Reclaiming Wagner

At the end of World War II, the opera house that Richard Wagner built himself on a green hill in Bavaria was a sad place, one with a tainted past and a doubtful future. Physically damaged and morally ravaged, the Festpielhaus in Bayreuth mirrored the wreck of Germany itself. The annual summer festival of Wagner’s operas, which the composer had inaugurated in 1876, had come to a dead stop. It was difficult to imagine how it could ever be revived.

There was a lot of troublesome recent history to cope with first. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s British-born daughter-in-law who inherited the management of the Bayreuth Festival from her husband Siegfried, was an ardent Nazi. In 1933, she greeted Germany’s newly puissant chancellor with a celebratory opening-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, complete with raised-palm salutes. Hitler felt at home in Bayreuth. He loved Wagner’s town, Wagner’s music and Wagner’s family, and the weeks spent immersed in the composer’s legacy were always the high point of his year. Winifred placed herself, her two sons Wieland and Wolfgang and the resplendent family name at the service of the Führer’s greater glory, and received generous subsidies in exchange. And the Reich provided more than money. So strongly did Hitler feel about Wagner’s vision of German national mythology that he got personally involved in the selection of conductors and stage directors.

At the beginning of “Das Rheingold,” the first of the four operas that make up “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” a low E-flat major chord murmurs primordially. It’s the sound of a world being born in the deep bed of the Rhine. But what sort of world? Hitler heard in those chords the sound of a burgeoning Aryan empire. In 1951, when Herbert von Karajan raised his baton to release that same hushed rumble during the first postwar festival, the passage intimated an old culture’s rebirth. Germany required a new creation myth. Instead, it retrofitted an old one.

To resurrect Wagner meant to rescue him — and by extension, Germany — from the memory of Nazism. For many, Wagnerism and Germanness overlapped to such an extent that they were almost indistinguishable. Winifred remained a cultural hero to the remnants of the Nazi old guard, but she was too politically unpalatable to remain in charge. The festival devolved to her sons, and especially to Wieland, who set out to wrest his grandfather’s legacy from his mother’s poisonous philosophy. He found redemption in spare, abstract stagings that hovered somewhere between neoclassical austerity and timeless modernism. “Rheingold” began in the dark, from which a mandala of brilliance grew. There was not a breastplate or horned helmet in sight.


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