The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty (review)

The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty. By Nike Wagner. Translated by Ewald Osers and Michael Downes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. [xix, 327 p. ISBN 0-691-08811-X. $29.95.]

Nike Wagner, one of Richard Wagner's thirteen great-grandchildren, confirmed her entry in the race to succeed her uncle Wolfgang as director of the Bayreuth Festival by publishing the German edition of this book in 1998 (Wagner Theatre [Frankfurt: Insel, 1998]). For the American edition, she has brought the story of her family up to the year 2000.

Before offering her version of the Wagner family saga, the author offers 128 pages devoted to interpretations of the operas performed at Bayreuth—intended as evidence, perhaps, of her fitness to produce them. In ten unrelated "program notes" (which make almost no reference to Wagner's music), she subjects the plots and characters of her great-grandfather's operas to a variety of cultural and psychological interpretations. Born in 1945, Nike Wagner holds a Ph.D. in literature from Northwestern University. She has written on Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, and is interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, and modern European cultural theory. Her analyses of Wagner's characters—and of his family—depend heavily on Freudian theory.

The most interesting of these essays are the two devoted to Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which she concentrates on three episodes of either physical or "psychic" incest: between Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan and Brünnhilde, and Siegfried and his aunt Brünnhilde whom Siegfried regards (in Nike's reading) as both mother and lover. This Freudian focus illuminates the troubling, rhapsodic power of their scenes together, which (the author posits) allowed the composer to translate blissful, unstable moments of god-into-man transcendance into music of sublimely sensuous if unfulfilled longing.

Even more to the point of this book is her concluding assessment of Wotan, which one cannot help but also read as her assessment of her uncle, Wolfgang Wagner.

The scandalous aspects of the story of The Ring are that a father is trying to use his children to prevent his own end, that an old man sweeps young people to death with him, that a ruler makes his descendants pay for his mismanagement. . . . The cycle plays out the drama of misused and lost children, both on the political and psychological plane; it is an allegory for the string of disasters triggered when a power-hungry authority refuses to abdicate or to prepare a succession for a different and more just world. (p. 78-79)

The crimes and excesses of this most dysfunctional of artistic dynasties have been chronicled and criticized before. Two earlier accounts are those of Nike's aunt Friedelind (Nacht über Bayreuth: die Geschichte der Enkelin Richard Wagners [Bern: Hallwag, 1945], called Heritage of Fire: The Story of Richard Wagner's Granddaughter for America [New York: Harper, 1945], and The Royal Family of Bayreuth for Britain [London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948]); and Nike's cousin Gottfried (Wer nicht mit dem Wulf heult: autobiographische Aufzeichnungen eines Wagner-Urenkels [Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997], translated as Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family Legacy [New York: Picador USA, 1999]).

These different and highly personal memoirs focused on the pro- (or proto-) fascist and anti-Semitic attitudes and actions of the whole Wahnfried clan, from Richard Wagner and Cosima down through their son Siegfried and his wife Winifred, and to their sons Wieland and Wolfgang. The latter two (by all accounts) worked hard to clear the Bayreuth air of noxious nationalist gases after the war. But in the accounts of Friedelind, Gottfried, and (now) Nike, both brothers are still regarded as tainted, marked by the family curse. Wolfgang's own memoirs (Lebens-Acte [München: A. Knauss, 1994], or Acts: The Autobiogaphy of Wolfgang Wagner [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994]) are primarily a self-flattering record of his own achievements as an opera producer and manager...