BERLIN LETTER:The amiable Wolfgang Wagner, who died this week, came from a family of difficult characters, writes DEREK SCALLY
BRITAIN HAS the Windsors, Germany has the Wagners. If anyone decided to award the two families marks based on drama, feuds and entertainment value, the Wagners would win hands down.
As the late Wagner expert Jonathan Carr pointed out, the Wagner family history encompasses "greed and jealousy, plotting and scrapping that more than match the most lurid episodes of Dallasor Dynasty".
Considering that, Sunday’s death of family patriarch Wolfgang Wagner has been a quiet, dignified affair.
The 90-year-old headed the annual Bayreuth Festival dedicated to the music of Richard Wagner for a record 57 years, transforming it from a provincial, fascism-singed festival to the most sought-after ticket on the musical calendar.
Richard Wagner had been in his grave for 35 years when Wolfgang Wagner was born in 1919, but his shadow still loomed large as the most influential composer of his era, whose confused, often anti-Semitic views clouded his musical achievements.
While Wolfgang inherited the Wagner profile – strong nose, jutting chin – those who knew him describe him as a mild-mannered amiable man, a welcome break from the family tradition of difficult characters.
Wolfgang’s father, Siegfried, died when he was just 10; his English mother, Winifred, was best friends with the Wagner-obsessed Adolf Hitler. Dubbed “Uncle Wolf” by the Wagner children, the Nazi leader was a regular visitor to the family villa, Wahnfried.
The other dominant figure in Wolfgang’s life was his brother, Wieland. Older by two years and his mother’s favourite, the artistically inclined Wieland was the heir apparent to the Wagner throne.
That took the pressure off Wolfgang to “perform” and, simultaneously, made his life unbearable as the “spare heir”.
A striking photograph from the late 1930s with Hitler betrays the difference between the brothers: while the teenage Wieland stands tall with his eyes staring in the same direction as the dictator, Wolfgang slouches and squints the other way.
While Wieland joined the National Socialists and was excused by Hitler from military service, Wolfgang declined to join the party, a big deal in a house of Nazi sympathisers. He was called up and severely wounded in the 1939 invasion of Poland.
He recuperated in Berlin – with “Uncle Wolf” a regular visitor to his bedside – and returned to Bayreuth.
The shadow of “Uncle Wolf” hung over the Wagner family long after the war’s end. With Winifred convicted as one of Hitler’s “most fanatical supporters”, it fell to the brothers to rebuild the war-damaged theatre and put on their first festival in 1951 with Wieland as creative director and Wolfgang managing the practical and financial affairs.
Their decision to create a “new Bayreuth Festival” dedicated to the Nazi-tainted composer was, Wolfgang Wagner later said, anything but a given at the time.
“Crucial was our wish to free the work of Richard Wagner from often misunderstood interpretations of his intentions and to try to present the works as though they had just been created,” he said.
"That meant a thorough, unjaundiced examination of the material – musical and dramaturgical – to see whether it was possible to present Richard Wagner's integrated work of art or Gesamtkunstwerkin its intellectual universality."
Their collaboration ended with Wieland’s sudden death in 1966, plunging the festival into creative uncertainty.
While Wieland created a postwar Bayreuth aesthetic combining minimalist sets and symbolism, Wolfgang had more conservative tastes. A critic dismissed his first Bayreuth staging as “sounding like wood and cardboard”.
With the passing decades, Wolfgang’s sole stewardship of the festival caused resentment in the other wings of the Wagner family, not least among Wieland’s children.
Complicating matters further, Wolfgang divorced and remarried in 1976, with his second wife, Gudrun, bearing him a daughter, Katharina, whom he groomed as his heir while his other estranged children fumed in the wings.
This set the scene for a series of family dramas which became more entertaining than the increasingly sclerotic festival.
Yet even Wagner’s loudest critics have given the late festival director his due, in particular for hiring Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez for the centennial Ring cycle in 1976 that is now considered a masterpiece.
In his last years, Wolfgang continued to invite young directors to Bayreuth, but critics suggested these annual infusions of creative talent were not enough to revive the festival’s wilting artistic ambitions.
Gudrun’s sudden death in 2007 prompted the enfeebled festival director to order his affairs. He declared a ceasefire with Eva, a daughter from his first marriage, and backed her as joint festival director alongside Katharina.
Wolfgang’s achievements in Bayreuth were as much administrative as artistic, particularly his decision to secure the Bayreuth Festival’s future by transferring it to a state-funded foundation in 1973.
Only time can judge whether Wolfgang Wagner achieved his other life’s ambition: to convince modern audiences that “the work of Richard Wagner is greater than those who misunderstood and abused it”.