The buzz at the festival is all about the performances for the first time in years, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
THERE’S AN unusual anticipation in the Bayreuth air ahead of next week’s 99th Richard Wagner festival.
For the first time in many years the on-stage action – a Lohengrin premiere and the Bayreuth premiere of star tenor Jonas Kaufmann – has attracted more attention than the off-stage intrigues of the composer’s warring descendants. Not that the antics of Germany’s uncrowned royal family are any less entertaining than usual, but more on that later.
This is the first festival since the death of Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of Richard Wagner and long-time festival director. All eyes are fixed on whether his chosen successors – his daughters, half-sisters Eva and Katharina Wagner – manage the balancing act between preserving festival traditions jealously guarded by Wagnerians, and injecting the fresh blood critics say the festival badly needs.
“If Eva and Katharina don’t use this as a chance for a new future, then the Bayreuth era is over,” admits Hans Neuenfels, the controversial director heading this year’s Lohengrin premiere. “Everyone has to play a role, otherwise it’s just stagnant and dreary and I’d have no interest in participating.”
Neuenfels has a very effective weapon at his disposal: Jonas Kaufmann, one of the hottest young tenors of the modern opera world.
Dubbed "an artist as much as a crowd-pleaser" by Gramophonemagazine, Kaufmann is, according to BBC Music Magazine, "the German tenor we have been waiting for". In the last decade, the 41-year-old Bavarian has built up a box office name – not to mention a fan base – with an athletic frame, a mane of black locks and a voice that prompted one enthusiastic critic to praise him as a "German tenor with Italian sheen".
Kaufmann’s approach to Wagner, too, has an Italian lightness and lyricism he thinks the composer intended for his work, but one which is a long way from the stolid style that springs to mind with modern Wagner performances.
"Finally: Wagner sung like Schubert, a role that isn't belted out," says Christine Lemke-Matwey, a Wagner expert who watched this year's Lohengrinrehearsals.
She is confident Kaufmann will win over even ardent traditionalists next week. Either way, for the first time in years, the buzz in Bayreuth is about the performances.
That would be quite a feat after a decade-long battle to succeed Wolfgang Wagner as festival director – as public as it was bitter – which poisoned beyond rescue the already hostile relations between estranged Wagner relations.
This year’s family drama surrounds Gottfried Wagner, the disowned son of Wolfgang Wagner (grandson of Richard), who was kicked out of the bosom of the family after making a career writing about and lecturing on Bayreuth’s Nazi past.
On a lecturing tour of Israel in 1990, he received a letter telling him that, “as his father and festival director”, Wolfgang Wagner was forbidding him from returning to Bayreuth.
Gottfried duly cut all ties and moved to Milan but, when he heard last year his father was ailing, he reached out to ask about a possible reconciliation. Hopes were dashed by an icy doctor’s letter, rejecting a meeting on “medical grounds”.
The real reason, according to Gottfried Wagner, is his refusal to distance himself from a scandalous family biography, published in 1999 in English as The Twilights of the Wagners.
“What looked – and was intended to look – from the outside like a peaceful family idyll was in fact quite different,” he writes, realising early on he was quite far down his father’s list of priorities, a list would always be headed by the festival.
Sent away to boarding school ahead of each summer season, and told by his father to “grin and bear it”, he was hauled back for the premiere photographs.
Regular faces in the family album were Gottfried's godparents: his grandmother Winifred, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, and his uncle Bodo Lafferentz, whom Hitler had charged with safe-guarding the Bayreuth festival during the war years through the Kraft Durch Freude(Strength Through Joy) movement.
English-born Winifred Wagner, who married the composer’s son Siegfried, remained an unshakeable admirer of the Nazi leader to the end, telling a documentary maker three years before her death in 1980: “If Hitler were to walk in through that door now, for instance, I’d be as happy and glad to see and have him here as ever.
“That whole dark side of him, I know it exists but it doesn’t exist for me because I don’t know that part of him,” she said.
Gottfried familiarised himself with his family’s past by poking through his grandmother’s voluminous correspondence with the dictator she dubbed “Wolf” – until his father heard about it and locked the letters away.
His critics dismiss him as a self-pitying man who made a career from a feud with a distant father.
But his defenders say he has campaigned for the family to come clean on its Third Reich links and post-war denial, and throw open the Bayreuth archives to historians – something that is still only in planning.
For Gottfried, his great-grandfather remains a flawed composer of music so “entwined with totalitarian ideas” that “it cannot be innocently enjoyed”, he said a decade ago.
Wagner family feuds are of epic proportions and this one was no different: father and son spoke for the last time in 1990; Gottfried was mentioned in passing just twice in his father’s 1994 autobiography – and not at all in the death notices. Gottfried says he learned about his father’s death last March from the newspaper and that he wasn’t invited to the memorial ceremony, a ticketed event in the festival theatre.
"If the worst comes to the worst, I'll ask the chancellor for a ticket," he told the Süddeutsche Zeitungdaily. In the end he didn't attend because, he said, his ticket arrived too late for him to travel.
His most recent complaint was that he cannot pay his last respects to his estranged father because his siblings won’t tell him where their father’s urn is interred. The evergreen Wagner family feud rolls on.