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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
