Number 202: July 2011 - Wagner Society of England

THE DIABOLICAL DYNASTY
Review of Tony Palmer’s DVD “The Wagner Family” by Chris Argent
Robert Lepage’s set (“The Machine”) consists of 24 “planks” able to rotate
independently about a horizontal axis across the stage to provide level, sloping, angled, or
moving surfaces. representing trees, walls, rocks etc.
During This could hardly be said to be a story of simple country folk. As families go,
the Wagner Clan (as Jonathan Carr labels them) have to be unique. And there could be no
more comprehensive exposition of the collective schizophrenia that has to be tolerated by
Wagnerian aficionados than Tony Palmer’s devastating critique enshrined in his film The
Wagner Family. Proceeding from generation to generation with viewpoints provided either
by living members of the family or from biographies (and their authors thereof) of those who
preceded those currently in residence in Wahnfried, the tale is simply of disharmony and
mutual antipathy.
Tony Palmer starts the story in 1870 when Richard Wagner married Cosima von
Bulow and follows it through until Wolfgang Wagner’s recommended successors, his
daughters Katharina and Eva Pasquier-Wagner, inherited his crown. The film well illustrates
the thesis that the rulers in Bayreuth were every bit as autocratic as the Russian Tsars and, in
the way Wolfgang sought to erase all evidence of Wieland’s reign in Bayreuth after his
brother died, reminds one of the behaviour of successive Egyptian Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt
in seeking to obliterate all record of their immediate predecessor.
The stories and the legends may well be intermixed and slanted according to the
retailer, but what really emerges is that generation by generation there has been a singular
lack of goodwill, harmony and happiness in the Festspielhaus on the Green Hill and in the
home built for Richard Wagner with monies extracted from Ludwig. What is also made clear
with worrying clarity is that, but for the two grand dames sucked into the family, Cosima
from Hungary and Winifred from England, the Bayreuth Festival would have ceased to exist
in 1883 when Richard died and again in 1923 when Siegfried (the illegitimate but Cosimasanctified
heir) died – the other potential heirs having been ruled out of their potential
inheritance by the lady from Hastings.
The film thus presents us with a dilemma: are we content to patronize an artistic
establishment that has such a shameful history? Without Cosima’s arrogance and Winifred’s
cunning we would not have the opportunity today (however limited it is for mere mortals) to
hear Wagner’s compositions for which he built the theatre. That history is splendidly set out
in the film, which features inputs from many of the characters in the plot starting in the Red
Corner (those ashamed of all the Wagner family machinations) with Gottfried (Wolfgang’s
son), Friedelind (Siegfried’s daughter) together with, a little late in the day, Nike (Wieland’s
daughter). In the Blue Corner, evidently proud of their intrinsic anti-semitic leanings and
their truck with Hitler, are the rest (Winifred, Siegfried, Wieland, Wolfgang and many of their
descendants). The composer himself has to be excluded from the latter list as he was almost
certainly torpedoed into his anti-Semitic writings by Cosima.
The well-known story of how Cosima behaved after Wagner’s death in Venice and
then took command of the Bayreuth Festival by diktat is retailed (with relish) by Gottfried,
as is the account of how Winifred Williams, the orphan from Hastings was inducted into the
bed of Cosima’s homosexual son and heir in order to defuse the threat of blackmail by Verena
and her husband Bodo Lafferentz who were apoplectic after being excluded from the
Wagnerian inheritance by Cosima’s cosmic fiat. If one didn’t know that the carryings-on in
Bayreuth were true, it would be hard to credit the shenanigans that took place between RW’s
death and that of his second grandson Wolfgang on the evidence adduced by Tony Palmer
(including tit-bits from Wieland’s mistress Anja Silja).
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