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Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Wahnfried, review: Getting to the ugly heart of Wagner
What do you do when you've done the Ring? Longborough Festival Opera has built a great reputation for its economical stagings of the operas of Richard Wagner's Ring, and completed its latest cycle last year. This season, they have shaken up their programming by importing a contemporary opera that starts with the German composer's death in 1883 and takes us to the 1920s with the rise of Nazis. This ambitious if flawed 2017 work by composer Avner Dorman and librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz, receiving its UK premiere, tackles the contentious and difficult issues around Wagner's legacy and influence, notably his anti-Semitic views. The main character is the fiercely racist British writer and philosopher Houston Chamberlain (a huge role for Mark le Brocq, magnificently sustained). Described by critic Alex Ross in his fine book Wagnerism as a 'British botanist turned Symbolist Wagnerite turned German racial ideologue', Chamberlain idolised the composer and left his first wife to marry Wagner's youngest daughter Eva (both wives are played by Meeta Ravel here). The important question the opera raises is how much Chamberlain, through his writings, was a decisive influence in ensuring that Wagner's anti-Semitic racism was by taken up by the Nazis, or whether Wagner would have achieved that all on his own. Dorman's lively, spiky music and Polly Graham's energetic direction turn Chamberlain into a deluded individual, whose quest to be seen among the German greats of Goethe and Kant is doomed to fail. In the relentlessly skittish first act, we see the Wagner family at the family home of Wahnfried in the wake of the composer's death, fighting and struggling to craft his legacy. This mission is led by his restrained wife Cosima (Susan Bullock) who is trying to erase his revolutionary past and form his biography with the help of Chamberlain. The music here echoes 1920s neo-classicism and the edgy spirit of the Weimar Republic, plus a few pre-echoes of The Rake's Progress. Act Two offers some deeper set-pieces in a solo lament from a conflicted Siegfried Wagner (powerfully declaimed by Andrew Watts), who is hiding his sexuality and is expected to be a great composer like his father, and in the confrontation between Chamberlain and Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor whom Wagner had supported and who premiered Parsifal (Edmund Danon, strongly serious). Wagner himself hovers in the background in the form of the ever-jokey green ghost the 'Wagner-Daemon' (an agile Oskar McCarthy), smirking at his family's pretensions and putting Chamberlain in his place as a mere footnote to history. Inevitably this story leads towards the appearance of a none-too-heavily disguised youthful Hitler – known as the 'Master's Disciple' (Adrian Dwyer) – visiting Wahnfried in 1923 and proclaiming Wagner as his inspiration. Siegfried's wife Winifred (Alexandra Lowe) is immediately besotted with him. The orchestra explodes sonically, but the implications of this disturbing moment for the future are left unexplored. There is total commitment from the cast, with fine singing and acting throughout; Justin Brown, who commissioned the opera, conducts with vigour, and the orchestra, community chorus and young actors bound with energy. But, because this clever show fails to elicit sympathy for these unattractive characters – least of all Wagner – there is an emotional emptiness at its heart.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wahnfried review – madness, monstrousness and a mischievous Wagner daemon
The Israeli-born Avner Dorman's opera focuses on Richard Wagner's clan and the composer's legacy after his death, together with the family in-fighting presided over by his widow, Cosima, at the family home, Wahnfried. When the idea of the opera was first mooted, Wagner's great-granddaughter Eva approved it, 'as long as Cosima doesn't come out of it very well'. She doesn't, almost no one does, and certainly not the extraordinary and appalling figure of Houston Chamberlain. Chamberlain is so little known that he could be a figment of librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz's imagination, yet the opera's historical veracity is impeccable. The English Germanophile, a failed scientist and admirer of Wagner, inveigled his way into Cosima's household, eventually marrying Wagner's daughter Eva. He was, through his writings on German supremacy, a crucial architect of the antisemitism and hatred that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler admired and upheld. From the outset, when Chamberlain appears as a naive and ridiculous bumbler who believes that the order of the world is for the strong to kill the weak, the tenor of the narrative is chilling and deeply disquieting, despite moments of clowning black humour. As Dorman observed at the time of the world premiere in Germany in 2017, the same horrors are being perpetrated in the world today – and so much ignored – making Longborough Festival Opera's UK premiere and director Polly Graham's brilliant production important and all the braver. The irony in the opera's title is implicit. Wagner named his home in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Wahnfried, meaning free from delusion, but this is a portrait of madness writ large against a background of blood-red velvet drapes. The deluded fervour first of the Wagnerites and then of Mark Le Brocq's Chamberlain – simply a tour de force – is monstrous. Le Broq and Susan Bullock's imperious Cosima are a hateful pair, their philosophy of hate for the Jews carefully delineated. It's Chamberlain who pushes Cosima to banish her daughter Isolde, spirited into a Tardis-like box with the demand that she reimagine herself in keeping with the true Wagner ethos; he too insists on her brother Siegfried's homosexuality being hidden. Andrew Watts's impassioned aria to his lover is a focal point, while the picture of Siegfried's hardly idyllic marriage to Winifred Williams – the better known figure here for her insidious cosying up to Hitler, sung by the formidable Alexandra Lowe – is a further marker of the authenticity of the piece. Written in 20 scenes, each setting flagged up on a small blackboard, the driving energy of the second of two acts is the more convincing. Dorman's music, multifaceted in its references – Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Wagner himself – is incisive, with often brittle instrumentation, and dynamically paced by conductor Justin Brown. The impeccable stagecraft carries the evening, but there are two characters who haunt Chamberlain to inject a further dimension. Hermann Levi – the Jew who conducted the Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal, the opera that became core to the family wrangling – is sympathetically portrayed, embracing the terrible and ever-present contradictions, perhaps an alter ego for Dorman. But it is the mischievous figure of Oskar McCarthy's Wagner-Daemon, the composer's familiar after death, whose disapproval brings a lighter note. It's his final judgment that Chamberlain, who aspired to be counted alongside Kant, Goethe and Wagner himself, will – like all Wagner's heroes – ultimately be a failure. It was Dorman, taking a bow at the curtain call, who was greeted as a hero. Until 14 June
Telegraph
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Simon Callow on the controversial birth of the Wagner cult
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.'
Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Can Wagner and his family ever escape the shadow of the Nazis?
The idyllic setting of Longborough in the Cotswolds has long been the place to see Richard Wagner's epic music dramas. A statue of the German composer is even perched on the roof, looking down on effigies of those minnows Mozart and Verdi. A man with no small sense of his own greatness, Wagner would have loved it. But this summer the festival is pushing Wagner off his plinth. A new opera,Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult, is a provocative examination of his legacy by the 50-year-old Israeli composer Avner Dorman. First performed in Germany in 2017, Wahnfried will get its UK premiere in a new production by Polly Graham, the daughter of the Longborough founder Martin, who died in April. What can
