Biography:Up to the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Richard Wagner's immediate family and descendants, holding court in their hulking villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth, saw themselves as the guardians of the Holy Grail and the pinnacle of pure Aryan culture.
The composer's great-granddaughter, Nike Wagner, saw them more as a "diffusely 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".
Jonathan Carr, a scrupulously fair-minded biographer, who has researched the history of the clan like no other and gained access to some hitherto unpublicised documents, modifies Nike's vituperation by pointing out that at least some Wagners had a sense of justice or ironic humour. What he has to tell, though, goes a long way towards confirming Nike's image of a Gothic-horror Addams family, starting with the opinionated and brash Richard Wagner himself, who felt he had the God-given right to hold forth on every topic under the sun without fear of contradiction. "Like a spoiled brat," Carr writes, "Wagner could never bear to be away from the centre of attention, sometimes emitting a piercing scream simply to shut up guests who had the effrontery to chat among themselves."
It was Richard who set the anti- Semitic tone in his family. In 1850 he published a pamphlet called Jewishness in Music, in which he railed not only against his own erstwhile mentor, Giacomo Meyerbeer, but also Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, claiming that even converted Jews could only produce superficially pleasing work but never truly profound German art. (He omits to mention Mendelssohn's great service to German Christian music in reviving interest in the largely forgotten Johann Sebastian Bach by conducting his St Matthew Passion in 1829 in Berlin, the first performance since Bach's death in 1750.)
WAGNER, LIKE SO many other racists, contributed to the bizarre inversion of the roles of perpetrator and victim in his allegation that the Jews, who made up only 1.25 per cent of the German population and wanted nothing other than civic emancipation, were "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".
Curiously enough, those family members who went out of their way after Wagner's death to consolidate the "Master's" anti-Semitism as an integral part of their mission to "regenerate" mankind through his music were added to the Wagner clan by marriage. But not only that: they were also non-Germans, confirming the adage that converts make the most fanatical adherents to a cult. His wife, Cosima, who ruled the Bayreuth roost till 1906, was French-Hungarian, her son-in-law, the proto-fascist ideologue Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was English, as was her daughter-in-law and Hitler-idoliser, Winifred Williams. It was Cosima, going further than even Richard himself, who stipulated that only Wagner's music could be performed in the Bayreuth theatre, and then only his Gesamtkunstwerke, based on German national myth, and not his early, more conventional operas. Chamberlain over-identified with his new Heimat so much that he came to believe "the best thing that could happen to the British would be defeat by the Germans with their deeper and truer culture" (Carr). In 1902, he wrote to the vainglorious Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany could achieve complete control of the world by "bringing the nation to a final break with the Anglo-American ideals of government"(ie democracy).
It was mainly Siegfried to whom Carr is referring when he speaks in defence of certain members of the dynasty. Taking over the directorship from his formidable mother, Cosima, he was amicable and non-discriminatory, a fact that drew snide remarks from Hitler and Goebbels, who had both become frequent visitors to Wahnfried and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as early as the 1920s. They called him feminine, "good-natured" (used in a pejorative sense), decadent, politically passive and spineless in comparison with his fanatically National Socialist wife, Winifred, whom both Nazi leaders adored and courted. The adoration was mutual. Winifred still spoke wistfully of her beloved "Wolf" (the Wagners' endearing nickname for Hitler) as late as 1975. But Siegfried took it all lying down, as the Nazis were instrumental in keeping Bayreuth running throughout the second World War, often by packing the theatre seats with bored and snoring SS officers.
AFTER THE WAR, the directorship was taken over by Richard's grandsons, first by Wieland (not without a characteristically bitter internecine struggle) and then by Wolfgang. Both of them made attempts to modernise the productions but also busily brushed the Nazi past under the carpet, in keeping with the general amnesia of the Adenauer period. It fell to the fourth generation to bring forth outright rebels against the whole fusty and narcissistic aura of Bayreuth: first cousins Nike and Gottfried Wagner, the former in her frustration at being sidelined in one of the many takeover bids, the latter in the iconoclastic spirit of the 1968 student rebellion.
Thus Carr's book presents the Wagner clan as a microcosm of Germany itself, from the 1848 revolution to the present, by contextualising the various historic stages of the Wagner cult superbly. A former correspondent for the Financial Times and the Economist in Germany and a recipient of many press awards for his reports on the country, Carr packs his account with information but always bears his immense knowledge lightly. The book is thoroughly readable and hard to leave down.
Eoin Bourke is emeritus professor of German at NUI Galway and author of The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature, which was published by Arlen House, Galway, in 2000
The Wagner Clan By Jonathan Carr Faber & Faber, 409pp. £20