The Wagner Clan Page 33
One explanation does not wholly exclude the other. Possibly Wieland and Lafferentz sought in the first place to preserve part of the ‘family silver’ (as Wolfgang and Winifred were also doing before American tanks rolled into town) knowing that, in dire extremity, they would have something precious to sell. Whether the proceeds from such a sale would then have percolated through to the whole family is an open question. Plainly, though, the decision to remove manuscripts from Bayreuth was not taken on the spur of the moment. Well before the town was badly bombed the Master’s score of Tristan und Isolde and his letters to Liszt, among other things, were taken to the Nussdorf chalet – presumably either for eventual transfer back to Wahnfried in ‘better times’ or for removal abroad. Valuable though this cache of Wagneriana surely was, a still more precious one remained – so near and yet so far – locked up in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. By a roundabout route, Hitler had come into possession of most of those manuscripts (including the autograph full scores of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi) that the Master had presented decades before to King Ludwig in return for ‘services rendered’. Understandably ‘Uncle Wolf’ was reluctant to give up this treasure trove, valued just before the war at 800,000 Reichsmarks, even to the Wagner family. Wieland and Lafferentz nonetheless made two joint bids to get him to change his mind.
On the first occasion the two of them – accompanied by their wives – got to see the Führer face to face. Invited to ‘lunch’ in early December 1944 at the Berlin Chancellery, the quartet finally sat down at table with Hitler some time after midnight. It can hardly have been a jolly occasion. Although Wieland later told his mother that their host was, if anything, friendlier than ever, Gertrud for one felt shocked by the grey-faced figure who, she said, talked absent-mindedly, ate nothing and patted his German Shepherd dog with a twitching hand.20 It seems that Wieland also had a private meeting with Hitler on the sidelines of this grotesque, nocturnal feast, but on neither occasion was a promise extracted to hand over the desired documents. Evidently the Führer felt the treasures could not be safer than with him. Despite his physical condition, much worsened since the bid to assassinate him in July, he still believed in victory and that the Bayreuth festival would go ahead the following summer. Wieland even took away the impression that Hitler expected him, with Wolfgang’s help, to take charge in 1945 in place of Winifred and Tietjen. At least, that is what he claimed to his mother in a letter soon afterwards in which he yet again demanded the festival directorship.21
Did the ‘heir’ really believe there was still a chance Nazi Germany might emerge on top, allowing him to take up the Bayreuth job he craved? That hardly seems to square with his efforts to prize those manuscripts out of the Führer’s increasingly shaky hands. Besides, there is evidence that around the same time he considered asking Hitler for free passage abroad – albeit no sign that he actually popped the question. The truth probably is that, like thousands if not millions of others, Wieland was desperately torn. A letter he wrote to Overhoff in September 1944, just before he began work at the Aussenstelle, indicates as much. In an admission dangerous, perhaps, even for him had the Gestapo intercepted it, Wieland wondered whether life would again be worth living ‘even if we are not swept away in the general chaos’. On the other hand, he claimed there was no reason ‘yet’ to give up all for lost and to draw conclusions that could ‘only be interpreted as signs of individual weakness’. There was still hope, he added in a pathos-laden reference to Parsifal, ‘that the Grail will glow again’.22 In the following months, the life-and-death events in the Reich recalled the Ring and especially Götterdämmerung rather than Parsifal. Not that even the Wagners had much time to ponder the difference. In April 1945 in particular, they were barely able to recover from one blow before the next one fell. On the fifth of the month Wahnfried was badly damaged in the first of a series of Allied bombing strikes that, all in all, destroyed more than a third of Bayreuth. Almost miraculously, the whole family escaped uninjured. Verena and Gertrud, in the meantime with three small children between them and both again pregnant, had been packed off to the relative safety of the Nussdorf chalet. Wolfgang’s wife Ellen, also pregnant, chose to stay behind. She and Winifred by chance took refuge not in the cellar of Wahnfried itself but beneath the adjoining Siegfried-Wagner-Haus (the so-called Führerbau where ‘Uncle Wolf’ had spent so many happy festival days) and thus escaped the bombs. Neither Wolfgang nor Wieland was at home when disaster struck but both turned up soon afterwards and Wolfgang, ever the handyman, began to shore up part of the roof.
Twenty-four hours later Wieland and Lafferentz set off by car for Berlin on a ‘now or never’ mission to persuade the Führer to yield his Wagner nuggets after all. Accounts differ on whether the two of them ever reached the capital but it is certain that, in the chaos of the war’s last phase, they did not get to see Hitler. On 8 April they made it back to Wahnfried, collected what they could of value from the archive and set off again, zigzagging through waves of refugees, to join their families in Nussdorf. Even Winifred, the ‘old warhorse’ as Wieland half-affectionately called her, at last beat a retreat. She made off with Ellen, not to Nussdorf but to a more primitive dwelling she owned on the edge of a forest in the hills above Oberwarmensteinach, a village a few miles from Bayreuth. Wolfgang shuttled between Wahnfried, the Festspielhaus and the village transferring and hiding what remained of the Wagner archive. On 14 April American tanks rolled into Bayreuth and that same day Ellen gave birth to a daughter, Eva, by candlelight in Oberwarmensteinach. According to Wolfgang, Winifred proposed a ‘hare-brained’ scheme (albeit one strongly recalling the plot of Die Walküre) to flee into the woods with the baby to escape the wrath of the approaching foe. He talked her out of it.23
Down by the Bodensee it was advancing French forces, not American ones, that the Wagner contingent had to fear. At least Nussdorf was better placed than the Bayreuth region for a getaway and, thanks to foresight more than luck, the means for flight was at hand. On 22 April adults and children clutching a few belongings (including Wagner manuscripts) piled into a boat awaiting them at nearby Überlingen, courtesy of Lafferentz’s ‘marine institute’ there, and set sail for Switzerland. At first they were lucky. An occasional dive-bomber flew overhead but took no notice of the little vessel. Once in Swiss waters, though, they were stopped by an armed patrol. Wieland shouted the name of Wagner and waved one of the Master’s scores as proof of identity. Either the Swiss failed to understand or they understood all too well. At any rate the would-be refugees were sent back. On reaching the chalet again, they found locals had already partly plundered it.24
With the French almost at the gate, the Wagner treasures were hurriedly stashed away. Some of them went into a wooden cavity on the terrace, others were wrapped in rubber diapers, secured with sealing wax and buried in the garden. The occupying troops failed to find them, or perhaps did not look very hard. According to one family tale, a French officer who burst into the chalet with his men promptly saluted and withdrew again with apologies on learning that Wieland was Wagner’s grandson. Although such a triumph of culture over coercion may seem unlikely, a strikingly similar event, later authenticated by both sides, did occur at almost the same time in Upper Bavaria at Garmisch. American troops drove up to Richard Strauss’s villa with the aim of requisitioning it, but dropped the idea after the master of the house appeared at the door and identified himself as the composer of Rosenkavalier.
Eight days after that abortive flight across the Bodensee, the family’s once mightiest friend and sponsor took his life in his Berlin bunker. The Wagner manuscripts he had kept ‘for safety’s sake’ probably perished with him. Or at least they vanished, though there is a faint chance the Russians made off with them and may one day reveal their booty. Shortly afterwards Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally and the war in Europe was over. The Wagners were scattered, Wahn-fried largely a ruin, many family treasures gone for good. For Wolfgang, though, there was no need for either he
or Wieland to feel accountable, let alone to have a sense of shame. ‘Fortunately,’ he claimed in his autobiography nearly half a century later, ‘neither my brother nor I had any reason to put on sackcloth or beat our breasts in remorse – our past was too short and insignificant for that. We had not done anything criminal and had no need to seek justification for any actions or sins of omission.’25 Winifred felt the same, only more so. ‘History will justify my actions,’ she wrote to a Swiss friend in a letter intercepted by the Allies. ‘I am very proud of having fulfilled my mission for the last fifteen years by myself. This I did in honour of R. Wagner, the town of Bayreuth and Germany.’26
14
New Bayreuth?
Rage, bitterness, frustration; all that and more welled forth from a striking commentary on ‘New Bayreuth’ that appeared in August 1951 in Das literarische Deutschland (Literary Germany), a usually sober intellectual weekly. ‘Only six years after an unparalleled material and – still greater – moral collapse,’ the author lamented, ‘the Bayreuth Festival can be resumed as though nothing has happened; without the slightest sign of a change … on the contrary with a proud display of continuity, indeed with pomp and luxury as a social event of the first order.’ Those responsible, the writer charged, had speculated, largely with success, on people’s short memories. One would do well not just to accept this ‘astounding fact’ without a thought.1
It was easy to pick a few holes in this trenchant tract. Even those who did not attend the festival could hardly fail to be aware, thanks to reams of press coverage, that something new and challenging was happening on the Bayreuth stage. That applied above all to Wieland’s dark, spare production of Parsifal (with choreography by Gertrud) – loathed by some but adored by others, including the doyen of English Wagnerites, Ernest Newman, who called it the best performance of the work he had ever seen or heard. As for the charge of ‘pomp and luxury’, ladies with off-the-shoulder dresses could indeed be spied in the audience and caviar could be found (with luck) in the festival restaurant; but the town itself still showed its bomb scars, the hugely overbooked accommodation was usually primitive and the cuisine far from tempting. Nor was the festival a social event quite ‘of the first order’. Both Theodor Heuss and Konrad Adenauer, respectively president and chancellor of the newly founded Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany), ostentatiously stayed away. For democratically elected German leaders, the shadow of the Führer still loomed oppressively large over Bayreuth in particular.
Besides, might not Franz Wilhelm Beidler, the author of the scathing piece, simply have been indulging in ‘sour grapes’? In a letter to the editor, a reader suggested exactly that. Herr Beidler, he pointed out, was the man from Switzerland who a few years before had proposed setting up an international foundation, in which he would have played a leading role, to run the Bayreuth festival. The scheme had come to nothing, the reader argued (without going further into what had been a very tangled affair), because the festival theatre had remained the property of the Wagner family. Herr Beidler’s vaunted ‘Swiss perspective’ thus seemed personally motivated. Another letter from a Bavarian parliamentarian took no issue with Beidler directly, but it did express confidence in Wieland and Wolfgang as ‘realists’ and approvingly quoted the former’s comment that ‘We are no longer interested in Germanic gods, but in man alone. We want to get away from the Wagner cult and closer to the cultic theatre.’ Whatever those words might mean in detail, they did seem to suggest that a new and hopeful page was being turned.2
Missing from these exchanges, though, was any mention that the irate Swiss scribe was himself a Wagner – or at least, with good reason, considered himself one. For this was the very same Franz Beidler born back in 1901 to the ill-starred Isolde, Cosima’s ‘first child of love’, and her Swiss conductor husband. When Isolde lost her bid in 1914 to be legally recognised as a daughter of Wagner, not of Hans von Bülow, her son’s chances of ever succeeding to the Bayreuth throne plunged – all the more so when, soon afterwards, Siegfried married and fathered four children. Franz Beidler Jr. might therefore have faded out of the Wagner saga for good, but for two things. Virtually everyone close to the matter well knew that Isolde really was the Master’s daughter, whatever a court of law might rule; and young Beidler (unlike his father) turned out to be a person of high principle and intellectual standing. In particular he despised the Nazis and they, in turn, hated him – both for his left-wing views (he wrote regularly for Social Democratic publications) and above all for his close ties to Jews. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ellen Gottschalk, daughter of a Jewish professor of medicine, and he long worked in Berlin as a close aide of Leo Kestenberg, also Jewish, who was a high-ranking government official responsible for a farsighted reform of music education during the Weimar Republic.
After Hitler came to power, the three of them joined the droves of refugees fleeing abroad – Kestenberg making his way via Prague to Tel Aviv where he became manager of the Palestine Orchestra (later the Israel Philharmonic), the Beidlers hopping first to Paris and thence to Zurich where they had the right of abode since Franz, via his late father, had Swiss nationality. But although he and Ellen henceforth made Zurich their home, Franz saw himself first and foremost as a Wagner in exile – like the Master, his grandfather, in the same city long before and like Friedelind at Lucerne a few years later. At any rate, outside Germany he emphasised his family roots more than ever. He began to sign articles ‘Beidler-Wagner’ and when von Bülow’s second wife, Marie, died naming Franz her heir, he rejected the inheritance on the grounds that he was not a blood relative. Above all, backed by influential well-wishers like Thomas Mann and Ernest Newman, he toiled away for years on his most ambitious project – a biography of Cosima meant to reveal the ‘real truth’ about the Hohe Frau as Du Moulin Eckart, Chamberlain and other ‘Bayreuthians’ had manifestly failed to do. Alas, when Beidler died in 1981 his magnum opus was still far from complete, but even the torso of it published sixteen years later turned out to be well worth reading for its psychological insight and elegance of style. Among books about the Wagners (let alone by the Wagners), it stands close to the top.3
With his background as a leftist Wagner long in exile, Beidler was almost bound to react harshly to much about ‘New Bayreuth’. Despite Wieland’s new-look Parsifal and his partly novel presentation of the Ring, the three maestros invited to the Green Hill in 1951 were no strangers to those who had lived through the ‘Third Reich’. That applied above all to Furtwängler, the Führer’s favourite who, although he found the regime repugnant, had stayed in Nazi Germany almost to the end and had led most of Bayreuth’s wartime stagings of Meistersinger. After (typically) changing his mind repeatedly about whether to take part in the newly launched festival at all, he finally agreed to do so – not, as in the ‘old days’, to conduct opera but instead to give a celebratory opening performance on 29 July of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The ‘festival proper’ would then begin the following day with Wieland’s tensely awaited new Parsifal. That seemed a clever choice. Thoughts would in the first place be directed not so much to recent history as to that occasion, nearly eight decades before, when the Master himself had conducted the ‘Choral’ Symphony to mark the laying of the festival theatre’s foundation stone. On the whole this approach paid off although, even with Beethoven rather than Wagner, Furtwängler could not wholly erase memories of his role in the Reich. Hadn’t he led that very symphony to celebrate the Führer’s birthday in Berlin in 1942, reaching down from the stage (albeit, as film footage shows, with obvious distaste) to shake hands with Goebbels who had been sitting in the front row?
As for the 1951 opera fare itself, one Ring cycle as well as a new Meistersinger (in a traditional production by Rudolf Hartmann, a Munich opera stalwart) were in the hands of Herbert von Karajan, already an ambitious rival to Furtwängler prior to 1945. Karajan, now forty-three, had joined the Nazi party not once but twice – first in Austria and then in Germany – not for ide
ological reasons but (like so many others) to help boost his career after Hitler came to power. That early history set him back a bit after the war, but by 1951 he was on the rise again and using Bayreuth as one springboard towards what would soon be world stardom. Meanwhile the other Ring cycle and Parsifal were in the intermittently safe charge of the sixty-three-year-old Hans Knappertsbusch (known as Kna), a craggy giant of a man who hated rehearsing but who could usually generate a shattering performance ‘on the night’. Given to the bluntest of talk laced with wry and often scatalogical wit, Kna had gained – and long retained – a reputation as something of a hero who had faced the Nazis down. In fact he had served the regime’s aims pretty well right from the start in 1933, when he helped instigate a public protest in Munich against Thomas Mann as a ‘bad Wagnerian’ with ‘cosmopolitan-democratic views’. This campaign was the immediate reason, though not the only one, that the Nobel prize-winning writer decided to turn his back on Nazi Germany. That Kna’s career did not subsequently prosper as he had hoped was due in particular to the Führer’s – wildly inaccurate – view of him as a mere ‘band-master’. Though Furtwängler remained Hitler’s favourite, he ranked Kna well behind Clemens Krauss, a star of musical life in Berlin, Munich and Vienna during the ‘Third Reich’ who also briefly popped up in ‘New Bayreuth’. He replaced his old rival Kna there for a single season in 1953 but died the year after.