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

East June 09, 2005  

Cutbacks End Columbia’s Arts Journalism Program

By Simi Horwitz
  
“Nothing that happens in a university is necessary,” says Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If Columbia were destroyed in a terrorist attack, life would go on. The real question isn’t ‘Is a particular program necessary?’ but rather ‘How does it add value?’ And the National Arts Journalism Program was valuable in marrying craft and knowledge in a setting that has access to the arts capital, the best arts journalists, and the rest of Columbia University. The NAJP gave arts journalists context, which helped them understand specifics.”

So why after 11 years is the NAJP closing on July 1? That is a complicated question involving funding cutbacks, personalities, and the byzantine world of academic politics. András Szántó, director of the NAJP, did not want to address the particulars of what happened. Others interviewed for this story were relentlessly circumspect. Participants on all sides asserted that they “understood” and “appreciated” the problems faced by those whose actions they clearly disagree with.

But all agreed that the trouble began when the Pew Charitable Trusts, which had contributed millions of dollars to the program, decided two years ago to put its money elsewhere.

“It was a difficult decision,” says Marian Godfrey, director of civic life initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “We were proud of the program because it made a strong statement about arts journalism. But having run it for close to 10 years — a long time for any foundation to be involved in any one program — and having spent between $10 million and $11 million, we felt we needed to use our scarce resources in other ways.”

Since 1994, the NAJP has hosted an estimated 130 arts journalists — reporters and critics — from across the country. Admission was competitive; writers accepted into the two-semester program as either senior or midcareer fellows used the resources of Columbia University to study theatre, literature, history, and other subjects and were encouraged to view the city as their campus. A goal of the program was to broaden the knowledge and boost the professionalism of its participants. Some senior fellows were already stars in their fields, like Margo Jefferson and Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times and Harvard’s Robert Brustein, theatre critic for The New Republic. But most fellows, especially at the midcareer level, worked at smaller periodicals, though a fair number moved on to more-prestigious publications following their time at the program.

In addition to its fellowships, the NAJP presented an array of conferences addressing the concerns of nonprofit cultural institutions, arts service organizations, and arts funders. Its final gathering, “Measuring the Muse: Arts Research From the Frontlines,” was held on May 5.

While the Pew Charitable Trusts felt that it had to return to its original mission of funding local artists and arts institutions, during the past two years the organization continued to provide the NAJP with money in the hope that the program could locate other resources. And according to ArtsJournal.com editor-in-chief Douglas McLennan, a former NAJP fellow and a member of its advisory board, those resources were indeed found.

“But when the dean made the decision to discontinue the program, there wasn’t enough money in place,” he says. “And by the time we had come up with funds, he had already made his decision. He was concerned with putting money in an ad hoc way into programs that did not have a major endowment. We were able to fund the program through this year with various projects, but it was just a stopgap.”

Lemann does not dispute McLennan’s contention, stressing that the many non-degree-conferring programs housed at Columbia routinely seek out funding mechanisms that fall outside of tuition. “The Pulitzer Prizes, for example, are fully endowed,” he says. “Foundations fund other programs and typically they run for a few years and then they stop. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

What is unusual is that Columbia, under the leadership of President Lee C. Bollinger, is firmly committed to the arts and to arts journalism in particular. In fact, Bollinger has been instrumental in reshaping the Graduate School of Journalism to provide its graduates with more-specialized training beyond the craft of writing a story. Next semester, for example, the school will offer a master’s degree in the arts.

Of all those interviewed for this story, Randall Bourscheidt, president of Alliance for the Arts, a nonprofit arts advocacy group, is the most openly enraged by the demise of the NAJP. “One of the saddest parts of this story is that Columbia University has failed to save a program that has reflected so well on it,” he says. “Its inability to come up with the money is a failure of judgment. This is a tragic loss for American journalism and the arts community, especially in New York, which has benefited from NAJP’s conferences.”

The Larger Picture

Just as the NAJP is shutting its doors, there is a growing realization at some academic institutions that arts journalists face new challenges today and need special training. Both Boston University and NYU now offer concentrations in cultural reporting, and in July Syracuse University will debut the Goldring Arts Journalism Program, a master’s degree program with concentrations in writing about architecture, film, fine arts, music, and theatre.

Johanna Keller, the program’s director, observes, “The level of expectation has changed in terms of how the arts are covered. Editors complain that critics are not trained journalists, while the critics complain that the editors and publishers don’t understand the arts.” And that lack of training and understanding has brought the profession to a crossroads, giving rise to these new programs.

But the universities are not alone. The National Endowment for the Arts has launched a program for arts critics, who will gather for 10-day to two-week workshops at Duke University, UCLA, and Columbia to address the future of arts criticism in the belief that at many newspapers, the role of the arts critic is either being eliminated or filled by freelance writers. According to Douglas Sonntag, the NEA’s director of national initiatives, “The quality and quantity of criticism is declining.”

NAJP director András Szántó agrees, at least in part. For arts journalism, he says, “it’s the best of times and the worst of times. It’s the worst of times in the uncertainty, anxiety, insecurity, and dislocation facing arts journalists in institutions that are being staffed by outsourced freelancers with pay scales that are comparable to artists. Within news organizations, they’re trying to keep up with an arts world that is being marginalized.

“It is the best of times,” he contends, “in that the universe of arts coverage is expanding in radio, magazines, on the Internet. Self-publishing is unprecedented,” and new technology offers arts writers a host of new venues for their work.

“There are more voices and more points of entry,” he says. “That is a hopeful sign, even if that means there’s also more stupidity. The rising level of arts participation and the increasingly educated and wealthy population are also good signs. But in today’s pluralistic arts world, it’s more confusing and the critic’s role is transforming. The greatest cultural irony of our time is that the diversity and accessibility are enormous. On the other hand, the sense of mission and excitement are no longer there. When the art generates the excitement, the criticism will follow.”

There is still much to explore in the evolving world of arts journalism, he suggests, making the NAJP’s shuttering a particularly numbing blow.

The New Designer Label
By Norman Lebrecht / June 8, 2005
  

If you were starting a business in 2005 which of these would seem the best bet – farming in Zimbabwe, making manual typewriters, or setting up a classical record label? Myself, I’d catch a flight to Harare, but I could be wrong since, amid the ruins of former classical glories there are some pickings to be had and a pair of likely lads with form as long a Bruckner concert are about to try their luck with a designer label.

The partners are wide-eyed survivors of classical wipeout. Chris Craker, a clarinettist in London orchestras, moved into record production then, in 1998, with 400 recordings to his credit, he started a smart label, Black Box, with venture capital from two Tory Lords, Young and Chadlington. Black Box’s unique selling point was living composers ö not a rapid revenue source. After three tough years, Craker sold out to Iron Maiden-owned Sanctuary and took a pause for reflection.

That’s when he met Paul Moseley, 14 years a marketing v-p at Decca where he spent most of his days in corporate meetings pondering the meaning of decline. Moseley had Russell Watson, Hayley Westenra and Bond on his books but he stuck his neck out on occasion for classical projects, earning the respect of artists. Now, like so many others, he was an independent consultant to a disappearing industry.

Together, the pair took a look at the landscape and saw nothing but wasted assets. The key to success in the record business is the name check. If the customer has heard of the artist on the cover he is halfway towards buying the disc, or so the theory goes. Yet here were dozens of big names in their prime unable to get on record. Craker and Moseley decided that if the project was right, they would mortgage their houses to back quality classics.

That’s the notion behind Onyx, a boutique label that launched last week with four discs by well-loved performers. The bubbling American soprano Barbara Bonney sings English and US art songs, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, Bryn Terfel’s regular sidekick. The august Borodin Quartet, background players at Stalin’s funeral, deliver a 60th anniversary recital with co-founder Valentin Berlinsky still on cello. Both CDs feel like they have a purpose.

The other two releases, though, are a class apart. Viktoria Mullova is a virtuoso violinist who has never quite found the following her talent deserves. One of the last border-flitters from the old Soviet Union, she had a child with Claudio Abbado and another with an orchestral player before settling in Fulham with the eclectic cellist Matthew Barley. On Philips, she recorded most of the great concertos but never sold a bundle. Four years ago, she tried a crossover album with Matthew. Then she took a year off playing to rethink where she was heading. Now she’s back and going for gut.

On Onyx, the once-austere Mullova attacks Vivaldi, bow-hair flying, with the period-instrument Italian band, Il Giardino Armonico. Forget academic authenticity. All Mullova did to meet the band was restring her precious Strad with medieval cat gut instead of modern metal, tone it down a tad to baroque standard (A=415) and borrow an antique-shop bow. The resultant sound is so raw it verges on the bucolic, yet phrasing and articulation are immaculate and the confrontational atompshere is nuclear. This is Vivaldi no holds barred.

Then there is the Pascal Roge project. Roge, 54, is so niche he vanishes between the cracks in floorboards. Styling himself ‘Ambassadeur de la musique francaise,’ he plays nothing else, and like no other pianist alive or dead. He used to record for Decca until they declared him unmarketable. Now he is recording the complete works of Debussy for Onyx, starting with the Preludes, which he plays with a touch so distinctive and a mischief so mechant that when he gets to the God Save the Queen parody in the Samuel Pickwick variation I laughed out loud on three separate hearings. This is a record that sets new benchmarks in French music.

So, can the Onyx method work? By conventional wisdom, not a snowball’s hope in Miami. The majors have a stranglehold on distribution, packing stores with hybrid trash, while the independent classical sector is in worse doldrums than usual with elite Hyperion facing a million-pound bill for a copyright case it unwisely contested to an unnecessary and probably inexorable conclusion; Hyperion will survive, but with deep cuts.

Any new entrant to the market must find a corner amid a rabble of own-label vanity imprints from famous orchestras, composers and concert halls, before facing the apathy of a public that does not fully realise what it lost when mainstream classical recording rolled over and died.

Yet, for all these morbid auguries, things are looking up for Onyx. In the months that he and Moseley were nagging their bank managers, Craker was being headhunted for a different job. Sony Classical was about to merge with BMG and a new boss, Gilbert Hetherwick, wanted Craker to run the UK office. Regime change had overturned Sony Classical. There was to be no more crossover ö it cost too much and earned too little. First casualty is the showy violinist Vanessa-Mae who signed for Sony Classical moments before it collapsed and is now being consigned to one of the group’s lesser pop labels, where she rightly belongs.

Sony-BMG held its first management meeting in Berlin last week. It aims to maintain a moderate classical output in which Craker will contribute ideas and local productions. But could he keep his own label? There was a pause in the process as corporate brains mulled this esoteric conundrum. In the end, Onyx got the best of both worlds.

It is an independent label, run by Craker and Moseley from their dining-room tables, but it will also have major-label distribution and access to proper budgets. If a disc takes off on Onyx, there could be a follow-up on BMG Sony but the project will have the attentiveness and integrity of a craft object.

This, it seems to me, is a pretty good deal. The corps get class artists without the headache of a long-term contract while the creatives get a voice in A&R. It’s an odd arrangement, but it could be a model for some good music making on a very modest scale.