – or all together, perhaps? Thanks to Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Schopenhauer – the list can be extended almost indefinitely – Germany has long been thought of as a land of particularly profound Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers). Thanks to composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and – of course – Wagner, music in all its expressive power and indefinable substance has been called ‘the most German of the arts’. How odd, therefore, that these ‘rulers in the airy kingdom of dreams’, as Heine defined his countrymen, only half ironically, should have been at the same time so industrious, well organised, worthy, even – yes – plodding. And on the face of it, how unfathomable that this same people, lusting for self-assertion and Lebensraum (living space), should have unleashed so much slaughter and misery on its neighbours – and on itself.
No one was more baffled by his compatriots than Wagner himself. In an essay called ‘What is German?’ he set out to get to the bottom of the matter; he might, one feels, have simply answered his own question by writing ‘Me – in all my explosive genius and self-contradiction’. But after a long discourse on art and politics, laced with some of his sadly familiar swipes at Jews, the Master instead concluded that he was stumped. Others, he opined, should look further into the question. Many indeed have done so, but more than a century on the answer remains uncommonly elusive. With respect to the Wagners, it needs noting at the outset that the fiercest German nationalists among them – Houston Stewart Chamberlain (husband of the Master’s daughter, Eva), as well as Cosima and Winifred – all married into the family and were not German-born. They were or became, as the trite phrase goes, ‘more German than the Germans’. As for other members of the clan it is striking how many of them, including Richard himself, often felt most comfortable and even safest outside the borders of their strenuous Vaterland. No doubt there was something typisch Deutsch about that. Those looking for evidence of German national character in the Wagner saga will surely find it in abundance, but they are also in for some surprises.
Family Tree
1
A Sublime but Glaucous Sea
Of all the buildings in which Richard Wagner lived during his peripatetic career, Tribschen near Lucerne in Switzerland was easily the loveliest. The three-storey villa with its rows of green-shuttered windows stood, and still stands, high on a wooded peninsula with dazzling views across the Vierwaldstätter Lake to distant Alpine peaks. It was more elegant than Wahnfried, the mausoleum-like residence Wagner later planned and built in Bayreuth, more light and airy than the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal in Venice, where he died. Summer was much the best time. The rooms filled with the sweet scent of flowers and cut grass, the family would often picnic on the meadow and, when his work had gone well or (more often) when he just wanted to show off, Wagner did headstands and climbed trees. The elder children played ‘brigands’ for hours in the shrubbery or cooed over the latest addition to the family, Siegfried Helferich Richard Wagner, affectionately known as Fidi.
Trippers were the main pest, sailing across the lake armed with telescopes in the hope of spying Tribschen’s notorious inhabitants. For Wagner was a former left-wing revolutionary who now seemed to be changing the face of music with the backing of unlikely allies, notably King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was widely regarded as mad. His mistress, Francesca Gaetana Cosima von Bülow, was an illegitimate daughter of Marie d’Agoult, a French countess, and Franz Liszt, whose devilish virtuosity as pianist and lover had long been the talk of Europe. To general astonishment, Liszt had meanwhile become an Abbé after curbing his wilder ways and taking minor Catholic orders, while the countess, despite (or because of) her pedigree, had turned into a writer with strong republican sympathies. Siegfried, born in the early morning of 6 June 1869, was Richard’s and Cosima’s third child, but they had yet to marry. Politics, art, nobility, sex – no wonder voyeurs by the boatload set daily course for Tribschen, or as close to it as they could get.
At least in the circumstances of his birth, Siegfried lived up to his extraordinary parents. Just as he uttered his first cry, according to an entry in Cosima’s voluminous diary, early rays of dawn sunlight flickered out from behind the mountains and bathed the villa’s rooms in orange fire. Caught in this blaze and reflecting it, Cosima’s portrait set in a gold-framed jewel case was ‘transfigured in celestial splendour’.1 Oddly enough it was Richard himself, not Cosima, who wrote that particular entry and the scene described might well have been taken from one of his own music dramas. It might also have appeared in one of the more poetic works of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, say his Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra); and by an extraordinary chance Nietzsche, who had enjoyed a ‘wondrous’ first meeting with Wagner in Leipzig a year earlier, was a house guest at Tribschen that night. Disappointingly, it seems that he slept through the whole thing, but the mere fact of his presence in that very place at that very time is enough to set the imagination racing. Wasn’t the Siegfried of Wagner’s massive Ring cycle the prototype blonde, fearless, Teutonic hero, prone to slay dragons and plunge unharmed through fire? And didn’t Nietzsche with his concepts of the ‘superman’ and the ‘will to power’ help blaze a trail for the Nazis? How easy, therefore, to see al
l this not so much as a striking coincidence as an omen.
Easy but wrong. It is hard to imagine anyone less like a hero of the Ring or a Nietzschean superman than the gentle, affable, bisexual Siegfried who was born at Tribschen that night. Because Wagner junior lacked his father’s genius, as well as his ruthless egocentricity, he remains far less well known than his life and talent justify. Although busy enough as boss of the Bayreuth festival, he also ran a parallel career as producer and conductor, besides composing nearly a score of operas – works sneered at with depressing regularity, especially by people who have never heard them. Not that the ignorant can be much blamed. The Wagner family itself, who stood guard over Siegfried’s scores after his early death, for the most part did precious little to propagate them in the wake of the Second World War. Even leaving aside the compositions, much remains to be uncovered about Siegfried’s personal and professional life. A couple of biographies of him have appeared in German, but his own memoirs are thin, his letters in part still not disclosed, his true feelings often masked by irony and bonhomie.
The problem with getting a clear view of Siegfried’s parents is rather the opposite. The near-limitless sea of material by and about the couple is one in which even expert navigators can lose their bearings for good. Cosima’s diary alone, belatedly published in full in 1976, runs to nearly a million words. She was also a compulsive correspondent, albeit no match for Richard, who fired off so many letters, more than ten thousand at the last count, that experts are still toiling to collect and classify them all. Overall, Wagner’s writings on just about everything under the sun (and including the texts of his music dramas) fill sixteen fat tomes. Nor is it just a matter of sheer quantity. Cosima’s diary reveals much to fascinate and infuriate, but it is wrong to take it, as many tend to do, as a verbatim record. Wagner’s near-thousand-page autobiography Mein Leben (My Life) is in part a compulsive read, but it is about as frank and reliable as you would expect, given that the text was written for a rich patron, King Ludwig, and dictated to Cosima. His essays, tracts and stories can be thought-provoking like Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution), practical like Über das Dirigieren (On Conducting) – even funny like Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven (A Pilgrimage to Beethoven). They are usually trenchant, sometimes violent. But often it seems that Wagner takes up his pen not because he knows at the outset what he wants to say but because he wants to find out what he really thinks. To put it mildly, he does not always succeed. In any case he changed some of his key views over the years, in part radically. There is nothing odd about that of course, but he rarely acknowledged the fact publicly and probably did not always admit it to himself.