The idyllic setting of Longborough in the Cotswolds has long been the place to see Richard Wagner’s epic music dramas. A statue of the German composer is even perched on the roof, looking down on effigies of those minnows Mozart and Verdi. A man with no small sense of his own greatness, Wagner would have loved it.
But this summer the festival is pushing Wagner off his plinth. A new opera,Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult, is a provocative examination of his legacy by the 50-year-old Israeli composer Avner Dorman. First performed in Germany in 2017, Wahnfried will get its UK premiere in a new production by Polly Graham, the daughter of the Longborough founder Martin, who died in April.
What can a devoted Wagnerian expect, I ask Dorman when we speak ahead of rehearsals. “Well, they will learn more about the Wagner family dynamics after his death — what being a ‘Wagnerian’ in Germany meant,” he says. “Most people probably know that links have been made between Wagner and the Nazis, between Wagner and Hitler. This opera delves into that: what is the connection?”
It’s the sort of gigantically hairy topic that you could write vast tomes on — and indeed several people have — but Dornan’s approach is (thankfully) more uproarious than scholarly. Although based on real history and events, “the opera itself takes a grotesque, theatre of the absurd approach”, he says. He calls it an “anti-Wagnerian opera”, noting that where Wagner wanted to immerse you in a mythic world of heroes and gods, Wahnfried holds up its characters for dissection and, to some extent, ridicule.
• The best musical, dance and theatre shows to book now
The Wagner clan and its hangers-on — centred on the house Wagner built in Bayreuth, named Wahnfried (meaning “freedom from delusion”) — were quite the bunch. His wife, Cosima, is blamed by many for polluting her husband’s legacy with her political and artistic conservatism in the decades that followed Wagner’s death in 1883 (she lived until 1930). Then there was Houston Chamberlain, who married Wagner’s illegitimate daughter, Eva. He was a virulently antisemitic Brit who espoused the superiority of the German race, attracting the interest of a failed watercolourist named Adolf Hitler. There was also the man whom Wagner chose to conduct his last opera — Hermann Levi, the son of a rabbi. Despite his credentials, he was badly treated by many of the inner circle. In Dorman’s opera he is hounded with screams of “Jew, Jew, Jew!”
These scenes caused some consternation at Wahnfried’s premiere. “Some people wanted to take that out — they said it was too much. But I said we can’t ‘nice-ify’ this,” Dorman says. His grandmother fled Germany on the last Kindertransport. “I remember her telling me stories of being chased down the street — being yelled at like that — Jude, Jude, Jude.”
Was there anyone among the generation of Wagners who followed the composer who wasn’t a rotten egg? “It’s a good question. I think you can have empathy for Fidi [Siegfried], Wagner’s son. He was most likely gay and was expected to take on the [Bayreuth] festival and become a great composer. He was not a great composer and he did not want to get married to a woman.”
• The best classical concerts and opera: our reviews
But while the characters on stage are mostly a nasty bunch, the overall message from Dorman and his librettists is an attempt to understand how the memory of “the Master” (Wagner) has been deployed, twisted and abused. There’s no doubt that Wagner espoused antisemitic ideas, encapsulated in his essay Judaism in Music, which he notoriously republished under his name in 1869. Wahnfried shows Chamberlain marrying into the family and allying them to political and racial ideas that may well have appalled the composer.
“The Wagner that the Wagnerians and the Nazis create is not ultimately the Wagner that we had to have,” Dorman concludes. “Making Wagner into this flat, racist character misses a big part of who he was and what he actually did.” He thinks such sweeping judgments have polarised opinion: “The conversation needs to be more informed, less either ‘Oh, Wagner is fantastic and we must never say anything bad about him’, or ‘We have to boycott Wagner and anyone who plays Wagner is awful’.”
It’s a position that’s particularly acute for Dorman given that Israel, where he grew up, preserves an unofficial ban on performing Wagner. Daniel Barenboim managed to smuggle some Tristan und Isolde into a concert in 2001, an act that the mayor of Jerusalem called “arrogant and unacceptable”. Wagner remains in deep freeze in Israel, even though, as Dorman points out, “many Israeli people drive German cars and have German washing machines, and the companies that made them were part of the Nazi apparatus”.
Dorman grew up in Tel Aviv, in what he calls “a very German household”. He played and studied Schubert and Bach (his father played the bassoon with the Israel Philharmonic), and read Goethe and Nietzsche. But Wagner was absent from his cultural life, an omission that crystallised a kind of Israeli-German-Jewish “identity crisis”, he says. “So in some ways writing this opera was an inquiry into how all these things can live together. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I know so much more about it.” He recalls the first big performance of his work in Germany. “I told my grandmother and she said, ‘Why would you want to have our music played in Germany at all? Why would you want to give them anything of yours?’”
• Read more opera reviews, guides and interviews
Dorman notes starkly that themes that may have appeared remote when he started thinking about Wahnfried in 2013 are now front and centre. “I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams that the antisemitism, and these tropes that are in the opera, would be on social media — that they would be adopted by people who once again believe they are at the forefront of progress. To witness it come back is shocking.”
Raking over the toxic Wagner clan may yet prove a wake-up call. “So many people are blind to antisemitism,” Dorman says. “Perhaps a work about how antisemitism took hold 100, 120 years ago will help people see.”
Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult is at Longborough Festival Opera, Gloucestershire, from May 27, lfo.org.uk
