Those wicked old Wagners

By Norman Lebrecht / June 15, 2005

There are almost as many books about the Wagner family as there are about the composer himself – and he was once the subject of more biographies than any main in history, bar Napoleon and Jesus Christ. Why this need to read about a nasty clan of nonentities who keep banning one another from the family shrine? Because there is a strong suspicion that the Wagners contributed measurably to the greatest atrocity of modern times, and that the full story has yet to be told.

Brigitte Hamann’s new biography of Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, brings to light fresh evidence of the family’s involvement with Hitler and its complicity in his crimes. It took great ingenuity on the author’s part since the Wagners squirreled away their papers and refuse access to outsiders. But Hamann, a Viennese scholar, laid hands on Winnie’s letters to her best Nazi girlfriend and, with other sources, has assembled a dossier strong enough to have landed several Wagners in the Nuremburg dock.

Winifred was an outsider. Adopted as a child orphan by a septuagenarian pair of Wagner worshippers couple, she was presented in 1915, aged 18, for marriage to the Master’s only son Siegfried, a homosexual of 46. Her role was to make babies and help ‘Fidi’ take over the Festival from his mother, Cosima. This was no easy task, since the war had wiped out the family savings. The Wagners blamed the Jews.

By 1921, with no resumption in sight, Fidi toned down his virulent anti-Semitism to court funds from Jewish Wagnerians in Europe and the US. Back home, he mingled with rabid nationalists. In September 1923 Adolf Hitler visited the family to pay homage to his favourite composer and meet the English historian Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Fidi’s brother-in-law (and Neville’s cousin), whose racial dogmas pervade Nazi ideology every bit as much as Wagner’s teutonic primitivism.

Winnie and Fidi went to Munich for the day to witness Hitler’s putsch; later they sent him goodies in prison. The festival reopened in 1924 and Hitler came the following summer, seeing a full Ring cycle, Parsifal and Mastersingers. He bonded with the Wagners, who called him ‘Wolf’. When Fidi died in August 1930, Winnie took over the Festival with Hitler as her constant consultant.

They were intimate friends, nothing more. Hitler was in mourning for his suicidal niece, Geli Raubal, and Winnie was in love with her artistic director Heinz Tietjen, a chameleon chameleon who ran the Berlin State Opera under both socialist and Nazi regimes. To please Hitler, Winnie booked his favourite conductor, the obstreperous Wilhelm Furtwangler. When he became Fuhrer in 1933 Winnie, facing a shortfall on ticket sales due to the ban on Jews, appealed to Goebbels, who sent her packing. Hitler then ordered Nazi organisations to bulk-buy tickets at full price, a subsidy that continued throughout the Third Reich. But for Hitler, Bayreuth would have gone bankrupt. Under his patronage, the Festival became an offshoot of the Nuremberg rallies, a place where prominent Nazis strutted their stuff before adoring crowds.

Until the Second World War, Hitler was a regular attender, meddling with the casts and mingling with the family. Winnie pestered him throughout the year, pleading for extra subsidy and occasionally interceding for victims of the regime. Relations cooled after Winnie’s daughter, Friedelind, fled to America and made anti-Nazi broadcasts, but Hitler remained attached to Winnie’s sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, and conspired with them to oust Mum and Tietjen and replace them with Wagner’s flesh and blood.

Wieland, whose middle name was ‘Adolf’, was in contact with Hitler until February 1945. With his brother-in-law Bodo Lafferentz, head of the Kraft durch Freude unit that co-financed Bayreuth, he set up a concentration camp near the festival grounds to manufacture parts for V-1 and V-2 rockets. The Wagners employed slave labour and set up a gallows in the yard. Wieland was named governor of the camp. After the War, its SS guards were put on trial but the Wagner bosses escaped unpunished.

When the day of denazification came, Winifred was banned from running the festival and her two sons took over, just as Hitler intended. The festival, reopened in 1951, became a gathering place for relics of Hitler’s circle. Wieland attacked his mother in the press as ‘a former leading Nazi’ while protesting his own political innocence. Wolfgang raised funds for the enterprise from old Nazis and steel magnates.

Although Wieland’s spartan staging signalled a breach with the past, nothing else changed at Bayreuth. The brothers soon fell out. After Wieland’s death in 1966, Wolfgang barred his children from the succession. Later he banned the son and daughter of his own first marriage in favour of his lastborn child, Katharine.

While Wieland was a competent stage director and enlightened manager, Wolfgang was a plodder, a thick-skinned autocrat. In 1973, the town of Bayreuth bought the festival theatre, its archives and the Wagner home for 12.4 million Deutschmarks (about £4 million at the time), but Wolfgang runs the Festival to this day as his private fiefdom, squandering public subsidy on productions of ephemeral consequence and accountable only to a board of poodles. Now 85, he cannot be long for this world. If the Bavarian authorities have any respect for public probity they will move swiftly on his death to suspend the intended succession.

For the Wagners, as Hamann confirms, have shed nothing but shame on their ancestor’s ideals. They were formative Nazis, active SS men and unregenerate accepters of post-war Nazi gold. They were also creative nullities, trading on a famous surname.

Their family saga is no sillier than most telly soaps, except that it involves crimes against humanity. Hamann has provided the fullest indictment so far of Wagner family guilt. There are, to my knowledge, at least two more books in preparation, intent upon dewhitewashing Bayreuth. The evidence is mounting, and the reckoning cannot be deferred indefinitely. Only when the Festival is removed from family hands will its wicked past be fully purged. Personally, I won’t set foot in the place until there is evidence of regime change.

Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner, a life at the heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (transl. Alan Bance), is published on June 18 by Granta Books, price £30

The composer was certainly a genius, but he diverted music from elegant universality into tortured self-obsession

Dylan Evans
Tuesday June 7, 2005

Guardian

It’s Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 will have filled six days of airtime with every single note the composer wrote – every symphony, every quartet, every sonata and lots more besides. This coincides with a series of three films on BBC2 in which the conductor Charles Hazlewood tells us about the composer’s life, and three programmes of musical analysis on BBC4.
It’s good to see classical music getting some coverage on primetime TV, but the relentless focus on Beethoven is dire. Not all fans of classical music are members of the Beethoven cult. Some of us even think he did more harm than good to classical music.

Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music, but this change was a change for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven’s fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven’s original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.

This is not to deny Beethoven’s genius, but simply to claim that he employed his genius in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea. If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences.

It’s instructive to compare Beethoven’s morbid self-obsession with the unselfconscious vivacity of Mozart. Like Bach’s perfectly formed fugues and Vivaldi’s sparkling concertos, Mozart’s music epitomises the baroque and classical ideals of formal elegance and functional harmony; his compositions “unfold with every harmonic turn placed at the right moment, to leave, at the end, a sense of perfect finish and unity”, as the music critic Paul Griffiths puts it. Above all, Mozart’s music shares with that of Bach an exuberant commitment to the Enlightenment values of clarity, reason, optimism and wit.

With Beethoven, however, we leave behind the lofty aspirations of the Enlightenment and begin the descent into the narcissistic inwardness of Romanticism. Mozart gives you music that asks to be appreciated for its own sake, and you don’t need to know anything about the composer’s life to enjoy it. Beethoven’s music, on the other hand, is all about himself – it is simply a vehicle for a self-indulgent display of bizarre mood swings and personal difficulties.

Hazlewood claims, in his BBC2 series, that music “grew up” with Beethoven; but it would be more accurate to say that it regressed back into a state of sullen adolescence. Even when he uses older forms, such as the fugue, Beethoven twists them into cruel and angry parodies. The result is often fiercely dissonant, with abrupt changes in style occurring from one movement to another, or even in the same movement. Hazlewood is right to describe Beethoven as a “hooligan”, but this is hardly a virtue. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.

I won’t be able to resist tuning in to Beethoven at times this week, but I’ll need to cheer myself up with something more optimistic and life-affirming afterwards.

· Dylan Evans is a senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England

www.dylan.org.uk