Barenboim turns his guns on Bayreuth

william osborne says:

The restraining order placed on Eva that bars her from the grounds of Bayreuth is indeed grotesque. In German it’s called a Hausverbot. For some reason, the practice isn’t uncommon in Germany’s cultural institutions. It’s something like a shunning, a total form of exclusion. Some even associate it with high artistic ideals.

Wolfgang Wagner, the great, great grandson of Wagner, did two things that set in motion the destruction of the Wagner family’s legacy of ruling Bayreuth. The first was the divorce of his first wife, Ellen Drexel, to marry Gudrun Mack, who was a secretary in the festival’s press department. This deeply alienated his daughter Eva and their relations never recovered. The second problem was Wolfgang’s bitter and unrelenting opposition to the progressive ideals of his son Gottfried who was to be the heir of the festival. Wolfgang was eventually banished from the family, leaving the festival without its next generation of leadership.

Gottfried received a Ph.D. in theater studies, with a special focus on the work of Brecht and Weil. This could not have been more anathema to Wolfgang’s far right views. In his autobiography, Gottfried quotes his father as saying, “Hitler cured unemployment and restored worldwide respect for the German economy. He freed our people from a moral crisis and united all decent forces. We Wagners have him to thank for the idealistic rescue of the Bayreuth festival.”

After blacklisting by HUAC, Brecht had settled in East Germany in 1949 and collaborated with the government. As with most people with Nazi sympathies, Wolfgang possessed a deep hatred of anything as “Bolshevist”. Gottfried also studied Jewish history, founded a post holocaust discussion group, and worked in Israel. Wolfgang banned Gottfried from the family villa (which is on the grounds of Bayreuth) in 1975. The family continued to enforce Gottfried’s banishment after Wolfgang’s death. Gottfried was not even allowed to attend his father’s funeral.

Unfortunately, there’s an even larger part of the story. After the war, Bavaria became something like the national redoubt for Germany’s Nazis. A special party called the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) was formed just for Bavaria that has exclusively ruled the state to this day. The party’s motto is often stated as, “So far right as the law allows.” With a kind of wink of the eye, the implicit assumption is made that it would go farther if not restrained. After the war, many unrepentant Nazis quickly found that the American occupational authorities were willing to discretely work with them, a practice that was continued by the CSU. The CSU continues to maintain a far right stance because any deviation to the left would allow extremist parties to come into power, causing problems similar to those faced in Austria.

In this climate, Bayreuth continued to hold a special significance for the right and far right, so the attacks on Gottfried did not come only from his family. He was also constantly attacked and demeaned in the Bavarian press. In 1983, he left Germany and settled in Italy.

So where has all of this led? We see reported efforts by Katharina Wagner to make Christian Thielemann the GMD of Bayreuth, a conservative nationalist who has expressed sympathies for the far right, xenophobic group Pegida. It would seem that Wolfgang is seeing the victory he long sought – something that must also please the more unfortunate side of Bavaria’s political landscape.

I find this unfortunate because the perspectives of Gottfried would probably have been very beneficial for Bayreuth. The productions of Wagner’s work Gottfried has done for other houses have been true to the score and relatively conventional. He is somewhat eccentric as a person, but no radical as a director. Brecht created one of the most substantial and respected bodies of theatrical theory in the 20th century. Interpretations of Wagner influenced at least to some degree by Brecht’s theories would have revealed important dimensions of Wagner’s work. A synthesis and continuation of German theatrical art and concepts would have been continued. This work would have also been especially beneficial for the reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Wagner family and Bayreuth. Through Wolfgang’s lack of repentance and the continuation of a far right political climate in Bavaria, Gottfried was banished and these opportunities lost.

DESR says:

My dear old thing, if Chancellor Merkel can say blithely of Britain’s desire to change whole European treaties “Where there is a will, there is a way!” I fancy this little local difficulty will not prove a three pipe problem.

Perhaps she could mediate?