The Wagner Family
- Episode aired Sep 14, 2009
YOUR RATING
A clan of musical misfits, who ran a world-famous festival, and provided the only hearth and home that Hitler ever knew.A clan of musical misfits, who ran a world-famous festival, and provided the only hearth and home that Hitler ever knew.A clan of musical misfits, who ran a world-famous festival, and provided the only hearth and home that Hitler ever knew.
Photos
Wieland Wagner
- Self - Wagner's Grandson
- (archive footage)
Winifred Wagner
- Self
- (archive footage)
Storyline
Featured review
Wagneritis
ITV is not meant to charge a licence-fee, yet there's still a hidden duty to pay before we're allowed to hear anything about Wagner. We must all sit properly in church, while Melvyn Bragg reminds us that the composer's anti-semitism 'is still unforgivable' - what we might call a masonic sign ("Surely you're one of us holy socialists.") But once through the barrier, we're free of Bragg in this untypical episode of the South Bank Show, not a personal interview for once, but the study of a genuinely intriguing family history.
It all starts when Wagner's only (gay) son Siegfried is showing reluctance to marry and produce the all-important heir to the great dynasty. An English teenager Winifred is presented to him as a willing bride, and he eventually gets round to marrying her, delighting the opera world with two sons and two daughters in four years.
His duty done, Siegfried returns to his old life, and Winifred becomes fixated by a new politician who is trying to revive German morale by invoking the Teutonic legends - as brilliantly set to music by Wagner. He is the little-known Adolf Hitler. Before long, he has become her attentive escort, but as his star rises, he feels that Germany alone can be his bride. By the outbreak of war, the two daughters are grown up, one of them looking (bizarrely) like another possible candidate for Mrs. Hitler, this time ruled out because he disapproves of wide age-gaps. The other is disgusted by Hitler and escapes to America, where she makes anti-Nazi broadcasts, of which we get a short and fascinating clip.
Postwar, it is the elder son Wieland who must undertake the onerous task of re-starting the festival, with its equivocal reputation, and he makes a good job of it too. But he dies young, apparently troubled by guilt about his war record, however successfully it was kept secret. Now it's Wolfgang's turn, and sibling rivalry isn't the word, as he demolishes all his brother's work. But it's his son Gottfried with whom he quarrels much more violently, and who is essentially the narrator of this programme, ending on him asking quizzically "Can you be proud to be a Wagner?"
It is almost comic to hear Winifred admitting that she supplied notepaper to Hitler in jail, while denying that he used it to write 'Mein Kampf'. It is too late for her to try to distance herself from the regime, when we hear that many political decisions were taken in the family home beside the opera-house, Hitler using her son's school atlas to monitor troop movements.
A few editing quibbles. Wieland's daughter Nike is wrongly captioned as Winifred's niece; she was of course her grand-daughter. The acoustics also let us down occasionally; I think I heard there was a paternity question over one of Wagner's step-daughters, but I'm not sure. And what about that weird picture of the opera-house with the windows blocked-out by swastikas and a huge picture of the Führer above the door? If that is not vandalism, we are certainly due some explanation.
So what about the verdict on Wagner? There is no doubt that his operas did lead to the Third Reich. And so did the invention of the cotton-gin lead to the American Civil War, without turning boy-wonder Whitney into a war criminal.
It all starts when Wagner's only (gay) son Siegfried is showing reluctance to marry and produce the all-important heir to the great dynasty. An English teenager Winifred is presented to him as a willing bride, and he eventually gets round to marrying her, delighting the opera world with two sons and two daughters in four years.
His duty done, Siegfried returns to his old life, and Winifred becomes fixated by a new politician who is trying to revive German morale by invoking the Teutonic legends - as brilliantly set to music by Wagner. He is the little-known Adolf Hitler. Before long, he has become her attentive escort, but as his star rises, he feels that Germany alone can be his bride. By the outbreak of war, the two daughters are grown up, one of them looking (bizarrely) like another possible candidate for Mrs. Hitler, this time ruled out because he disapproves of wide age-gaps. The other is disgusted by Hitler and escapes to America, where she makes anti-Nazi broadcasts, of which we get a short and fascinating clip.
Postwar, it is the elder son Wieland who must undertake the onerous task of re-starting the festival, with its equivocal reputation, and he makes a good job of it too. But he dies young, apparently troubled by guilt about his war record, however successfully it was kept secret. Now it's Wolfgang's turn, and sibling rivalry isn't the word, as he demolishes all his brother's work. But it's his son Gottfried with whom he quarrels much more violently, and who is essentially the narrator of this programme, ending on him asking quizzically "Can you be proud to be a Wagner?"
It is almost comic to hear Winifred admitting that she supplied notepaper to Hitler in jail, while denying that he used it to write 'Mein Kampf'. It is too late for her to try to distance herself from the regime, when we hear that many political decisions were taken in the family home beside the opera-house, Hitler using her son's school atlas to monitor troop movements.
A few editing quibbles. Wieland's daughter Nike is wrongly captioned as Winifred's niece; she was of course her grand-daughter. The acoustics also let us down occasionally; I think I heard there was a paternity question over one of Wagner's step-daughters, but I'm not sure. And what about that weird picture of the opera-house with the windows blocked-out by swastikas and a huge picture of the Führer above the door? If that is not vandalism, we are certainly due some explanation.
So what about the verdict on Wagner? There is no doubt that his operas did lead to the Third Reich. And so did the invention of the cotton-gin lead to the American Civil War, without turning boy-wonder Whitney into a war criminal.
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