Gottfried Wagner He who does not howl with the Wolf

by Edward W. Said

Gottfried Wagner is ’s great- Then, after Wieland’s untimely death in 1966, the grandson, and an extraordinarily unhappy fellow. So un- Festival is directed by Wolfgang who, according to his ag- happy in fact that his book is an unrelieved jeremiad against grieved son, undid Wieland’s achievements and returned his family, especially his father Wolfgang, now the head of to a basically reactionary state, its conventional the Wagner establishment in Bayreuth, as well as his great- designs and productions essentially appealing to the grandfather the composer, a loathsome anti-semite; German establishment for whom the Festspielhaus, with Gottfried’s English grandmother Winifred, an arch-re- Arno Breker’s outlandish quasi-Nazi bust of Richard deco- actionary pro-Nazi admirer of Hitler, and pretty much rating the entrance, would remain an unreconstructed everyone who has had anything to do with the perfor- temple of racist ideology. mance of Wagner’s operas in the twentieth century. Very few people associated with the performance No one seems to sympathise with or understand of Wagner’s operas come off well, according to Gottfried. poor Gottfried, whose wish somehow to atone for his He accuses most of them either of concealed pro-Nazi family’s ghastly history leads him from one disastrous ex- sentiments or of unalloyed sycophancy and oppor- cess of groveling or aggressive assertion to another, most tunism. When his father hires two distinguished Jew- of them the result of his uncertain talent as regisseur, musi- ish conductors for Bayreuth -Daniel Barenboim and cologist, and intellectual historian. He, of course, blames James Levine- they earn the young man’s excoriation his unsuccessful career as opera director, polemicist, as ‘alibi-Jews’, imported into the Wagner shrine as a token and public scold on his father’s malign influence and the of appeasement for an unsavory past. None of the great man’s apparent omnipotence. Every production of Bayreuth Ring productions meets with young Gottfried’s Gottfried’s that fails (and most of them do), every nasty approval and because he is so stingy in his accounts of critique of his work, every personal misfortune, is blamed their work we are not given an opportunity to understand on Wolfgang’s baleful reach, his amazing power as the head why. On one occasion, for instance, he enjoys listening to of ’s most important cultural institution, the Tristan in the Festspielhaus ‘although’ Barenboim was con- Wagner festival at Bayreuth from which he has banished ducting. This is neither criticism nor analysis: it is slander- his son, and blighted his future. He Who Does Not Howl ous insult. And so for page after page. is unsparing both in its messy details and in the aggrieved One wishes that his domestic life were more inter- tone with which they are remorselessly delivered. It makes esting, but it isn’t. He goes from one marriage to another, for decidedly unpleasurable reading. he adopts a disadvantaged Rumanian boy, he makes new It cannot have been easy to have been the ne- friends and, of course, many many new enemies, and works glected youngest son of a driven, unpleasant man who fitfully as a shoe salesman, bank employee, assistant di- seemed to have carried the weight of the Wagner rector, itinerant lecturer. He is accorded a period of redemp- legacy, including his affinity for fascism, on his shoul- tion when, sanctimoniously but entirely predictably, he trav- ders. First there was Wolfgang’s competition with his els to Israel to lecture and atone in public for his family’s gifted brother, Wieland, who almost single-handedly manifold sins. He gives lectures on his great-grandfather’s scrubbed the great music-dramas clean of their dread- anti-semitism, on Nietzsche and Liszt (who is his great- ful past in