Peace breaks out in Wagnerian feud

Adolf Hitler was an infamous patron of the festival, yet it still takes up to ten years to get a ticket for the event and the family clan that has run it since 1876 has been immersed in Germany's most publicised - if not operatic - internecine feud for nearly half a century.

Today, however, peace descended on the so-called “Green Hill” of the Bayreuth Music Festival, one of the main highlights of Germany's operatic and social calendar that is reputed to have been sold out every year since the controversial composer Richard Wagner founded it.

After decades of infighting, the board of the Bayreuth festival ruled that Katharina and Eva Wagner, the composer's great granddaughters from different marriages should assume control of the event, following the decision of their 89-year-old father Wolfgang to step down last week.

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Katharina Wagner, 30, who organised the first web broadcast of Wagner opera this year and her half sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, who is artistic director of the Aix en Provence music festival pledged to improve the artistic quality of the strife-torn event.

“Our aim is to make Bayreuth the quintessence and standard bearer of Richard Wagner's musical dramas,” the two women said in a joint statement. They announced that Christian Thielemann, the internationally renowned German conductor would serve as their chief advisor.

The announcement appeared to have finally brought an end to over four decades of feuding within the Wagner family over the running of the festival and nearly a decade of fierce rivalry over who should succeed Wolfgang Wagner, the grandson of the composer, as director of the event.

The future of the festival was in doubt right up until yesterday's deadline after Nike Wagner, 63, Wolfgang Wagner's niece submitted a counter-bid for control of the event with the renowned Belgian director Gerard Mortier. She claimed that her cousin had “gone behind her back” to become the front runner.

The composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima launched the festival in 1876 and resided in their famous “Wahnfried” villa in the city which like the festival, rapidly became a magnet for opera lovers from throughout Germany and abroad.

Hitler became a fanatical Wagner fan in the early 1900s. He regarded the reputedly anti-Semitic composer as a genius who had managed to capture the nation's Germanic soul in his music. Biographers say that he likened listening Wagner's work to a mystical or religious experience.

By the 1930s, the Nazi leader was a regular visitor to Bayreuth. He became a close friend of the British-born Winifred Wagner (nee Williams), the wife of Richard Wagner's son Siegfried. Winifred, who is reputed to have shared Hitler's anti-Semitism, referred to the Nazi leader by the nickname “Wolf”. There were even rumours that the two would marry.

Hitler responded by turning Bayreuth into a cultural Mecca for the Nazis. The festival was given special status and funding. Winifred referred to Hitler as “our blessed Adolf” and kept a framed photograph of the Nazi leader on her desk right up until her death long after the war. She never questioned her support for Hitler with whom she corresponded frequently. The Wagner family has refused to release them, preferring to keep the locked in a bank vault.

The music of Richard Wagner has since never managed to shed its associations with the Nazi era. The foundation that runs it has always stipulated that a Wagner family member should run the event. But Bayreuth is nowadays one of Germany's key cultural occasions. Its programme runs for only a month each summer but attracts the nation's artists and the political and business elite.

Chancellor Angela Merkel who is an ardent Wagner fan and frequent visitor, chose the event to appear for the first time in public with, her normally reclusive husband Professor Joachim Sauer.

Winifred's sons Wolfgang and Wieland were handed the reins of the festival when it reopened after World War II. Wieland was considered the true heir to Richard Wagner and regarded as a genuine creative genius. Yet he died in 1966 and sole control was then given to the less gifted Wolfgang.

Almost from then on, the Wagner family's feuding became almost as well known in Germany as the composer and his festival. Wolfgang's son, Gottfried Wagner would have been his father's natural successor at Bayreuth. However Gottfried disgraced himself early on the “Green Hill” by publishing details of Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism and of Winifred's fanatical admiration for the Nazis.

Yet the family feuding had hardly started. Nike Wagner, the daughter of Wolfgang's talented brother Wieland, followed up with a blistering attack on Wolfgang in which she described him in true Wagnerian-style as “the shadow attached to Wieland's heels, the demon who sucked the blood from his veins in the full light of day, the sprite he had crushed a hundred times but who always returned to his feet.”

The battle for control of Bayreuth began in earnest in 2001, after Wolfgang flatly refused to accept the board's suggestion that his daughter Eva should step in to replace him. Nike waded in with an initial counter bid. However Wolfgang rejected them both.

In the interim he had remarried his secretary and press officer, Gudrun Wagner and she had given birth to Katharina, their daughter. Until late last year, Wolfgang had doggedly refused to accept the board's recommendations, first attempting to install Gudrun as his successor and latterly, the tall, blonde, Teutonic-looking Katharina.

Nike's acid response was that Gudrun, who had by then become the eminence grise of Bayreuth, had reached her position “not through art and culture but via the nuptial bed”. Then last year and wholly unexpectedly, Gudrun died.

Katharina was given her debut at the festival and promptly turned out a somewhat controversial version of Wagner's celebrated “Meistersinger von Nuremberg” which featured singers equipped with strap-on penises. Earlier this year Wolfgang finally accepted a board recommendation that Eva and Katharina should take joint control of the festival.

Katharina told Germany's mass circulation Bild newspaper last week that she wanted to show that Wagner was “all about stories with dragons, heroes and magic powers.” She added: “I want to start a massive debate about Bayreuth's past. Why did Hitler love Wagner and how come the Nazis had such an influence?” she asked.

Despite yesterday's official end to hostilities, there is plenty left within the clan Wagner for further controversy - if not another feud.