This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Some are born Nazi, some achieve Nazidom … but Richard Wagner, it appears, had Nazism thrust upon him. The issue of exactly how many world wars/fascist regimes Uncle Dick was personally responsible for is never going to get stale, of course, but this month a fresh take bursts upon us at Gloucestershire’s own boutique Bayreuth, Longborough Opera.
Avner Dorman’s opera Wahnfried (premiered at Karlsruhe in 2017) details — in absurdist revue style — the beginnings of what you might call the toxification of Wagner’s legacy, a particular feast for fans of cherchez la femme, who will be gratified to learn that the whole Adolf pivot was not Richard’s fault at all but entirely that of his widow and daughter-in-law.
Well, the idea that Nazism is essentially a female thing will hardly be news to anyone who is, for example, married. Of course Wagner’s own hands were not exactly spotless, given his well-known feelings about Jews, best expressed in the charming Jewishness in Music pamphlet.
Anyway, starting at the top, Wahnfried was the name Wagner chose for his last home at Bayreuth, the little Bavarian town he lit on for the celebration of his works until the end of recorded time.
The name is usually rendered as “Peace after madness” or something, though of course “Dunravin” works much better in every way. Bad choice, though: the crazee stuff was just beginning, with this loony bin the nexus and symbol of everything that would go tits up in Germany over the next 50 years.
The fun started immediately after his death in 1883. Control passed to his widow Cosima, with her own anti-Semitic obsessions (rather more adamantine and less nuanced than Richard’s theoretical maunderings) unleashed for the remaining 47 years of her life.
Illegitimate Cosima’s upbringing — dumped by her parents (Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult) on an ancien régime-devoted Parisian crone — had created a bigoted, haughty devotee of masochistic self-sacrifice, acolyte as much as wife and chilly muse.
Her first meeting with Wagner had been noteworthy: Liszt, visiting his 13-year-old daughter and her siblings for the first time in nine years, weirdly brought with him Hector Berlioz and Wagner (then 40), who, to entertain the poppets, read them his new Götterdämmerung “poem”; followed (perhaps) by jelly and a raucous game of sardines.
Years later, grimly married to conductor Hans von Bülow, Cosima fell under the spell of their “eccentric, fatherly friend” Wagner, running off to live with him in Lucerne.
After Richard’s death in 1883, she turned Bayreuth into the pilgrimage shrine it has remained, transforming it from aesthetic powerhouse to nationalist one, the spiritual centre of the young Germany: like Stratford, Camelot and Westminster Abbey rolled into one, Wagner’s œuvre the culmination of a thousand years of German culture — a role it maintains in its own estimation and in the uneasy subconscious of many Germans.
A big fillip came with the advent of the now-excised-from-history English wacko Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who like Cosima had abandoned his birth identity to become ferociously German. His 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which charted the triumph of Europe in racial terms (co-opting Romans, Greeks and Jesus as full-on Aryans), was Kaiser Bill’s favourite bedside book.
Intoxicated by Chamberlain’s description of him as “Aryan warrior-king”, a Siegfried in “battle against the corrosive poison of Judaism”, Bill happily returned the compliments: “God sent your book to the German people, just as he sent you personally to me.”
Chamberlain, fuelled by his own anti-English fury, pushed Wilhelm’s “Anglophobic, anti-Semitic, Germanophile ideas to the point of murderous lunacy”, as Ian Buruma puts it.
Wagner-worshipping Chamberlain would surely have married Cosima, but her status as the faithful widow was too precious. Undaunted, he hitched up with her daughter Eva and moved in next door. Soon, the last bit of the jigsaw slotted in.
Rumours about the chorus-boy-related behaviour of Cosima and Richard’s son Siegfried, now 45, made a swift marriage desirable, so in 1914 the 17-year-old English orphan Winifred Williams was conjured up for the role.
Somehow, Winnie wrung four children from Siegfried’s loins (and the Bayreuth reign of her son Wolfgang ended only with his death in 2010) and knocked Cosima and Chamberlain out of the park in the dodgy-pals stakes through her long-term love-in with A. Hitler.
This story never stops giving: a youngish Hitler — known as “Uncle Wolf” — getting pulled into the Bayreuth orbit in the early Twenties, acting out Grimm Brothers bedtime stories for Winnie’s children Wolfgang and Wieland (“What was it like to sit on the Fuhrer’s knee?”, the conductor Otto Klemperer asked them after the war) and, later on, mulling his plans for Poland with the help of the lads’ school atlas.
The only character who comes out not smelling too bad is the amiable Siegfried, who at least picked Adolf for a wrong ’un. But Siegfried died in 1930, and Winnie’s Bayreuth became the Light Entertainment HQ of the Third Reich.
It didn’t stop there — not by any means. This Bavarian Southfork is now run by Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina, whose cousin Nike — sidelined like many another relation — talks of “one great-granddaughter nibbling on the liver of another … ”
Dorman’s Wahnfried gives us the start of this terrific story: there’s surely room for about three sequels — with a bunch more jokes than The Ring.
