Tony Palmer: The Wagner Family
Family Ties
Siegfried and Winifred Wagner.
The Wagner Family
Directed and edited by Tony Palmer
Gonzo Multimedia TP-DBD172 (106 Minutes, NTSC All Regions)
Watching various interviewees talking about the Wagner legacy in Tony Palmer’s The Wagner Family is akin to viewing the Japanese film Rashomon
The film’s interviewees and Wagner scholars agree that The Richard Wagner Foundation needs to fully disclose all historical documents related to the Wagner family and the Richard Wagner Festival.
Gottfried Wagner, a central figure in the film and Wolfgang Wagner’s maverick son, is among those who strong believe that completely opening up the archives would resolve questions about the family’s tainted past.
Missing Documents
Among the undisclosed documents are materials spirited out of Bayreuth in 1976, when Winifred and daughter Verena packed up private papers and sent them to Munich. This cache includes correspondence involving Hitler and Siegfried and Winifred Wagner. Although Katharina Wagner has promised more openness little new information has publically disclosed.
Wieland Wagner’s daughter, Daphne, seen later in the film, complains about disclosure of some information about the family. And in another interview Wolfgang claims that the outspoken Gottfried has come under Jewish influence and bans him from the Festspielhaus.
One-Sided Story?
When Wagner scholar and critic Barry Millington reviewed a partial version of the film shown in London in 2009, he wrote that it was one-sided because it relied too heavily on comments made by a group of disaffected Wagners. Millington also felt the film should have included contemporary interviews with Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, who now jointly run the Bayreuth Festival.
Although the film acknowledges that members of the Wagner family saved the festival at various critical times in its history, acidulous commentary by Gottfried, Nike, and Daphne Wagner about Bayreuth’s legacy of anti-semitism and collaboration with the Nazis create a distinctly unfavorable image of much of the family.
Wolfgang is criticized for his alleged Stasi-like management of the festival after Wieland’s death and Nike relates how Wolfgang destroyed the scenery from Wieland’s productions. But this is hardly unique at Bayreuth. In 1981 the festival’s press officer told me scenery from all old productions is destroyed; only costumes were kept and rented to other companies.
Certainly Palmer’s reliance on Gottfried for so much of the film’s narration weakens its objectivity, especially given the rift between Gottfried and Wolfgang, which deepened after Gottfried published Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy in 1997. (Palmer’s film was made before Wolfgang’s 2010 death.)
Palmer balances the record somewhat by having Friedelind point that that Richard Wagner would have been appalled by the Nazis and had nothing to do with them, as indeed Friedelind did when she left Germany after the Nazi invasion of Poland. The film recounts her wartime anti-Nazi activities and the frosty reception she received when she returned to Germany in 1953 and very importantly includes footage from interviews with Friedelind.
Gut Churning
Author Robert Gutman’s assertion that Parsifal depicts a black mass was preposterous when his book, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music
A short interview with Dagny Beidler helps counterbalance the appearances by Gutman and Wagner family members with axes to grind. Beidler is the granddaughter of Isolde von Bülow and conductor Franz Beidler. Speaking with grace, charm and wit, Dagny recounts Isolde’s unsuccessful paternity suit against Cosima in 1913-14.
Tabloid Father
The tabloid-style antics of several generations of Wagners have been documented in Jonathan Carr’s 2007 book, The Wagner Clan
Director Jürgen Flimm recalls how he had to suspend Ring rehearsals to pay obeisance to Wolfgang’s wife Gudrun on her birthday. Gudrun, Wolfgang’s heir apparent before her death, is excoriated by several Wagners for being ill-suited for her administrative duties at Bayreuth.
But the film’s most provocative content is its recounting of how anti-semitism and German nationalism infected Bayreuth. Houston Stewart Chamberlain married Cosima’s daughter Eva and became Bayreuth’s resident anti-semite and the festival turned into a gathering place for German nationalists.
Later, as Hitler began his ascent to power, Winifred Wagner, who was running the cash-strapped Bayreuth Festival, became a soul mate (or more) with Hitler. As the Germans say, “Eine Hand wäscht die andere”.
It is ironic that Cosima and Winifred, two strong-willed women who had disruptive childhoods, saved the Wagner Festival at separate times but also helped steer the Wagner clan into repugnant anti-semitic and fascist alliances.
The film notes that Hitler made war-related decisions during his visits to the festival. As he planned the invasion of Poland, Hitler consulted Wolfgang’s geography book. A few years earlier, the plan to assassinate Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was developed during one of Hitler’s Bayreuth sojourns.
But Wieland was “the big Nazi of the [Wagner] family”, author Brigitte Hamann alleges, partly because he was named as a director at the Flossenbürg camp. (Wieland’s exact role at the camp remains speculative; disclosure of World War II records could clarify his activities.) Hitler planned to name Wieland as the director of all theaters in western German-held lands after the war. Wolfgang was to have headed theaters in eastern countries.
The Wagner Family includes excerpts from other films, including Palmer’s lengthy biography, Wagner, recently re-mastered and re-released, and the director’s Parsifal – The Search for the Holy Grail. There are also excerpts of the unrepentant Winfried defending her actions in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975. “Hitler helped us,” Winifred declares in the Syberberg film. “There would be no Bayreuth without Hitler.”
Magic Fire
Palmer deftly uses excerpts from Lohengrin and the Ring that were originally in The Magic Fire, a biographical film about Wagner. Erich Korngold, who was Jewish, appears as a Wagner conductor in the 1945 film. Palmer’s inclusion of these excerpts during The Wagner Family and in the end credits is a reminder that Wagner’s music transcends racial ideology.
Reviews (2009 London screening of The Wagner Family)
- London Evening Standard (Barry Millington – includes a Wagner family chronology)
- Times of London (Neil Fisher)
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