The Wagner Clan Read online

  Ambivalent though his brand of antisemitism was, Wagner served as a model for Hitler all the same. What kind of model? The answer emerges pretty clearly when Hitler makes that single reference to the Master by name in Mein Kampf. At this point in his wearyingly prolix tale, Hitler is not directly discussing antisemitism or music or drama but what he calls ‘marathon runners of history’ – great and solitary individuals who work for the future, doomed to be largely misjudged in their own day but ready ‘to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end’. As examples, Hitler mentions just three names – Luther, Frederick the Great and Wagner – but he obviously reckons the list could be extended to include himself. Of this trio, Wagner was easily the closest to Hitler historically, and the fate of many of Wagner’s stage heroes came near to matching that of the ‘marathon runners’: Rienzi the tribune who went down in flames, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser the misunderstood ‘outsiders’ – even wise old Sachs, the widower who wins public acclaim but sentences himself to continued solitude by renouncing Eva and helping her beloved knight win the Master’s prize. Isn’t this how Hitler saw himself: lonely, struggling, heroic? Grotesque though it may seem, Wagner’s life and works were almost certainly mirrors in which the Führer thought he saw himself reflected – at least in broad and, to him, imposing outline.24

  No wonder Hitler was moved when he visited Wahnfried for the first time on that autumn morning in 1923 and stood before the Master’s grave. All the more so since he suddenly found himself at the centre of what was apparently a happy, close-knit family – for an often-penniless drifter, war-scarred veteran and great hater a rare experience. If Siegfried seemed to Hitler a bit of a softie, he was nonetheless the Master’s son and he was striving to get the festival back on its feet again. Besides, there were the lively children, the grand old granny upstairs, the ailing ‘sage’ Chamberlain round the corner and, above all, the adoring Winifred. Nearly two decades later, reminiscing at his Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters in East Prussia, Hitler spoke emotionally of that first day and of how the family had stood by him when he was at his lowest ebb. ‘I love these people and Wahnfried!’ he confessed, adding he saw it as a special stroke of good fortune that, by saving the festival from financial collapse when he came to power in 1933, he had been able to make good the Wagners’ early support for him. His regular Bayreuth visits, he said, were always his happiest times and when they came to an end he felt as he did when the decorations were pulled down from a Christmas tree.25

  After Siegfried’s death, and despite his will, there was much speculation that Hitler and Winifred would marry. Their long-standing liaison was widely known, even down to reports (naturally embellished) about ‘Wolf’s’ lightning nocturnal visits. By 1932, at the latest, when the Nazi leader ostentatiously sent a huge bouquet of flowers to Wahnfried, the local press had concluded that an engagement was in the offing. But the flowers were, in fact, to mark the confirmation of Wieland and Friedelind as full church members, and an engagement never came. ‘Mei Mudder mecht scho, aber der Onkel Wolf mecht halt net,’ Friedelind is reported to have said. The ineffable flavour of her patois is lost in translation but the meaning is clear enough: ‘My Mother wants to all right, but Uncle Wolf simply does not.’26 That is probably correct. Hitler left it very late to marry, whether because he felt the need to ‘save himself for the German people’ or for more intimate reasons – or a mixture of both. Notoriously, it was 29 April 1945 before he tied the knot in his Berlin bunker with his long-time companion and presumed mistress, Eva Braun. The next day the newlyweds took their lives.

  Whether despite or because of the absence of marriage bonds, ‘Winnie’ and ‘Wolf’ stayed in constant and friendly contact for years, although the link between them did loosen during the war. He wrote to her regularly, not least when he was down in the dumps or even deeply depressed (as he evidently was after the mysterious gunshot death of his pet niece ‘Geli’ in his Munich flat in 1931). Winifred did her best to cheer him up and bubbled like a schoolgirl at every sign of affection. ‘I’m over the moon with delight and thanks,’ she confessed after he sent her a portrait of himself. The picture was, she claimed, ‘a masterpiece of accuracy and ability’ that ‘now graces my little house with the blessing of your constant presence. Endless thanks to you, spender of such nameless joy! In faithful friendship, Your Winnie.’ 27

  On the practical side, of course, Winifred as festival director had far more to thank her ‘Wolf’ for. For one thing, he swept away Bayreuth’s money troubles as no benefactor, not even King Ludwig, had quite managed to do before. Admittedly much of the cash did not come direct from him or even, in every case, from other Nazi bodies simply bowing to the Führer’s obvious wish. At the start Goebbels was particularly active in his support for Bayreuth, perhaps thinking he could buy his way into decisive influence there. In 1934 alone, his propaganda ministry bought up more than 11,000 tickets for 364,000 marks (around a third of the whole Bayreuth budget). The same year the Reichsrundfunk (state radio service) spent 95,000 marks for festival broadcasting rights and continued to pay weighty (albeit lesser) sums annually thereafter. But overall, in the pre-war years up to and including 1939, Hitler’s Reichskanzlerei (chancellery) was the biggest backer, putting up a total of more than half a million marks for Bayreuth tickets and new productions. Incongruously, from a financial standpoint, things became still simpler for the festival during the war years (1940–4). On Hitler’s orders a Nazi leisure organisation bought up all the tickets and paid nearly all the bills, doling out on average more than a million marks annually.28

  Besides flourishing under this rain of cash, Winifred also knew that she could call on Hitler when she felt her position as festival director was under threat – from jealous local Nazi functionaries, for instance, or from the ever-acquisitive Goebbels. Thanks to Hitler’s protection, she was often able to take on or retain artists she badly wanted but who would almost certainly have been lost to her under a strict interpretation of the Reich’s odious political/racial rules. One case in point was the Heldentenor Max Lorenz, a practising bisexual with a Jewish wife, whom Winifred engaged year after year for key roles including Siegfried, Tristan, Parsifal and Walther von Stolzing. Another example was Franz von Hoesslin, a conductor with Jewish links by descent and marriage, who was shunned by other German opera houses during the Nazi era but who continued to appear regularly at Bayreuth. Not that Winifred always had to appeal direct to her ‘Wolf’ for help; the mere knowledge of her link to the Führer was frequently enough to keep otherwise obstreporous Nazi bureaucrats at bay.

  To that extent Bayreuth from 1933 was a ‘Hitler festival’ rather than a ‘Nazi festival.’ That does not mean it was in some way morally ‘better’, as some over-zealous post-war apologists have sought to imply. Nor does it mean that the Führer always got his way when it came to choices on performers and stagecraft. He surely played a key role in the engagement of Roller for Parsifal and in the return of Furtwängler to Bayreuth in 1936, and he concocted a plan, only partly realised before war began, for a giant new festival complex in which the existing theatre would have been subsumed. But for the most part Winifred managed deftly to field his wishes while effectively defending her own, especially that the Heinz Tietjen/Emil Preetorius duo be given something close to carte blanche. Not that her reasons for so arguing were purely professional ones. By 1933 at the latest Winifred had become emotionally dependent on her ‘Heinz’ – more so, in fact, than she was on the still-desirable but seemingly unattainable ‘Wolf’. For the children, now in their teens, Hitler remained the largely benevolent uncle but Tietjen had emerged as a substitute father. It was a role that could and did cause untold resentment.

  11

  Dissonant Quartet

  Shortly before they first met him in 1931, the Wagner youngsters pored over press photos of Heinz Tietjen and pronounced his face to be like that of an orang-utan. This unflattering but not wholly inaccurate comparison rather vexed the festival’s new arti
stic director designate when he got to hear about it, as he did about most things, but it should hardly have surprised him. Almost from the time they could trot, Wieland and Wolfgang, Friedelind and Verena had been notorious for sheer cheek and much mischief. Some visitors to Wahnfried in the 1920s, Hitler and Goebbels firmly included, found the Master’s grandchildren diverting, even adorable; others snarled more often than they smirked at the little terrors and their doings. A few of the local old folk could still ruefully recall the near-perfect manners of the five offspring the Master and the Hohe Frau had brought to town decades before. What a contrast, they groaned, to the loud and dissonant quartet produced by the all-too-amiable Siegfried and his foreign-born wife. That such behaviour could be allowed even at the Wagner shrine was just one more sign that the Fatherland was going to the dogs.

  The kids did tend to go a bit far – wrestling on the Master’s grave, turning the carefully tended front lawn into a muddy football pitch, scaring guests they disliked with a makeshift ‘ghost’dangled into the entrance hall from the gallery above. Pudgy Friedelind, inappropriately nicknamed ‘Maus’ or ‘Mausi’, was easily the noisiest child, with the quickest and often most wounding repartee. ‘My elder sister ruled the roost and held the floor,’ Wolfgang bitterly (enviously?) recalled years later. ‘As I see it, Friedelind’s contrary, rebellious attitude was a way of life in itself.’1 Winifred thought much the same. Whenever she discovered evidence of some domestic misdeed, she tended to assume that Friedelind was the culprit and reacted with a noise level even her daughter found hard to match. Her wrathful cry of ‘Mausi’ could be heard, it was said, far into the Hofgarten behind Wahnfried’s back gate.

  Put down most of these ‘sins’, though, to high spirits and the presence of extraordinary temptation. Above all there was the festival theatre, Bayreuth’s Disneyland, to scamper through; not during the performances themselves of course, when the four boringly had to try harder to behave, but in those thrilling months of preparation when carpenters banged, painters splashed and singers strutted about in fancy dress, cooing, bellowing and – with luck – dispensing chocolates to hopeful urchins. There was a real magic dragon to be wary of and a wonky ‘wave machine’, built for the undulating Rhinemaidens in the Ring, to mount for a ride – at least until Papa or giddiness put a stop to the fun. Back home, dressed up as four Nibel-jungen in miniature Ring-robes and winged helmets designed by Aunt Lulu (Daniela), they would chase one another squealing through the garden, to the mingled delight and vexation of Wagnerians come to view the Master’s last resting place. For a few coins, the gang would draw visitors from gate to grave in a handcart. Heinrich Himmler was one of those who took the trip. Years later he still enthused about it.

  Siegfried’s death brought a drastic change, especially for Friedelind. She had always thought of herself as her father’s favourite and that was probably true. He loved her wit, happily put up with her pranks and dried her tears when she came running after yet another brush with Winifred. When he was away on conducting trips she felt lost and vulnerable; when he was composing in his ‘bachelor cottage’ she would crawl under a piano there and watch him for hours. On one of their long walks together she even offered innocently to marry him, evidently seeing herself as a more than acceptable substitute for her mother. He graciously explained to the crestfallen Maus why he could not take up the offer, but it seems he did tell her several times that one day it would be up to her to carry on his festival work.2

  Siegfried probably did not believe that his eldest daughter ever could or should run things alone; his will, after all, treated the four children as equal heirs after Winifred. But spurred by her father’s well-meant words, Friedelind for many years (perhaps, in her heart, always) saw herself as the ‘crown princess’ of Bayreuth. She slaved to improve her pianism, pored over scores and stage models of the music dramas and, sooner than her siblings, began to treat the festival theatre more as training ground than playground – often to the mild unease of the artists she shadowed, drinking in their every word and gesture. The great soprano Frida Leider recalled that while resting in her dressing room between acts of Parsifal ‘a little girl with long blonde plaits appeared, sat down opposite me, folded her hands and stared questioningly at me without saying a word. We began to make conversation and finally got on very well … Eventually I had to kindly but firmly send her away as she showed no signs of leaving.’3 The year was 1928; Friedelind was aged ten, Frida had just turned forty and was one of the greatest singers of her time or, indeed, of any time – especially in Wagner. As one connoisseur ideally put it, she had a tone of ‘perfect character, existing at that rarely achieved point where the heroic has not become inhuman, and where the human does not undermine tragic dignity’.4 From that unlikely start in the Bayreuth dressing room and despite the age difference, a close friendship was to emerge – and to deepen in the late 1930s when both women had special cause to despise and fear the Nazis.

  Whatever Siegfried’s view of the festival’s future, Friedelind’s youthful dream of winning the Bayreuth throne one fine day was not inherently absurd. Cosima had shown that a woman could well take charge, whatever jealous males might mutter, and anyway neither of Friedelind’s brothers seemed to be raring for the job. Quick-witted but moody Wieland was initially far keener on painting and drawing than on music, just as his father had been until well into his teens. There were, it is true, early claims – repeated with embellishment abroad – that he was developing into a ‘young Liszt’; but these were based on no more solid evidence than the press report of a school concert at which the supposed Wunderkind had picked out a carol on the piano. The only notable feature Wieland had inherited from Liszt were his hammer-toes; it was Friedelind who got the long and sensitive fingers. As for Wolfgang, easy-going and practical, he felt drawn to the festival more as artisan than as artist or musician. Intrigued by all the trappings of stagecraft, he set up a workshop of his own in the cellar at home where (shades of the Rheingold Nibelungs) he battered and sawed away for hours on end. No fool when it came to money matters, indeed imbued with a farmer’s canniness and sense of thrift, ‘Wolfi’ also raised chickens and sold the eggs to Winifred at the going market price. His pragmatism and business nous paid off handsomely much later when he became festival director, but as a boy he seems never to have dreamed that he would one day run the show. If anyone had first refusal, he believed, it was the so-far hesitant Wieland. In those days at least, Wolfgang looked up to his elder brother with fondness and some awe. Finally there was bonny little ‘Nickel’ (Verena), the pet of the family. She was well able to pout and wheedle to get her own way, useful attributes both, but no one saw her as a future boss on the Green Hill.

  When Siegfried died after those hugely taxing Tannhäuser rehearsals in 1930, Friedelind lost not just her adored father but, as she believed, her greatest ally. Only Toscanini, that demon of a maestro with a soft heart, came anywhere near taking Siegfried’s place in her affections. He went out of his way to comfort the children in that sad summer and later gave Mausi decisive help when she was down and almost out – hence the dedication of her 1945 book Heritage of Fire ‘To my two fathers, Siegfried Wagner and Arturo Toscanini’. The omnipresent Tietjen she saw as no kind of an emotional substitute, and in due course she painfully concluded that he would not help her to the top at the festival either. He did, indeed, humour her for a while, writing her flowery letters and letting her give a hand at rehearsals, but that seemed as far as he was ready to go.

  Winifred, at least, made plain whom she thought must head the festival one day and it was certainly not the obstreperous Maus. Friedelind was exiled to an isolated boarding school in the wilds of Brandenburg to ‘learn discipline’, and sent to clinics to diet because she was no longer just plump but downright fat. None of that worked, of course. For all her own unhappiness as an orphan, Winifred seems not to have realised that her daughter’s behaviour and weight problems were the outward signs of deep inner loneliness and disappointment.
Or if she did realise it, she simply felt at her wit’s end and decided to get Mausi out of the house for as long as possible, come what may. Despite Friedelind’s obvious fixation on the festival and her already thorough knowledge of the music dramas, Winifred saw Wieland as the clear heir apparent – however reluctant he might currently seem to be and whatever Siegfried’s will might say. She even appealed to her old friend Wolf to allow the will to be changed specifically to give precedence to the eldest son. Hitler too favoured Wieland, giving the youth a special (and specially remunerative) concession to take official photos of top Nazis and presenting him with a Mercedes, no less, when he got his driving licence in 1935 at the age of eighteen. But the Führer was not prepared – even for Winnie – to permit any tinkering with the last will and testament of the Master’s son, however critical he might feel of its contents.

  Unlike Friedelind, Wieland seemed not to suffer much, if at all, from Siegfried’s death. According to a much-repeated family tale, he had once remarked years earlier that he wished the thrilling ‘Uncle Wolf’ were his real father and Siegfried his (usually absent) uncle.5 Even if the boy did not say exactly that, he and his father were plainly never close. Despite their common passion for visual art, they were of almost opposite temperaments; the sociable Siegfried with his humour, patience and immaculate manners; his stand-offish first-born more often sulking than smiling, and liable (throughout his life) to fly into sudden rages that just as suddenly blew over. Over the years, one photo after another shows a grumpy-looking Wieland staring at, or often past, the camera as though inwardly growling ‘Who the hell are you?’ or ‘What am I doing here?’ At school the girls were liable to scatter at his approach because he would kick a football at them and mutter insults – which treatment, mark you, did not stop quite a lot of the victims finding their tormentor weirdly attractive. Good-natured Wolfgang they could treat as a real chum; Wieland spelled excitement, danger.