Great music, bad people: why Richard is polarizing Wagner

“Richard Wagner is the most controversial artist of all time.” With this sentence begins a thirty-year-old book by the American ex-diplomat and historian Frederic Spotts about the festival in the Franconian Bayreuth, which the composer founded in 1876 and where his operas are still performed every summer – and only this one.

Such a double superlative is questionable. In the case of Richard Wagner, that is the case. He is judged more controversially than virtually any other artist. You can fill libraries with books about him. And it should stay that way forever. Because Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813 and died in Venice in 1883, is an absolutely unique figure.

And an idol for many, but especially for fascists. Adolf Hitler adored him. The murderous Russian Wagner mercenaries, whose boss Yevgeny Prigozhin (probably) died last week, are named after him. For fans of his music, this is a difficult dilemma to bear. And certainly not the only one.

“Her great-grandfather Richard Wagner’s work could always be interpreted in many ways,” said Katharina Wagner, current director of the Bayreuth Festival (which has always been led by at least one member of the family), in a guest article for “Die Welt “. Now this tradition is experiencing a “terrible comeback” in Russia.

The music is an important aspect. Some are still annoyed by it, they experience it as a flamboyant and confused soundscape, but psychologists testify to a high addiction factor. His works are ubiquitous on the agendas of the opera houses. Because Wagner is a crowd puller, also for the author of these lines.

My taste in music is very broad. I can get a lot out of hip-hop myself (you can only chase me with techno). But if I had to choose a favorite composer, I wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond and say: Richard Wagner! Just revisited the festival in Bayreuth and got my money’s worth.

This was also due to the Ukrainian (!) Oksana Lyniv, who furiously conducted Wagner’s early work “The Flying Dutchman”. A statement against war and Prigozhin? Lyniv took the stage at the premiere two years ago, becoming the first woman in the history of the festival. But now Katharina Wagner should secretly congratulate herself on her election.

The “Dutchman”, staged by the Russian (!) Dmitri Tcherniakov, is considered relatively unproblematic, but illustrates part of the problem. For his operas or music dramas (he was one of the few composers who wrote the texts himself), Richard Wagner mainly used material from the Germanic-Nordic culture.

In doing so, he gave it an unmistakable twist of his own. This applies in particular to his four-part mammoth work “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. National ideas can be found in two operas: “Lohengrin” and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”, which polemicize against the “French tooth bit” and invoke “sacred German art”.

But the real problem with the “Meistersinger” is the character of Sixtus Beckmesser, who is nothing more than a nasty caricature of a Jew. For example, in the 2017 Bayreuth production, Jewish director Barrie Kosky showed him in the battle scene at the end of the second act, with an explicit allusion to the Nazi incendiary newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’.

Because Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite. In his pamphlet “Judaism in Music” he claimed that Jews could not create their own art. And he whispered about their “demise”. No wonder some see a direct line from Wagner to Auschwitz. No wonder that Wagner’s works can hardly be played in Israel.

According to great-granddaughter Katharina, Wagner’s “notorious anti-Semitism” made him attractive to fascists. It wasn’t the only problematic aspect of his personality. Richard Wagner was an egomaniac. He was convinced of his genius, loved luxury and lived beyond his means. He repeatedly had to flee from his creditors.

This did not prevent him from blatantly deceiving even admirers and patrons. Among them was the merchant Otto Wesendonck, who lived in Zurich. Wagner was given ‘asylum’ by him after taking part in the 1849 uprising in Dresden. It was in Zurich that Wagner experienced perhaps his most productive years, but he also became involved with Wesendonck’s wife Mathilde.

Wagner therefore had to leave Zurich in 1858. Years of artistic and financial failure followed, before he found a new mainstay in 1864 in the young Bavarian King Louis II (the one with the castles). But he also started an affair with Cosima, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow.

He fathered an illegitimate daughter with her. For the Bavarian government, which was a thorn in Wagner’s side with his arrogant (monetary) demands, this was a welcome excuse to expel him from Munich. Ludwig did this with a heavy heart, but he continued to pay and enabled the construction of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.

After Richard’s death, the widow Cosima (she had married him after their divorce in Lucerne, where they had since lived and had two more children) became the “guardian of the Grail”. She led the festival to artistic and financial success, but she was as much of a fanatical anti-Semite as her husband, and disaster followed.

Bayreuth developed into the high mass of Germanism. Frederic Spotts describes the festival in his book as “cloud cuckoo land of crazy nationalism”. However, the picture was not black and white. Jewish artists were not wanted and were nevertheless engaged, such as conductor Hermann Levi or singer Friedrich Schorr.

That was also due to Siegfried, the only son of Richard and Cosima. He was gay and had affairs with men who then blackmailed him. So he had to be married off to the young English Winifred Williams. He begat two sons and two daughters by her, secured the succession, and then returned to his real interests.

Meanwhile, Winifred found a “replacement,” none other than Adolf Hitler. She admired him early on, and the later “Führer” tolerated it because he was an ardent “Wagnerian”. He came regularly to Bayreuth and the Wagners became a surrogate family for him. Siegfried and Winifred’s children called him “Uncle Wolf”.

Siegfried Wagner, a tolerant and cosmopolitan by nature, became increasingly critical of this, but died of a heart attack in 1930 at the age of 61, just a few months after his mother Cosima. Since the sons were still minors, Winifred took over the running of the festival, and disaster once again took its course.

The Bayreuth Festival flourished artistically thanks to state aid, but morally sank to an all-time low. Richard Wagner became the soundtrack to National Socialism, although “virtually the only person in the party who really liked Wagner’s operas was Hitler himself,” as Frederic Spotts’s book puts it.

After the Second World War, the festival was discredited. Winifred Wagner probably only escaped prison because he helped Jewish and gay artists (it was never black and white in Bayreuth). But she remained a Hitler admirer. In her dealings with other old Nazis, she used the term USA – Our Seliger Adolf.

But her sons Wieland and Wolfgang (Katharina’s father) managed to restart by “cleansing” the festival of the German national stench. They also tolerated being booed by the traditional Wagnerians. Katharina Wagner continues this line, this year with a new “Parsifal” production with AR technology.

There are still question marks over the future of the festival. For decades, as a ‘normal mortal’ you hardly had a chance at a ticket. Bayreuth was notoriously overbooked. Some performances were not sold out this year. Terms such as “card crisis” and “slow seller” circulated in the German media.

The reasons for this are complex. So the tickets are very expensive. And maybe it’s the location. Richard Wagner chose Bayreuth, which was quite remote, so that only true ‘believers’ made a ‘pilgrimage’ to its operas. That is a disadvantage nowadays, because Bayreuth is, to put it somewhat polemically, a Frankish provincial town.

There are no luxury hotels, no gourmet restaurants and no ICE train station, because the railway to and from Nuremberg is not electrified to this day. For today’s spoiled event crowd, this may not be enough. And the Festspielhaus with its hardwood seats in the non-air-conditioned hall is an “imposition”.

But nowhere else can you experience Wagner as authentically as in this ‘barn’ with its difficult and incomparable acoustics. There were and are failed productions, but if everything goes well, you will experience great moments, such as this year during the performance “Tannhäuser”. After the magnificent final applause, it was clear to me: I will definitely be back.

You have to live with the contradiction between Wagner’s music and its abyss, which make him susceptible to abuse by fascists like Prigozhin or rather his neo-Nazi partner Dmitri Utkin, who made the unfortunate choice of name. No one has described the dilemma more perfectly than another American, the Jewish conductor, composer and charismatic Leonard Bernstein: “Richard Wagner, I hate you! But I hate you on your knees.”