The Wagner Clan Page 28
7 Bayreuth’s new Master and Mistress. Siegfried and his English-born wife Winifred, married in 1915 when he was 46 and she 18, take one of their regular strolls through town (left).
8 Averting eruption. The ever-affable Siegfried chatting with the explosive Italian maestro Arturo Toscanini before the Festival Theatre in 1930. Soon after this picture was taken Siegfried collapsed during rehearsals and died in hospital, aged 61. He never saw his ‘dream production’ – Tannhauser with Toscanini at the helm.
9 Free at last. Siegfried’s eldest daughter Friedelind, hunted by the Nazis and interned by the British, arm-in-arm with her ‘second father’ Toscanini at Buenos Aires airport in 1941. The maestro had pulled many strings to ensure his charge could cross the Atlantic from war-torn Europe to safety.
10 Winifred’s Bayreuth team. From the bottom (clockwise), the inscrutable Heinz Tietjen (producer, conductor and eminence grise), Wilhelm Furtwangler (conductor), Paul Eberhardt (lighting) and Emil Preetorius (stage design). The photo was taken in 1936, six years after Winifred took over as festival director and three years after Hitler came to power.
11 Warrior maiden. Frida Leider, here shown as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, was one of the greatest dramatic sopranos of all time. She sang key roles in Bayreuth until 1938 when her Jewish-born husband had to flee abroad and she suffered a nervous breakdown (right).
12 Happier days. Frida Leider cuddling lion cubs at the Berlin zoo. Privately, Frida was a close friend of Friedelind Wagner who admired her artistry, humour and sheer style. It was the fate of Frida and her husband that finally turned Friedelind against the Nazis for good.
13 Hitler snapped with the Wagner daughters. Verena (left), the youngest of Siegfried and Winifred’s four children, stayed in Germany and married an SS officer. Friedelind (right) fled abroad, took U.S. citizenship and fiercely condemned the Hitler-Bayreuth connection – above all in her autobiographical Heritage of Fire.
14 Hitler with the Wagner sons. Wieland (left) as the eldest child was regarded as heir to the Bayreuth ‘throne’ and specially dispensed from war service. After his brother’s death in 1966, Wolfgang (right) ran the festival single-handed until well into the next millennium.
15 The ‘Führer’ greeting the crowd from a window of his favourite theatre in 1940. His Bayreuth visits, he told his staff during the war, were his happiest times. When they were over, he felt as he had done when the decorations were pulled down from a Christmas tree.
16 Fascist Parthenon for Bayreuth. On Hitler’s orders, the architect Rudolf Adolf Mewes designed this grandiose complex for the ‘Green Hill’, into which Wagner’s festival theatre (seen at the rear) was to be subsumed. Construction was stopped after the war began.
17 Bayreuth harmony, 1950. Wolfgang with his first wife Ellen nee Drexel, a ballet dancer he met in wartime Berlin and who bore him two children. A retiring and delicate figure, unlike most other members of the clan, Ellen shunned conflict and sought no role in running the festival. She and Wolfgang were divorced in 1976 after 33 years of marriage.
18 Pleading innocence. A typically trenchant Winifred, flanked by her lawyer Fritz Meyer, holding forth at her ‘denazification’ trial in Bayreuth in 1947. The court found her to have been a Nazi ‘activist’ (the second highest category of offender) and ruled that she be stripped of 60 per cent of her assets. On appeal, the sentence was largely quashed a year later.
19 What now? Wolfgang (left) and Wieland ponder the future outside their bomb-damaged home Wahnfried in 1948. As so often, the practical Wolfgang looks upbeat while his chronically-sceptical elder brother seems to doubt there will be much of a future worth working for.
20 Briefly happy families. Gottfried and Eva (right), Wolfgang’s two children, romping in the garden at Wahnfried with Wieland’s four (from the top of the ladder) Wolf Siegfried, Iris, Nike and Daphne. Later Wolfgang forbade his kids to play with the others, evidently feeling his brother’s brood acted like hooligans.
21 In waiting. Wolfgang’s little son Gottfried (left) and Wieland’s Wolf Siegfried (‘Wummi’), four years his elder, pose like prospective ‘masters of the house’ before Wabnfried. Both seemed set to direct the festival one day, stepping into their fathers’ shoes. But after Wieland’s death in 1966, Wolfgang long ran the show himself, keeping all other claimants at bay.
22 Smile please. Friedelind Wagner (left), on her first postwar visit to Bayreuth in 1953, mounting the steps to the festival theatre with Winifred her mother. Although the two are beaming here, relations between them were usually tense and often explosive. Above all, Friedelind came to despise Winifred’s Hitler fixation and finally fled into exile (above).
23 Perfect (Wagnerian) profiles. Friedelind had more in common with her grandfather Richard than a prominent nose and jutting chin. Musical, plucky, forceful with an often biting tongue, she might well have run the festival the ‘Master’ founded. But she ignored invitations to come back to Bayreuth from US exile immediately after the war, and when she finally did return her brothers were running the show.
24 Checked. The ‘outsider’ Tannhaüser, as vulnerable as a pawn on a chess board as he faces judgement during the (Act 2) singing contest in Wartburg castle. This scene from his 1954 production helps show how Wieland Wagner with skeletal sets, creative lighting and judicious placing of the protagonists could, time after time, capture onstage the essence of his grandfather’s music.
25 Love goddess. Anja Silja, every inch a golden Venus, looking implacably irresistible in Wieland Wagner’s 1964 Tannhauser. For Anja, then aged only 24, this was her fifth season in Bayreuth following her sensational debut there as Senta in Fliegende Hollander. She was also working with Wieland in other productions across Europe from Berlin to Naples, and the two had long since become lovers.
26 Husband and wife team. Gertrud Reissinger, Wieland’s childhood sweetheart, married him in 1941 and bore him four children. A talented dancer and choreographer with a decisive manner, she had more influence on her husband’s career than rivals cared to acknowledge.
27 High hopes – dashed. Wieland’s trenchant daughter Nike, a fierce critic of her uncle Wolfgang’s marathon rule on the ‘Green Hill’, preparing to make her bid for the festival director ship. With Elmar Weingarten (right), manager of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, she drew up a wide ranging reform plan but it failed to win the crucial backing of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation.
28 Soulmates. Wolfgang’s son Gottfried, increasingly repelled by all he gleaned about Bayreuth’s role during the Third Reich’, enjoying New York in 1978 with Lotte Lenya, widow of the German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill (left).
29 Thwarted heiress. Eva Wagner-Pasquier, Wolfgang’s daughter by his first marriage, was fomally chosen in 2001 to take over from her father as festival director. But Wolfgang simply refused to cede his place to her.
30 Festive trio. Wolfgang in buoyant mood with his second wife Gudrun (left) and their daughter Katharina, born in 1978. When the board of the Richard-Wagner-Foundation rejected Gudrun’s bid in 2001 for the festival directorship, Wolfgang decided to stick to the top job – until his ‘Kati’ was ready to take over.
31 Time papa, please. Katharina, putative heiress to the festival directorship, deep in powwow with her father Wolfgang – master on the ‘Green Hill’ (initially with his brother) for more than half a century. After hedging her public comments for years, Katharina finally admitted in 2007 that she would like to take on the festival job ‘if the conditions are right.’
Despite their ‘indignation’, the brothers evidently did not conclude that they lived under a regime that was evil to the core. On Kristallnacht Wieland was already living in Munich, the so-called Hauptstadt der Bewegung (Capital of the [Nazi] Movement), where the plunder was far worse than in Bayreuth and synagogues were indeed burned. His girlfriend Gertrud recorded that the two of them picked their way round the shattered glass on the streets, neither supporting the action nor trying to stop it. ‘One simply looked on,’ she wrote. ‘W
ieland found it bad.’13 The pair seems to have reacted just as passively a year earlier in Munich on visiting the notorious exhibition of so-called ‘degenerate art’, some 650 paintings, drawings and sculptures by avant-garde masters like Nolde, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Klee whose work the Nazis banned. If, as a budding artist himself, Wieland felt any empathy for these works despite (or because of) the official censure, there is precious little sign of it. For years afterwards his style stayed heavily traditional – at least up to his last recorded picture during the Munich era, an unfinished portrait in oil of his chief patron, the Führer. When questioned by the brothers about ‘degenerate art,’ Hitler was once again evasive. The offending works, he pointed out, had not actually been destroyed. Some had been sold abroad and Old Masters bought for German museums with the proceeds.14
Wolfgang, it is true, presents himself in his memoirs as having been anything but a fan of Nazism. He states that, unlike Wieland, he never joined the party, that he left the Hitler Youth movement and its ‘swindlers’ in dudgeon after only three months and that he repeatedly spoke his mind to nincompoop Nazi officialdom. Unlike his brother and sisters, Wolfgang says, he ‘largely refrained’ from cultivating the official connections that could have been his too, and stresses that he never accepted Hitler’s hospitality in the capital.15 That claim about Berlin seems odd since all the children are on record as having visited the Führer there both before and, Friedelind apart, during the war. Moreover all of them, not just Wolfgang, got away with insubordination to Nazis high and low precisely because they were Wagners and well known to have Hitler’s blessing. Still, when Wolfgang expresses distaste for the party in general and many of its representatives in particular there is no good reason to doubt him.
Not that Wieland’s attitude was much different. Although it is a fact that he joined the party, he signed up only belatedly – in 1938, after Hitler put him on the spot by asking whether he was already a member. Wolfgang, who was present at the start of this uneasy chat, promptly made himself scarce to avoid being faced with the same question.16 Evidently the Führer did not subsequently ask about him, or if he did he could not be bothered to follow up the matter. Wieland he regarded as the ‘heir’ – entitled to privilege, yes, but more or less behoven not to stand aside from the party indefinitely. The little brother was, at best, ‘the spare’. Wolfgang plainly suffered later from being treated as Bayreuth’s second string in talent as well as age, but in the pre-war era (not to mention during post-war denazification) his less exposed role proved largely a blessing. Free of the burden of high expectations that his brother struggled with, neither arrogant nor specially ambitious, he made friends easily at school and got on happily with his hobbies.
Neither then nor later was Wolfgang much given to critical reflection. The title of his autobiography Lebens-Akte (perhaps best translated in this case as Action Man) suggests as much, no doubt unintentionally. He surely did, though, have a fine eye for the ridiculous. When a firework display in the garden at Wahnfried went wrong, engulfing a livid Führer and festival artists in clouds of smoke, young Wolfi was tickled pink. He found it no less hilarious to have to rescue the broad-beamed ‘Hermann the Magnificent’ (i.e. Göring) from a narrow chair in which he had become hopelessly stuck.17 Such incidents offered rare but welcome relief to the strains of having Hitler around as a summer house guest for several days at a time rather than as a fleeting visitor. The Führer’s reputation as a ‘night owl’ was all too well deserved. After festival performances, he would receive fawning guests in the Wahnfried annexe and deliver himself of protracted monologues until the small hours of the morning. After most visitors had gone home and even the weary Winifred had retreated, the children (or at least some of them) were required to stay up and keep ‘Uncle Wolf’ amused. Sometimes it would be close to dawn before he too decided to trudge off to bed. Until he awoke in mid- to late morning, everyone had to go around on tiptoe, the dogs were kept indoors, and the car was rolled by hand out of the garage to the distant street. As Friedelind noted, entertaining a Führer – even one so well disposed to his hosts – was ‘not all roses and champagne’.18
Perhaps it was ‘baby Verena’ – already emerging as an attractive young lady when Hitler came to power – who suffered least from this wearying summer schedule. With her refined dress sense, slim figure and come-hither smile, Nickel was the toast of virtually all male visitors to Wahnfried, especially of Wolf and his bustling coterie. When he held forth in the annexe she was often at his side and, with a bat of her eyelids, could even get away with an occasional, semi-irreverent interjection. It was hardly a surprise when, during the war, she married a top Nazi official. Her spouse was old enough to be her father but then, after Cosima and Winifred, that was something of a family tradition. Her less comely but more talented sister, on the other hand, took a course that could not have been more different.
12
Mausi at Bay
Of Siegfried’s and Winifred’s four children, it was Friedelind who finally emerged as the one heroic rebel. Thanks largely to her independent mind, critical eye and what even her mother admitted to be her ‘enormous sense of justice’, she alone made a clean break with the ‘Third Reich’. By thus following the example of her idols like Toscanini and (another fiercely anti-fascist conductor) Erich Kleiber, Mausi incensed such noted Wahnfried visitors as Goebbels and Himmler and, it seems, rendered the Führer uncharacteristically speechless when he was told of her ‘treachery’. Even for one who was unhappy at home and felt baulked of the artistic inheritance she craved, her choice of self-exile at a time when Hitler’s power was at its height showed principle and guts. That she of all the Wagners should then – in post-war Germany – regularly have been dubbed the ‘black sheep of the family’ is a peculiarly shabby irony.
Friedelind was no saint all the same. As a child she could be a real little beast, jealous and wounding. It was she who first brought her school chum Gertrud Reissinger home to Wahnfried and hence ultimately into the arms of Wieland; but when she felt she was starting to lose her girlfriend to her brother, she stole and made public compromising photos that she vainly hoped might force the pair to split. Not much early ‘sense of justice’ there, even if the affair can be passed off as a fit of spite (albeit far from the only one) by a boisterous but at heart lonely adolescent. Nor, despite her habitual love of the forthright, is Friedelind wholly candid in her memoirs and passes over the fact that, in her late teens, she had still not fully shaken off either her racial prejudice or a certain admiration for Hitler’s Germany.
From her account in Heritage of Fire one might well conclude that Friedelind had been against the Nazis and sympathetic to Jews almost from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. A rather different picture emerges from private sources including her correspondence with Eva and Daniela – ‘the aunts’ with whom she continued to have close relations because they were her beloved father’s sisters and hostile to Winifred. The letters show that Friedelind was still going out of her way to defend the ‘new Germany’ in 1937 during one of her lengthy stays in England and that she was making snide remarks about Jews and blacks even in early 1938.1 Memoirs are anyway not the place to look for relentless self-criticism, but in this case Friedelind had special cause for caution. She wrote her book in English while in wartime exile, starting it in Britain and finishing it in America where it was first published. In neither country would such unsavoury revelations about her fairly recent history have gone down at all well. As it was, the revelations she did make about her family, Bayreuth and the Nazis were anything but welcome in her home country – although most people there long knew of them only from press reports and hearsay. A German translation, not an original German text written by the authoress, called Nacht über Bayreuth (Night over Bayreuth) was published in Switzerland as early as 1945; but this was very hard to come by for decades in Germany itself and only found a publisher there well after Friedelind’s death in 1991.
For all her childi
sh nastiness and sins of omission, the fact remains that Friedelind finally did see through ‘Uncle Wolf’s’ awful Reich and drew the consequences, unlike her siblings, let alone her appalled mother. Ironically Winifred was partly responsible for her daughter’s slow but sure conversion. By shunting her off to boarding schools and letting her spend ever longer spells abroad, she helped Mausi gradually win a perspective on Wahnfried and the Nazis that was denied the rest of the family. Arguably the process began as early as 1930 when Friedelind, then barely twelve, was assigned to a school at Brighouse in Yorkshire. For Mausi it was a sad time because first Cosima and then Siegfried died within months of one another, but she liked the school itself – certainly far more than the ones in Brandenburg and Berlin to which she was subsequently propelled. A few years later, after more bitter rows with Winifred, she was back in England again – this time at a school near Arundel in Sussex, not far, in fact, from the birthplaces both of her mother and of her late uncle Chamberlain. Not that Mausi felt an urge to make a pilgrimage to either spot or, indeed, to spend much time mulling over her books. Repeatedly, she skived off to London for meetings with Frida Leider who was singing Wagner at Covent Garden and for a happy reunion with her ‘other father’ Toscanini whom she had not seen for years.
Thanks partly to these contacts Friedelind gained new friends who henceforth stuck by her as she flitted in and out of London, increasingly at odds with her homeland and usually all but out of cash. One of the closest of them was Isabella Wallich, a brilliant young pianist and niece of Fred Gaisberg, the near-legendary gramophone pioneer who had already recorded extensively at Bayreuth. Indeed, it was ‘Uncle Fred’ who had signed up Siegfried Wagner to record the Siegfried Idyll in London in 1927. Small wonder the two young ladies hit it off – despite a row at their very first meeting when the often bossy and possessive Mausi, invited by Toscanini to one of his rehearsals, questioned Isabella’s right to be there too. The incident shows well enough how Friedelind could be her own worst foe, but in this case her sharp tongue did not abort the birth of a lifelong friendship.2 Decades later when Isabella herself became a record producer with her own company, she and Mausi were to collaborate in a bold but fraught venture that brought some of Siegfried’s works (among other rarities) to disc.