On Monday, a 24-member committee including representatives from Germany's federal government, the state of Bavaria and the Wagner family will name a successor to Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's 80-year-old grandson, who has run the Bayreuth festival for almost half a century. The three candidates are all Wagners - Wolfgang's wife Gudrun, his daughter Eva and his niece Nike - and they all loathe one another heartily.

Regardless of the committee's decision, however, it has become clear this week that there is little chance of a smooth transfer of power at Bayreuth to a new generation and the feuding is set to continue for many years to come.

The latest twist in the tale began early last year, when Wolfgang agreed that the procedure for choosing a successor should be set in motion, declaring that he did not want to continuing running the festival "as a mummy or a robot". But in its eagerness to end Wolfgang's reign - which has been compared to the final years of Leonid Brezhnev - the committee neglected to secure from him a firm date of departure.

When Wolfgang heard this week that the choice was likely to fall on Eva, his daughter by an earlier marriage, rather than on his wife Gudrun, he announced that he had no intention of terminating his contract as festival director - which will end only with his death.

"This reassuring position, which secures the future of the Bayreuth festival, can stand for the moment," he said.

Most insiders believe that Wolfgang's plan is to install the 56-year-old Gudrun as a caretaker director until their 22-year-old daughter, Katharina, who has just finished a theatre studies degree, is ready to take over. But Nike, a cultural historian who has long been the critics' favourite, is withering about Gudrun, who was Wolfgang's secretary before she became his wife.

"Everybody knows that Gudrun reached her position as a collaborator through the marriage bed and not through art and culture. My guess is that our theatre and music people regard her candidature as the laughing stock of the nation," she said.

Wagner family feuds are almost as much a part of Bayreuth tradition as the operas themselves, which have been performed in a theatre designed by the composer since 1876. Although the festival is now controlled by a foundation and is partly financed from public funds, its constitution specifies that its director should "in principle" be a Wagner.

Wolfgang has been at odds with most of his family since 1976, when he told Playboy that none of his relations was fit to succeed him. Since then, he has banned his son Gottfried from setting foot in the opera house and dismissed his daughter Eva's work at Covent Garden and the Paris Opera as unimpressive.

But Nike has long been the most uncomfortable thorn in the old man's side, not least because of her claim that Wolfgang is guilty of suppressing information about the Wagner family's relationship with the Nazis.

The festival is undoubtedly a commercial success, recouping 63 per cent of its budget through ticket sales, with all performances sold out months in advance. In fact, the demand for tickets is so great that each performance could be sold out nine times over.

But there are signs that Bayreuth is losing some of its artistic clout and most critics agree that the most interesting productions of Wagner's works now happen elsewhere.

"There must be a change, because the institution of Bayreuth and its director are both going senile," according to Nike.

Nike's solution is to effect a revolution at the theatre on the "green hill", starting a second season around Whitsun to satisfy some of the demand for tickets and extending the repertoire beyond the 10 major operas to include some of Wagner's early works that have never been performed at Bayreuth. She wants to bring the festival closer to local people by staging live performances in the town centre and touring productions to other towns in the region.

BUT her most radical proposal is to stage works by composers other than Wagner - including modern and contemporary composers whose works are influenced by Wagner.

Wolfgang rejected Nike's plan as "absurd" and by Thursday, Gudrun had published her own manifesto, a long-winded call to leave things more or less as they are.

The committee looks certain to reject both Nike and Gudrun in favour of Eva, who has worked at London's Covent Garden and the Paris Opera and is currently an artistic adviser to the festival at Aix-en-Provence. Eva has taken the wise precaution of saying nothing at all about her plans for Bayreuth but this reticence has not been enough to prevent a last-minute falling out with her cousin, Wieland Lafferentz, who runs the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg.

Lafferentz announced this week that he was no longer interested in running Bayreuth with Eva, whom he described as "inexperienced" and that he now wanted to run the festival on his own. Optimistic observers hope that naming a successor on Monday will create such momentum for change that Wolfgang will feel obliged to step down sooner rather than later. But the old patriarch warned this week that he would take his lead from Germany's disgraced former chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and "sit it out" until the committee agreed to appoint his wife to succeed him.