Simon Callow on the controversial birth of the Wagner cult

Telegraph

27-05-2025

It takes some chutzpah to write an opera about Richard Wagner, that titanically complex figure (both as man and musician) who took opera to places it had never been before and rarely has since. Among the many problems is an obvious one: do you quote your composer's music, or attempt pastiche? Or ignore it altogether?
In Wahnfried (2012), whose British première is being given at the fiercely enterprising Longborough Festival Opera in the Cotswolds this week, the composer Avner Dorman circumvents this problem by starting with the old ogre's death in 1883. His focus is the baneful evolution of the Bayreuth Festival into a stronghold of extreme Right-wing ideology, ultimately endorsed and personally protected by Hitler, for whom Wagner's work was the embodiment of everything in which he believed.
During his lifetime, Wagner himself was hardly untainted by extremist thinking. His noxious 1851 pamphlet Judaism in Music, in which he compared Jewish musicians like Mendelssohn to vermin feeding off a corpse, had caused such a furore on its first appearance that the publisher withdrew it; undaunted, Wagner had it expanded and reprinted nearly 20 years later.
Until nearly the day he died, he was wont to erupt into anti-Semitic tirades. And yet, with typical contrariness, he surrounded himself with Jewish colleagues; indeed, the first conductor of Wagner's last anguished and ecstatic opera Parsifal, dripping with Christian imagery, was Jewish: Hermann Levi. As Levi took his place in front of the orchestra for the dress rehearsal, Wagner was unable to refrain from remarking, quite audibly, to his wife Cosima: 'I don't know what I'd feel if I was being conducted by a Jew.'
And yet he repudiated militarism and the Imperial pretensions of the new German Reich; his contradictions were legion. With his death, any ambivalence disappeared. His widow was a far more proactive anti-Semite than Wagner, and after his death in 1883, the Bayreuther Blätter, Bayreuth's inhouse magazine, became, with her encouragement, an increasingly strident conduit for the naked assertion of ethnic purity, with its concomitant proclamation of the supremacy of the Teutonic race.
It is the alarming figure of Cosima who dominates the first act of Wahnfried. The opera's title is the name of the house Wagner built for himself in Bayreuth. Freedom from Illusion is the conventional translation, and in a sense, for Wagner it was just that: he had his grave dug in its garden in anticipation of what he felt to be his imminent demise, and would often go and stand in it for whole hours at a time.
For Dorman and his librettists, the house's name is grotesquely ironic. First, under Cosima then, as she became frailer, under her son Siegfried, Bayreuth became increasingly associated with militant chauvinism. Siegfried's wife Winifred was an early and ardent partisan of Adolf Hitler, leader of the newly formed National German Workers Socialist Party. In 1923, she invited him to Bayreuth. His first port of call, however, was to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman resident at Bayreuth, author of an idolatrous biography of Wagner, whose volubly expressed racial theories he had embraced.
With the publication of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a two-volume outline of racial theory, Chamberlain himself became an international celebrity; the book was immediately acclaimed as a sort of bible of anti-Semitism, which naturally recommended him to the residents of Wahnfried. He never met his idol, but was eagerly welcomed by Cosima, who saw him as a useful idiot: 'we need a St Paul to establish this cult.' In 1908, Chamberlain abandoned his first wife and in the fullness of time married Eva, Wagner's first daughter with Cosima, which sealed his position as a central prop of the Wagner establishment. Hereinafter, he was the Sage of Bayreuth.
Meeting Hitler, the Sage pronounced him 'Germany's saviour, the messiah of a counter-revolution.' This overwhelmed the gauche young Hitler: Wagner's music was the soundtrack of his life. In Mein Kampf, he recounts his first exposure to it: Lohengrin, the story of a mysterious outsider who finally attains the Holy Grail. Him, to the life. Seeing Rienzi, the story of a man of the people who defies the ruling class to lead his country, he felt that he had been given a vision of his own destiny. (He appears to have paid less attention to the end of the opera, in which Rienzi and his loyal followers retreat to the Capitol, where they burn to death).
Hitler in turn made a great impact on his first visit to Bayreuth, above all with Winfred, who submitted helplessly to his fabled charisma. Their intense relationship, particularly after the death of Siegfried at the relatively early age of 61, ensured that Bayreuth was explicitly associated with Nazism – endorsed it, indeed. That relationship kept the Festival going, almost to the bitter end. Shortly after their first Bayreuth meeting, Hitler and his cronies attempted a putsch in Munich, for which they were jailed. From prison, Hitler wrote to Winifred to thank her for her support. Bayreuth, he said, was 'on the line of march to Berlin… a place where first the Master then Chamberlain forged the spiritual sword with which we fight today.'
This is the remarkable and disturbing history which Dorman, who is Israeli-American, and his librettists confront in Wahnfried. Dorman's personal relationship with Wagner's music is complex: growing up in Israel, the child of three generations of Holocaust survivors, he was immersed in German music; the family played Schumann and Beethoven and Brahms, but never Wagner. Eventually, in America, where Dorman now lives, he encountered it and found, unsurprisingly, that his response to it was complex. He felt, as he puts it, that Wagner's position in music was unclear. Wahnfried is an exploration of that anomaly.
Dorman says that writing the piece presented almost insuperable challenges. 'How does one write an opera in which one despises all the characters, all of whom see themselves as Wagnerian heroes?' His musical solution is to cut against the grandeur and breadth of much of Wagner's own music: the opera begins with four penny whistles tootling away.
'Treating this material,' observes Justin Brown, the conductor and commissioner of Dorman's opera, who is also at the helm for the Longborough production, 'requires a certain grotesqueness – a circus atmosphere. The beginning is actually jazzy. And very difficult to play. [Dorman] loves that: he's never happier than when writing something impossible.'
The slide whistles have important work to do: the articulation of Chamberlain's racist pronouncements, Dorman says, is almost too heavy to handle: 'hence the slide whistles, which permeate the piece the way Chamberlain's ideas do.'
The libretto's masterstroke is to introduce a figure called the Wagner Daemon who, says Dorman, represents the multi-faceted Wagner we know about, 'the Richard Wagner who actually lived.' In the opera, the Daemon attacks Chamberlain, telling him that he's completely missed the point. The Daemon is an almost simian figure, as was Wagner himself, who loved to terrify his guests by climbing up the side of the house or vaulting over the seats in the Festspielhaus. Dorman's Wagner-Daemon is clownish, getting together for a raucous reunion with Bakunin on the barricades, where indeed he had fought side by side with the great anarchist while still Court Musician to the Saxon king. And finally, he tells Chamberlain that he has completely missed the point about Wagner's racial theories.
For Longborough, this production is a great coup. As Keith Warner, director of Covent Garden's mid-2000's Ring cycle: 'How many new operas are so funny, deeply moving and earth-shattering in one?' For Dorman, Wahnfried is driven by the need to comprehend 'the musical civilisation he helped to bring into existence. It's part of my history, part of my identity.'