Illustration by Tim Bower

Dirty, sexy opera

In Germany, Wagner is worshiped like a god. His scheming, squabbling descendants are another story.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Music, Laura Miller, Adolf Hitler, Germany, History, Nazis, opera, Reviews, Book reviews, Biographies

Jan. 15, 2008 | You can't blame an author for claiming that the true story he's about to tell you will "more than match the most lurid episodes of 'Dallas' or 'Dynasty,'" but you might take it with a grain of salt. However, when one of the actual participants describes the story as the saga of an "expanding family hydra, a selfish, pretentious mass with prominent noses and thrusting chins ... in which fathers castrate sons and mothers smother them with love ... in which men are feminine and women masculine and in which a great-grandchild nibbles on the liver of another great-grandchild" -- well, that's when you know they're talking about the Wagners.

The 19th-century Romantic composer Richard Wagner has a relationship to Germany unlike that of any other artist to his or her native land. To many, he's not just the nation's greatest composer, but its greatest artist of any kind, the personification of the (idealized) German soul. When the West German president Walter Scheel gave the keynote address at centenary ceremonies for the Bayreuth festival in 1976 he felt obliged to observe that Wagner was no more than "one of the most important German composers," but even Scheel soon lapsed into drawing mystical equations between Wagner and his homeland. Scheel spoke in the opera house at Bayreuth, the Mecca of Wagnerians, a site that has been devoted exclusively to Wagner's works for the past 132 years. That comparison to Mecca is not made lightly -- Scheel provoked disapproving gasps when he told the assembled worshipers that he didn't regard Bayreuth as "the spiritual center of the world."

It's the exalted, semi-divine reputation of Wagner (in some circles, at least) that makes the often sordid and reprehensible behavior of his descendants so fascinating. He saw himself as the epitome of the Romantic ideal of the artistic genius: child of destiny, redeemer of humanity, law unto himself. If Shelley called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," Wagner thought that the creator of Gesamtkunstwerks ("total works of art") like his operas ought to be not only acknowledged but venerated. By combining music, words and drama into an aesthetically, emotionally and spiritually overwhelming experience, Wagner believed that a profoundly inspired artist such as himself could "regenerate" a society -- specifically, the German people -- restoring the nobility and heroism of the past.

Few modern human beings have claimed a status so godlike, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, an early friend and devotee of Wagner's, soon became disgusted by the composer's pretensions, likening the receptions at the first Bayreuth festival to "papal audiences." But Nietzsche was only there to begin with because Wagner's music -- epic, enveloping and mystical -- is capable of instilling quasi-religious feelings; he felt it too. After Wagner died, his family decided to match life to art. They turned up the idolatry to 11, carefully buffing all the ignominious aspects of his past out of official accounts, and presiding over the Bayreuth festival in a dynastic succession. Jonathan Carr's fiendishly enjoyable "The Wagner Clan" describes the history of this dynasty, as plagued by scandal and treachery as the snarling millionaires in any prime-time soap opera.

The first hierophant was Wagner's widow, Cosima, the illegitimate daughter of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, arguably the greatest pianist of his time. Although every bit as emotionally extravagant as her husband, Cosima had a taste for renunciation that Wagner attributed to her Catholic upbringing. She also had a will of granite. No woman could have been better suited to serve as Wagner's selfless handmaiden in both life and death -- and his death surely facilitated her hero-worship. While Wagner was alive, it was more difficult to ignore the fact that despite his generosity, warmth and talent, he was also, in Carr's words, "a lying, spiteful philanderer" with a hair-trigger temper and a whopping sense of entitlement. It is only after they die, remember, that saints can be properly canonized.

In addition to the highest possible regard for his genius, Cosima also shared the most risible of Wagner's flaws: his anti-Semitism. Wagner published some hate-filled tracts on the subject during his life, and he once wrote to his (unreceptive) patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, warning that Jews are "the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man: it is certain that we Germans especially will be destroyed by them." Nevertheless, Wagner had Jewish friends and allies, and was willing to hire Jewish conductors, musicians and performers when they proved to be superior to the gentile alternatives. At times, he wrote or spoke admiringly of Jews, or suggested that all would be forgiven if they allowed themselves to be "purified" by Christianity. For these (not entirely persuasive) reasons, Carr describes Wagner's feelings on the subject as "muddled and inconsistent."

Cosima's anti-Semitism, by contrast, he calls "chillingly implacable." Whenever anything went wrong, "from supplies of rotten food for the army to a badly tuned instrument, as like as not Cosima found 'Israel' or 'Jewish revenge' behind it." She had "almost none" of her husband's "fondness for individual Jews," and made the "purity" of Bayreuth -- culturally, musically and racially -- one of the festival's primary selling points. As an added bonus, any management difficulties she encountered, from poor box office receipts to bad reviews, could be blamed on Jewish conspiracies against the Master's vision.

Cosima reigned over the festival for 23 years, a period considerably longer than her actual marriage to the composer, and more than anybody else, she cemented the worshipful tone at Bayreuth. She also drew into her orbit the English anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an "effective string-puller" (as Carr puts it) who wrote a bestseller titled "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," one of those books that attains great success by bewailing the decadence of modern life. As Chamberlain saw it, history consisted of a mighty, ongoing conflict between the noble Aryans and assorted lesser races, particularly the Semites. His theories would galvanize the burgeoning Nazi ideologues who, in turn, mourned him extravagantly when he died in 1927.

Chamberlain also produced a highly selective biography of Wagner as part of the "campaign of revisionism and distortion" orchestrated by Cosima. Cosima, Carr claims, regarded Chamberlain as a "soulmate," but had no intention of remarrying and thereby forfeiting her status as Wagner's devoted widow. So she married him off to her daughter Eva, who had spent her life functioning as her mother's factotum. "It is hard," Carr writes, "to avoid feeling that, for Chamberlain, the daughter remained to the end something of a proxy for the mother."

Although she retired for reasons of poor health in 1906, Cosima lived until 1930, ensconced in the upper floors of Wahnfried, the family's marmoreal home in Bayreuth, and retaining the informal title of "Hohe Frau" or "Exalted Lady." Her son by Wagner, Siegfried, took over the directorship of the festival, abandoning his youthful ambition to become an architect, and devoting his life to living under his father's shadow. (Carr argues that Siegfried, along with several other lesser-known players in this saga, has gotten short shrift from history, their talents and achievements undervalued.) Named for the half-savage, dragon-slaying, anvil-splitting hero of Norse saga, Wagner's only son was an easygoing, modest and good-humored chap, not the sort of man you'd pick first for a job that required wrangling the hardcore Wagnerians opposed to any variation of the traditional presentation of the Master's works.

Then there were Siegfried's affairs with men, including an ill-fated romance, culminating in a six-month voyage through Asia on a merchant steamer, with a brilliant young British musician whom Carr suspects of being "the love of his life." Fortunately for the Wagner dynasty, Siegfried was bisexual and, just as a newspaper was about to expose his secret sex life, he married a much younger woman and promptly fathered four children.

Siegfried's wife, Winifred, was, like Cosima and Chamberlain, a foreigner. Cosima was French and Hungarian, and Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner were English. Joined to the Wagner clan by marriage rather than blood, all three were far more fanatical in their devotion to the Wagnerian notion of "the German spirit," and more vehement in their hatred of Jews than any of Wagner's direct descendants. All three had disconnected, peripatetic childhoods (none more so than the orphaned Winifred), and Carr speculates that they compensated for their primal experiences of homelessness by seizing fiercely onto their chosen "Fatherland."

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