TWILIGHT OF THE WAGNERS: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy
By Gottfried Wagner, translated by Della Couling
Picador, 310 pages, $25
In Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” Gottfried, the rightful heir to the medieval kingdom of Brabant, is a mute character. When the opera begins, Gottfried is absent from the realm, as he has been turned into a swan by the usurping witch Ortrud; when the opera ends, Gottfried has been restored to his rightful place by Lohengrin (though to somewhat uncertain prospects).
The Gottfried Wagner who is the composer’s great-grandson began life as a potential heir to the master’s opera-festival kingdom in Bayreuth, Germany, but he is an heir who has been banished by his father and who is unlikely to be restored. The source of Gottfried Wagner’s trouble has been his refusal to remain mute–about his great-grandfather’s anti-Semitism, about his grandmother’s unrepentant adoration of Hitler, about his father’s Nazi past and rightist sympathies. Gottfried Wagner’s unbound tongue can make for sporadically compelling reading in his tell-all “Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy.” And yet, a greater degree of muteness, in the form of a less-indulgent memory (or a more-vigilant editor), would have been a great asset to Gottfried Wagner’s autobiography.
The family history he recounts is execrable; it is a consistent story of Nazi involvement and persistent anti-Semitism that should be acknowledged–and closely pondered–by those who care for Wagner’s music. At 9 or 10, Gottfried Wagner began poking around in the attics and storage sheds of the festival house; what he discovered were photos, films, correspondence and program notes that document the links between Hitler and the Bayreuth Festival and between Hitler and the descendants of Wagner, who have maintained continuous control over the festival since its founding. Gottfried’s account of his grandmother Winifred (the daughter-in-law of Richard and Cosima), who ran the festival from 1930-45, is perhaps most astounding: An early Nazi supporter, Winifred, in 1923, supplied the then-imprisoned Hitler with the paper on which he wrote “Mein Kampf”; in 1935, she had a special annex built at the family home in Bayreuth, where Hitler was a frequent pilgrim; she maintained an intimate correspondence with Hitler and was even the recipient of his proposal of marriage (Gottfried hints at sexual relations); following the war, she continued to hold celebrations on Hitler’s birthday, and she remained a Holocaust denier to the end of her life.
Winifred’s sons, Wolfgang and Wieland (Gottfried’s father and uncle), came to know Hitler at Bayreuth as “Uncle Wolf,” and both emerge in Gottfried’s account as Nazi true believers whose later de-Nazified productions and left-leaning political pronouncements were merely opportunistic shifts intended to keep the flame of Bayreuth lit, while all the while maintaining the rightist cult of Wagner. This charge will be particularly distressing to the champions of Wieland, whose postwar, abstract, “timeless” productions are viewed by many as the dawning of a new Bayreuth. Perhaps most damningly, Gottfried recounts his father’s recollection of a conversation he and Wieland had with Hitler at Bayreuth in which Hitler said, ” `Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East.’ “
In reporting these words of his father–along with his subsequent ugly speech on the Jews and “the Allies’ propaganda machine”–Gottfried thoroughly muddies the reputation of Wolfgang Wagner, who still runs the festival at Bayreuth and who, at 80, still refuses to name a successor. And it is Gottfried’s animus toward his father that runs most vituperatively through “Twilight of the Wagners.” Gottfried’s disillusionment with his father seems to have begun at age 6, when Wolfgang denied his son the part of–Who else?–Gottfried in his new production of “Lohengrin.” From this childhood hurt, Gottfried comes retrospectively to realize that his father viewed him as a potential rival.
Gottfried’s investigations of his family’s history are, throughout, intimately bound up with his increasing alienation from his father. The political quickly becomes personal: Not only is Wolfgang a Nazi, he is an emotionally cold, physically abusive father, a verbally abusive husband and, to top it off, an unimaginative stage director. Gottfried’s own leftist politics, his choice of Kurt Weill as a thesis topic, his founding of the Post-Holocaust Dialog Group are the actions of a man determined not to become his father. Gottfried Wagner, unlike his operatic namesake, will never inherit the ancestral kingdom, but revenge will be exacted: The present king will be revealed as a tyrant; the kingdom will be revealed as unworthy of its heir.
Gottfried Wagner is undoubtedly a thoughtful, decent, perhaps even brave, man. He does necessary service by his insistence that the legacy of Bayreuth be examined. Yet his book is marred by his apparent determination to repay everyone who ever offended or slighted him. We learn the names of all of young Gottfried’s sadistic, right-wing schoolmasters, of the sycophantic bureaucrats who turned Gottfried down for directorial jobs and for research grants, of the bank manager who tormented Gottfried at Deutsche Bank, of the ushers and attendants who tried to keep Gottfried out of the festival, of the critics who panned Gottfried’s stagings and misunderstood his views.
And of course, the master controlling all the wicked dwarves is Father Wolfgang, who, via his control of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth and the rest of the international Wagner conspiracy, has kept his son an outsider not just from the Valhalla of Bayreuth, but from opera production generally. Gottfried recounts that he wrote “Twilight of the Wagners” to make some personal peace with his family’s legacy, yet his compulsive return to every injustice suffered, however slight or mighty, results in a book that is a rather exasperating and increasingly tedious combination of cri de coeur and j’accuse.
But the principal disappointment of “Twilight of the Wagners” is Gottfried’s discussion–or lack of discussion–of Wagner’s anti-Semitism within his art and the political legacy of that art. Gottfried, who holds a doctoral degree in musicology, has delivered lectures with such titles as “The Cases of Nietzsche and Wagner” and “The Hitler-Wagner Case” throughout Europe, the U.S. and, most impressively, in Israel. Yet in his memoir, while we read much about the invitations that precipitated these lectures (and even more about the invitations that were rescinded due to Wolfgang’s interventions), we read much less about the content of those lectures. Rather too typically, a chapter provocatively titled “Hitler and Wagner?” quickly becomes an occasion for Gottfried to condemn yet another of his father’s Bayreuth productions and to recount a snub that he once received from Daniel Barenboim.
On the topic of his great-grandfather, Gottfried Wagner seems to believe that the composer’s anti-Semitism was fundamental to his creativity, that his anti-Semitism cannot be excused or lessened by historical recourses to the general prejudices of the mid-19th Century, and, finally, that Wagner’s conception of the artwork as well as of the German “race” and its revolutionary potential are fundamental to Hitler’s thought and action–all of which is relatively uncontroversial, yet profoundly troubling to those who have been moved by Wagner’s music. A surer guide through the complexities of that trouble will require a greater objectivity than Gottfried Wagner is able to muster, though it might be impossible to ask the truth-telling scion of such a monstrous family for greater objectivity.
