Biography: 'Who was Winifred Wagner and why is there a book about her?" the reader may ask. To put it simply, Winifred Wagner was an English orphan raised in Germany who married Siegfried, the son of Richard Wagner, thus becoming the matriarch of the dynasty that ran the Bayreuth Wagner Opera Festival until 1973, when it was taken over by a trust.
But that's the simple part. The complex part is that Winifred Wagner was inextricably tangled up with the NSPAD, the Nazi Party in Germany, she was on du terms with Adolf Hitler, and yet she readily helped many Jewish sufferers of persecution under the regime, often using her influence with Hitler to intercede directly. How she managed to get into this extraordinary situation is revealed in this riveting book.
Her story begins when, in 1907, as a nine-year-old orphan, she was sent from Sussex to Berlin to stay with distant relatives, Karl and Henriette Klindworth. Herr Klindworth, an elderly pianist, had been a close disciple of Richard Wagner's and so the girl grew up not only with a passionate love for Wagner's music, but with a powerful sense of German nationalism also.
When taken to her first Wagner Opera at Bayreuth aged 17, she met the 45-year-old Siegfried Wagner, son of Richard and himself a composer.
For Winifred it was love at first sight and a year later the couple married, despite the 26-year age difference. Thus she was plunged aged 18 into an ultranationalist household that had as its members Cosima Wagner (a rabid anti-Semite and the daughter of Franz Liszt and the widow of Richard Wagner), Siegfried Wagner (her equally anti-Semitic composer son, with a chip on his shoulder, who thought the reason his music wasn't performed was part of a Jewish conspiracy, when in fact it just wasn't as good as his father's), Eva Chamberlain (Siegfried's sister), and finally Eva's husband, Houston Chamberlain (Neville Chamberlain's cousin, an English Germanophile writer and race theorist who was the intellectual leader of the nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Germany and who would only talk to Winifred in German in spite of their shared mother tongue).
Now a part of the family business, Winifred settled herself in to do her bit, which, as far as mother-in-law Cosima was concerned, was to produce heirs - which she dutifully did, one per year between 1917 and 1920.
But after the end of the first World War the Bayreuth festival was close to bankruptcy and that might have been that, if Adolf Hitler hadn't also shared a passionate devotion to the music of the Master.
In 1923, the rising dictator paid his first visit to Bayreuth and thus began a relationship with the Wagner family that was to continue for the next 22 years (although Hitler's relationship with Richard Wagner's music began 10 years before that when he attended a performance of Rienzi in Linz, which he always maintained was the event that provoked him to enter politics; he obviously saw himself as a Rienzi type figure who would unite the German people and lead them out from under the yoke, etc).
In any case, Hitler needed the Wagner family's political support, and the Wagners needed Hitler's. They fell under his spell, Winifred especially so; by the time of her meeting with Hitler she had realised that, frustratingly, Siegfried was homosexual and it is suggested that she had fallen in love with Hitler.
There is no evidence that the infatuation was mutual, but there is no doubt that in the Wagner household Hitler found the only people that he could relate to as a family, and there are numerous accounts of his visits to Wahnfried, the Wagner family home, where he would play with the children, or sit around the fire with the family members until four or five o'clock in the morning, indulging in monologues which everyone seemed to find entrancing.
From 1930, the year of Siegfried's death, Winifred herself took over the running of the festival, which was again almost bankrupt, that is until she persuaded Hitler to step in and subsidise it. He did so using state funds from 1933 until 1944 (yes, even through the war, when the audiences consisted of wounded soldiers), and in the process made Bayreuth one of the centres of German politics during the Nazi epoch. The passages in the book that relate to the political spin-doctoring necessary to persuade conductors such as Furtwangler, Tietjen, and Toscanini to actually talk to each other, let alone to work together, are superbly dealt with.
Winifred herself had become a hard-headed administrator and managed the festival with flair, but if the dealings with festival musicians are riveting, what is one to make of the rows within the Wagner family itself? As the children grew up, each one wanted their own form of control over the festival, and the vicious squabbling which took place during and after the war and until the Trust was established in 1973 is worthy of any soap opera.
Extraordinarily, even when it must have been obvious how Hitler's state-controlled eugenics programme and anti-Semitic policies were at work, Winifred somehow managed to separate in her mind the horrific policies of Adolf Hitler the dictator from the behaviour of the man she knew as Wolf, or USA - Unser Seliger Adolf ("Our beloved Adolf"). In a famous film that was made in 1975, towards the end of her life, she is heard to say (she wasn't aware that the tape-recorder was running), "If Hitler were to walk in that door now . . . I'd be as happy and glad to see him and have him here as ever, and that whole dark side of him, I know it exists, but it doesn't exist for me because I don't know that part of him . . ." an attitude that was described by one commentator as "punishable stupidity".
In spite of her undeniable charitable acts (and there were many) towards individual sufferers under the Hitler regime, there was an ugly streak running right through the woman, and as her intellectual capacities diminished with age she became more and more intolerant, her circle of friends consisting only of people from the old Nazi network.
Historian Brigitte Hamann has approached her subject with powerful sensitivity and scholarship and the translation by Alan Bance flows swimmingly.
Fergus Johnston is a Dublin-based composer who is currently working on a piece commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland for their 2006 Brahmsfest programme
Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth By Brigitte Hamann, translated by Alan Bance Granta, 582pp. £30