Author : Jos Hermans
The premature death of Wieland Wagner meant that, for the second time in its history, the Bayreuth Festival found itself decapitated from its artistic leadership at an unexpected moment. Wolfgang, of the two Wagners the younger and the one who had always stood in the shadow of his more famous brother, now suddenly found himself alone and untouchable at the head of the Festival. The opera director, whose productions had been received with scorn for years, the man who described himself as "an odd duck, whom no one ever took seriously," now found himself with absolute artistic freedom. And for the second time, the succession issue had the effect of a coup d'état that triggered a blazing dynastic row.
Die Zeit is da!
The relationship between the Wagners had become very difficult over the years because of all kinds of disagreements on the political and on the personal level. The deepest rift was between the two brothers themselves. After a cooperative start, their cooperation soon degenerated into ruthless rivalry, which would finally end in irreconcilable animosity. For his brother's productions Wieland had only contempt. "Something like this should be banned in Bayreuth," he said of his 1960 Ring staging. Wolfgang, for his part, left no stone unturned in ridiculing his brother's reputation as the genius playwright that he was, and in labeling his work as sacrilegious in the face of Richard Wagner's true intentions. He would later tell Welt am Sonntag, "Because he challenged the audience more, people said he was better. What nonsense!". Relations between the two families had similarly languished; wives and children no longer spoke to each other, and Wolfgang's son and daughter were formally forbidden to attend Uncle Wieland's pagan productions. For Wieland, the situation was further complicated by the progressive estrangement from his wife Gertrud and by the profound political and artistic disagreements with his mother.
A sense of inferiority was the result of the lifelong humiliations Wolfgang had endured at his brother's side. The moment of revenge had now come. Like an outright Hagen, he planted the spear in the deceased brother's back. He destroyed all models of Wieland's productions and -what the German press described as a pogrom- he fired just about everyone who had worked with Wieland. From then on he did everything he could to destroy Wieland's reputation, both professionally and personally. He belittled the role his brother had played in the festival's postwar resurgence. He repudiated the notion that his brother had revolutionized Wagnerian theater. He complained that because he himself had forgone the chance of also producing an opera in 1951, Wieland had stolen the limelight. Never did he miss an opportunity to confirm that Wieland had been a Nazi. Although there is no record of Wieland's party membership in the Nazi Party archives, it is a fact that Hitler had declared during the 1938 festival that Wieland would automatically become a member of the party upon reaching the age of majority. However, Wolfgang himself had joined the Reichstheaterkammer of his own accord.
Hagen's spear also came down on Wieland's widow Gertrud. When she claimed her husband's share of the festival management for herself, he confronted her with an agreement that both brothers had concluded between themselves in April 1962. At that time they had agreed that in the event that either one of them died, the leadership of the festival would automatically go to the survivor. Gertrud herself and her family were not wanted in Wahnfried and on the Green Hill, Wolfgang told her in no uncertain terms.
The odd duck
While the family riot provided enough conversation to fill the long pauses on the Green Hill, the festival quietly babbled on. Thanks to the continuing success of Wieland's productions of the Ring, Tristan and Parsifal, there were still a number of excellent productions to be experienced in the second half of the 1960s. But just as in 1883, 1906, 1930 and 1951, concerns about the future of the Festival were raised. The reason was as always : concern for the artistic level. No one doubted that Wieland's death had brought an abrupt end to the most exciting chapter of Bayreuth's history. And however competent Wolfgang had shown himself to be as manager, it was far from clear whether he could become the strong man the Festival needed to maintain its international reputation as Wagner's supreme interpreter. Little encouragement was available. Although the brothers had started from the same artistic premises and employed similar techniques, what they brought to the stage was totally different. Wieland's creations had the mark of genius, Wolfgang's, the sign of workmanship. Wieland soared. Wolfgang plodded. Wieland had blazed a new path. Wolfgang seemed to have no clear sense of direction. Inevitably, the two brothers were compared and one of them had to be the lesser. That was the curse that rested on Wolfgang Wagner's artistic creations from the beginning.
In the years that Wieland was still alive Wolfgang directed four productions. In 1953 he began with Lohengrin, which he staged with extremely simple means. Combining some Neu-Bayreuth techniques with the pre-war tradition, the production was neither naturalistic nor symbolistic nor abstract, although it bore the hallmarks of all three. The general response was rather cool, which Wolfgang believes was only due to his late start as a director. Heinz Stuckenschmidt politely called it an "indefinable synthesis."
Der Fliegende Holländer, which followed in 1955, was equally a testament to a certain stylelessness - in this case rigid simplicity mixed with a generous helping of old-fashioned naturalism. The spinning girls spun, the drunken sailors were ...drunken sailors. Senta was a simple peasant girl, not a supernatural heroine; the Dutchman was a doomed sailor, not a demonic superman. Because of its lack of pathos and heroism, this interpretation reflected Neu-Bayreuth's approach. A few commentators were enthusiastic but most found the lighting and actor's direction lacking in excitement. "At no point did the production, by grouping, gesture or lighting, deliver a blow to the solar plexus, such as we experience in Wieland's productions," wrote The Times.
Tristan und Isolde followed in 1957. Cloaked in a leaden-gray atmosphere of gloom and doom, the piece was visually indebted to Wieland's first version. Solitude lay at the heart of all action, which only sporadically led to passion. The prevailing critical reaction was hostile, even scathing. "What concept does Wolfgang employ?" asked Joachim Kaiser. His answer was, "There is none. It is impossible to find a principle to explain the different levels of abstraction and emptiness." In the place of "new ideas" there had come only "a foggy disenchantment". The only warmth in this refrigerated production came from Birgit Nilsson who was preparing to become one of the great Isoldes. The 35-year-old Wolfgang Sawallisch held his debut there.
Next came The Ring in 1960. It was set on a collapsible saucer, a large “Dutch cheese”. The cheese could be tilted in various positions and even split into five parts to form the backdrop for the very different scenes of the Ring. Apart from this technical feat, the production was very conservative and compared to Wieland's first Ring simply reactionary. Many of the old-fashioned paraphernalia such as swords, spears, drinking horns, Hundings hut and Mime's blacksmith shop were brought back from the stables. It restored Wotan to his role as a tragic hero, as the victim of his own weakness, who must sacrifice his loved ones in the hope of creating a better world until he finally destroys himself and everything around him. The production was carried by an excellent cast including Birgit Nilsson, Astrid Varnay, Hans Hopf, Jerome Hines and Hermann Uhde, Wolfgang Windgassen, Aase Nordmo-Loevberg, Grace Hoffmann, Otakar Kraus and Gottlob Frick. Rudolf Kempe's direction was widely applauded.
But the good musical result could not save the production from heavy condemnation, especially by the German press. Wolfgang had put so much energy into the technical feat of his set that he had neglected the other aspects of the work. His directing was labeled foolish. All that many critics found memorable about the production was Wolfgang’s feat in making an intrinsically exciting drama boring. The Frankfurter Allgemeine considered it "unworthy of Bayreuth."
The Ring's failure brought a great deal of criticism, not only from the music press but also within the circles of Wagnerians themselves. Joachim Bergfeld, head of the Richard Wagner Archive, wrote to the Baseler Nachrichten that some of the most important music critics had stayed away to avoid writing comments about a production they knew in advance would be poor. But as bad as the Ring was, it went on. Wolfgang's three previous productions were even worse and inferior to what could be seen outside Bayreuth. Particularly weak was the directing. Even the kindest critics saw his style as a step backwards, and they regretted all the more that a Ring of such level had to come to replace Wieland's. And yet, despite all the criticism, Bergfeld wrote, Wolfgang is convinced that his productions are better than those of his brother. To the president of the "Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth," Bergfeld wrote even more freely. It was painful to see how Wolfgang's productions had brought down the level of Bayreuth, he wrote. And this appreciation was not only his but also that of Germany's two most prominent newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Süddeutsche Zeitung who had as low an opinion of Wolfgang's work as he did. Wolfgang was performing no better than the provincial theaters and worst of all, Bergfeld argued, Wolfgang was planning to develop a style other than Wieland's that would jeopardize the artistic integrity of Bayreuth. In time, either one of them would have to resign or a new division of powers would have to be decided.
One can imagine what a staggering blow Wieland's death was on the Festival's admirers and, given Wolfgang's poor results, what anxiety this created for the Institute's future. Some critics consoled themselves with the thought that after so much feverish excitement of the past fifteen years, a time of rest couldn't hurt. Others saw a benefit in shifting from the visual to the aural, which Wolfgang had defined as one of his goals. After Wieland's death, a glimmer of hope grew that he would grow into a better director now that he was on his own.
Post-Wieland dilettantism
His first production after Wieland's death, the 1967 Lohengrin, was therefore seen as a test case, which was a bit unfair, since the design for the production had been launched three years before. The production was exuberant and colorful. What Wieland had proposed as a neo-Greek mystery play in oratorical style was returned to the fairy-tale world by Wolfgang, as a medieval romance between humans and a supernatural intervention. Again, Wolfgang tried to combine the simplicity of Neu-Bayreuth with tradition, tried to pair symbolism with realism. Under the direction of Rudolf Kempe, this Lohengrin was also well received musically. Sándor Kónya was replaced by no less than four singers from the second performance onwards due to illness: James King, Jess Thomas, Hermin Esser and Jean Cox. The internationalization of Bayreuth had now progressed to the point that the following year only one German singer was left on the stage.
With his centenary performance of Die Meistersinger, Wolfgang took his audience back to the middle of the 16th century. Ideologically as well as visually it was a letdown. The second act of this conservative production seemed to have been copied from that of Cosima in 1888. He populated the party meadow with folk dancers, acrobats and pantomimes, and for the first time there was praise for Wolfgang's direction. Wolfgang emphasized the humanity of the opera. He presented the work as the story of a burgeoning bourgeoisie that had its faults but was fundamentally proud and decent and as the story of a German culture that also had its faults but was rich and glorious. This was opera as entertainment, intended to please the eye and the ear. He had entrusted the musical direction to Karl Böhm and Berislav Klobučar.
In 1970 he made a second attempt to stage The Ring. He now used the Dutch cheese, which by now had become a rather worn-out scenographic cliché, with more subtlety and dramatic effect. He handled light and color more daringly, creating sometimes abstract, sometimes realistic, sometimes symbolic impressions. Following the example of G.B. Shaw, this Ring was a worldly drama of highly fallible human beings. However, it avoided any political message. Siegfried was not a revolutionary challenging the ruling order but simply a dragon-killing young man pining away for the woman he loved. Although this Ring was an improvement over the previous version it did not excite anyone. Musically, the weak point was Horst Stein's direction.
In 1975 he turned to Parsifal. The last performances of Wieland's classic had been held two years earlier. Although the production was still a shadow of itself at that time, some Wieland admirers had wanted to preserve it as a memento of its creator. Wolfgang reacted with understandable horror, and so after 23 years and 101 performances Wieland's Parsifal production was discarded. What Wieland had merely hinted at through abstraction and the veil of a twilit dream world, his brother made concrete and suffused in romanticism and colour. Critics were impressed by some scenes, such as the scenes in the forest. But the recurring criticism was Wolfgang's poor direction. The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik published a catalogue raisonné of all his directorial blunders. René Kollo, Hans Sotin, Franz Mazura and Bernd Weikl received good press. About Eva Randová as Kundry, opinions were divided.
Wolfgang had inherited an opera house that, thanks to his brother, was considered the most exciting and acclaimed in the world. But after only a few years in business, a general consensus was growing in the international music world that Bayreuth was in decline. Singers and conductors were increasingly abandoning Bayreuth. More innovative productions were being seen elsewhere in Europe. Like 10 years before, Joachim Bergfeld felt called upon to bundle the criticism of the Bayreuth insiders. As long as ticket sales were going well, Wolfgang's position was untouchable. But Bayreuth faced two dangers, Bergfeld said. One was the increased competition from Karajan's Salzburg. The second danger was a further decline of the festival if outstanding artists continued to refrain from participating.
Bergfeld's fears were anything but hypothetical. To the Munich Abendzeitung, Pierre Boulez had already declared a year before: "I shall conduct Parsifal next year, but what should keep me there after that? Bayreuth is no attraction any more. To conduct there, simply to conduct, is of no interest. Wieland, with whom I wanted to do so many things, is dead, and what goes on there today under the word directing is quite astounding." Other conductors such as Karl Böhm and Rudolf Kempe had already abandoned the sinking ship, Georg Solti and Rafael Kubelik kept a low profile. In the absence of a stable conducting staff, a whole series of temporary and less suitable conductors had passed the review - Berislav Klobučar, Silvio Varviso, Lorin Maazel, Hans Wallat. The orchestra played uninspired and even sloppy. Famous soloists like Nilsson and Bumbry did not return and others were not to be lured to Bayreuth. Even leading roles were now taken by debutantes. Singers, conductors, critics and many in the Wagner Club had no respect for Wolfgang as artistic director of the Festival. His most obvious shortcoming was staging. Part of the problem was that his stagings lacked a driving intellectual concept. "I want to stage my Ring, not interpret it" Wolfgang once said. Wieland had regularly enraptured or enraged his audiences and in either case left them overwhelmed. Wolfgang pleased or disapponted, in either case he left his audience underwhelmed. Not being an intellectual himself and rather conservative, he emptied the operas of their moral and social content. In the end, he deflated them.
Faced with these criticisms, Wolfgang Wagner unflinchingly closed in on the argument that the festival regularly sold out. He could afford to work with smaller voices because of the magnificent acoustics of the house, he suggested. Underneath it all, Wolfgang Wagner knew it couldn't go on like this.
The Foundation
As great as the anxiety about Wolfgang's artistic leadership was, the greatest danger threatening his control of the festival was the legal complication over ownership within the Wagner family. After Wieland's death, family relations were more poisoned than ever. Siegfried Wagner's will had allocated the entire Wagner estate, after Winifred's death, in equal shares to his four children. Winifred's 1950 transfer of power in favor of both sons, along with their own 1962 agreement, were nothing more than temporary arrangements. After all, after Winifred's death, the dispositions of Siegfried's will would again come into force and the inheritance would have to be redistributed between Verena, Friedelind, Wolfgang and Wieland's children. Wolfgang's position would thus be seriously compromised and the institution of Bayreuth would become immobilized. Given Winifred's advanced age, legal chaos lurked around the corner. And so, for the first time, Siegfried's 1914 proposal that the festival be managed by a national foundation was taken seriously again. After seven years of negotiations, an agreement was signed between the Wagner family and the German government whereby the entire estate -the Festspielhaus, Wahnfried, and the Wagner archive- would be left to a foundation, the so-called Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth. To this foundation, the family donated the Festspielhaus, adjacent buildings and grounds. Wahnfried was donated to the town of Bayreuth, which now leased it permanently to the Foundation and transformed it into the current Richard Wagner Museum. The Siegfried Wagner House was sold to the city of Bayreuth, which absorbed it within the framework of the Wahnfried property. The archive was sold separately for 12.4 million DM to the federal, Bavarian and local governments, which in turn rent it to the Foundation today. The Foundation itself leases the Festspielhaus to the festival director, whose operational autonomy is guaranteed. The Foundation's board of directors consists of 8 members: the federal government and the Bavarian partial government each with 5 votes, the four branches of the Wagner family each with one vote, the "Gesellschaft der Freunde" with 2 votes, and several other local boards and foundations with 2 votes each.
The agreement gave the festival the "national" status Wagner had dreamed of. It definitely ended the private, dynastic succession since the authority to appoint the future festival director now rested with the Foundation. In exchange for the agreement, the Wagners actually got quite little. They received a few votes in the Board of Directors and the commitment to find a candidate festival director preferably within the family. If this proves impossible then a candidate will be appointed by a three-man expert commission which itself is to be selected among the directors of the Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Cologne opera houses. When the foundation agreement came into force in 1973, Wolfgang Wagner was unanimously elected festival director - a predetermined outcome of the whole scheme.
The family soap
The Foundation Agreement was a rare instance of familial accord but it did not diminish the acrimony or the competetion over the succession. In the summer of 1976, Wolfgang remarried Gudrun Mack. He fired his daughter Eva as artistic assistant and excommunicated his son Gottfried. To complete his break from all the rest of the family, Wolfgang declared to the press that he did not consider "any person with the name Wagner" capable of succeeding him as festival director. In doing so, he set the entire fourth generation against himself. Meanwhile, this scandal had reached such proportions that it had become front-page news in the main German newspapers.
All that noise meant nothing compared to the scandal that had exploded around Bayreuth's political past the year before. This subject was strictly taboo. After the war, everything possible had been done to hide the past, to repress it, to erase it. Secrecy had always been an automatic family trait of the Wagners. Apart from the stage, where the break with the political past was artistically tangible, no denazification had taken place in Bayreuth. On the contrary. As if nothing had happened between 1933 and 1945, the first edition of the post-war program book was full of articles written by dedicated, convinced ex-National Socialists, who had diligently helped to bring Bayreuth into the Third Reich and who one might have assumed would have disqualified themselves forever from further participation in the future of the festival - people like Paul Bülow, Hans Grunsky, Zdenko von Kraft, Hans Reissinger, Otto Strobel, Oskar von Pander and Curt von Westernhagen. As conductors, the compromised Furtwängler and Von Karajan were to be seen in that first year. The statue of Richard Wagner in the garden of the Festspielhaus was commissioned by the Friends of Bayreuth from none other than Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor. And as in the past, the festival remained the ideological-cultural rendezvous for the political right. Amidst all these contradictions, Bayreuth was truly a microcosm of the German federal republic itself -a state where democracy and social welfare flourished but also a state where Nazis were left untouched, where concentration camp survivors and participants in mass murder were left unharmed, where judges who had sentenced thousands to death could remain in place. The desire to forget and even forgive was overwhelming. It was not until 1988 that the street that had once been renamed Houston-Stewart-Chamberlain Street by Hitler himself in 1936 was renamed again.
Theodor Heuss, the first president of the Federal Republic, a man untainted by National Socialism, considered Bayreuth the symbol of unreformed Germany and refused to attend the festival. Wieland himself found the right-wing crypto-fascist Wagnerians insufferable: "I would like to know what Richard Wagner did to deserve all these ultra-nationalistic secret societies and Germanic women's organizations and all the others who swarm around the Green Hill. We must break once and for all with this old nonsense". Throughout the 1960s Bayreuth was able to maintain this façade to some extent. Paradoxically, the undermining of the façade began with the centenary celebration in 1976. The occasion was a semi-official study by Michael Karbaum. Karbaum was the first outsider who had been allowed to poke around in the Wahnfried archive. He documented how deeply Bayreuth had engaged with the German right since the late nineteenth century and with National Socialism from its inception in 1919.
Wolfgang was appalled at these "indiscretions" and for years prevented the publication of the book until it had been bowdlerized. In the end, the person who blasted the biggest hole in the façade was none other than Winifred Wagner herself, who was just about the only person in Germany who continued to openly express sympathy for Hitler. As she continued to entertain her Nazi cronies, Wieland had a wall erected between Wahnfried and the adjacent Siegfried Wagner house in which she lived. That wall had caused her even more grief than Wieland's productions, she later recounted. Those she royally loathed. Not only were they unattractive, she claimed, they were also not at all revolutionary; after all, it had been Siegfried who had shaved off all the beards and thrown the outdated bric-a-brac overboard. After Wieland's death, she became even more shameless in putting her Nazi sympathies on display. She invited Edda Goering, Ilse Hess and other wives of high Nazi officials to her family lodge in the festival house. Her behavior exploded into scandal when she gave a five-hour interview to marginal film director Hans Jürgen Syberberg in 1975. Feelings that had been hidden for thirty years were now coming out. For the first time since 1945, someone spoke publicly and unashamedly with undiminished affection for Adolf Hitler. Her words sounded like those of a patient on a psychiatrist's couch. The scandal was not so much that she held such opinions as that she had dared to express them in public. Wolfgang admitted that in the end she had merely expressed an opinion in public that many others held privately. A wall of silence followed.
A year later, Walter Scheel, president of the Federal Republic and guest of honor at the 1976 centennial celebration, gave his auditorium of special guests a brief but scintillating lesson in German intellectual history. Like Thomas Mann, he placed the responsibility for Bayreuth's dark chapter on those who had found Bayreuth a haven of culture without realizing that it had also turned into a haven of barbaric politics. He concluded with: "Bayreuth’s history is part of Germany history. Its mistakes are the mistakes of our nation. And in this sense Bayreuth has been a national institution in which we were able to recognize ourselves. We simply cannot erase the dark chapter of German history and of Bayreuth's history".
The leader of the German nation had dealt with the past. The leader of the Bayreuth Festival had not. Wolfgang Wagner still did his best for a time to keep the façade intact. His opposition to the Syberberg film was so great that he caused the publisher of the accompanying textbook to abandon his plans. His tentacles reached far enough to boycott Syberberg's film in many a cinema.
It was not until 1981 that Wolfgang Wagner made another attempt at staging, this time his second version of Die Meistersinger. The sets of the first two acts were more old-fashioned than anything he had done up to that point, and in fact they were very similar to Wieland's 1943 production. It was the opera Wolfgang loved most to direct and the one he reserved for himself. It was not until 1985 that he ventured into a new Tannhäuser, which he brought in the early Neu-Bayreuth style which by now represented an anachronism compared to what was being performed elsewhere. While Richard Versalle and Cheryl Studer were met with mixed feelings, Giuseppe Sinopoli was widely lauded for his masterful direction. The production itself was booed.
With even greater gusto did they jeer Wolfgang’s 1989 Parsifal. Although the acting was criticized for its lifelessness, the vocal performances of Hans Sotin as Gurnemanz, Franz Mazura as Klingsor and especially Waltraud Meier as Kundry were well received. James Levine managed the slowest reading of the work since Knappertsbusch, which some judged impressive, others annoying. "I felt like I was back in the age of Cosima," sighed one despondent critic.