Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  The first time any member of the family addressed a word to me I was, I suppose, about seven years old (my birthday is on 24 August 1902) and I was, as I say, playing with my hoop. My nurse was seated on a bench watching me play, when she cried out, ‘Look out!’

  Two wolfhounds, much bigger than I was, liked the look of my hoop as it rolled in front of me and came galloping after me. I do not fear dogs, though I did not share the dog worship which was the common characteristic of Richard Wagner, both his wives and his only son. (I was astounded, years later, when mine became the first eyes apart from their author’s to read through the diaries of Cosima, by the extent of canomania revealed – but that is to leap ahead.) The dogs only wanted to play. One knocked my hoop off course, the other would have bowled me over had I not got out of the way, but the encounter was sufficiently alarming for the nurse to elicit an apology from Siegfried. ‘Watch out! Watch out!’ my nurse called to me hysterically. ‘The dogs are going to…’

  ‘Wolfy, Donner, come here. Heel!’ called their owner, on that occasion wearing green stockings over his mustard-yellow breeches with a matching hunting coat. I was struck by his enormous stiff collar and by the abundance of yellow silk that formed his bow tie. ‘Are you all right, little boy?’

  ‘Come back – come away from the dogs,’ shrieked the nurse.

  As I was reassuring the colourfully dressed gentleman that I was quite all right, that the playfulness of the dogs had amused rather than scared me, his mother, standing some ten yards away from him on the gravel and looking not at me but into the middle distance, said, ‘Fidi, tell them the dogs are harmless.’

  These words were undoubtedly true. What struck the child who heard them was the fact that they were delivered in a ‘funny voice’ – later identified as a French accent, although I did not know about such things at the time. Whereas the man was kind, and smiled and laughed at me, his mother did not engage at all. Her haughtiness was chilling. Even though I was far from being a spoilt child and certainly did not expect to be the centre of the grown-ups’ attention, Cosima’s failure to meet my gaze and her need to communicate entirely through her son – well, they put one firmly in one’s place.

  Later – when my parents had finished playing what they considered some proper music, my father at the cello, my mother at the piano performing a very accurate but not especially inspired rendition of a piece by Haydn – I was able to blurt out, ‘We met the most famous composer in the world.’

  ‘Debussy, in the Hofgarten?’ asked my father, with some interest, but not with incredulity, since one of the most remarkable things about Bayreuth was the fact that famous musicians, composers, conductors and performers flocked to the place.

  My seven-year-old perception of these things was still a little vague, as my garbled version of nurse’s garbled explanation was unfolded. When the narrative was unravelled and rolled backwards and we got to the dogs my mother said, ‘Oh, you met old Frau Wagner.’

  ‘And is that man not the most famous…’

  ‘His father wrote operas and so does he,’ said my father.

  I was probably too young to see what a put-down (not to me but to the Wagners) this was.

  Over the years, if we passed them in the street or the Hofgarten, the Wagners would acknowledge us, Siegfried by touching the rim of his hat, his mother by a little nod of the head, since although she ‘looked through me’ the first time I met her, she would not have displayed such lack of courtesy to my father, being a respecter of the cloth.

  Clearly I had not managed to master much Wagner lore, however, when, at least a year after I’d first become aware of the couple, she so tall and stately, he so mincing on tiptoe, I’d made the mistake of referring to ‘that lady’ as ‘that man’s wife’ and my mother had corrected me, ‘not wife, darling, mother.’

  One of the things that made Winnie such a very apt recruit as Cosima’s daughter-in-law was her – how are we to define this? – her essential, most necessary, most maddening quality? One paradoxical word for it would be her discretion, though this would not be everyone’s word for a woman best known to history for her reckless and seemingly unvaried admiration for the most demonized of all villains in the political rogues’ gallery. But there was a sort of – perhaps Welsh – reserve about Winnie. Cosima fought off, sometimes with belligerent insult, sometimes with aristocratic froideur, those who threatened the guardianship of her husband’s memory, ideas, opera house and Festival. But she possessed an extraordinary willingness to wash dirty linen in public. Winnie, by contrast, when her time came to become the Defender of the Faith, could often baffle the anti-Wagnerians, or those who wanted to bring about unwanted innovations in Wagner productions, or those who wished to stop innovations of which she disapproved, by this strange Welsh wall of mystery. Had she simply failed to see the world as her enemy or rival or enquirer saw it?

  That is the central mystery of Winnie – did she or did she not see Wolf as others saw him? And knowing how others saw him, did this act as a spur to defend him? But after Auschwitz? She knew about the camps, the millions deliberately killed, the further millions who died in the war, the cities wrecked, the lives destroyed. Is our capacity to love another person often (always) accompanied by an inability to notice what it is that prevents the majority of other people loving them? (In the case of Wolf there are many complicated factors at work, of course, since he was extremely popular, the most popular political leader our country had ever had – so were we all suffering from the same delusion as Winnie?)

  It goes without saying that my mind, even more than the minds of most Germans of my generation, is haunted and monopolized by the question. But we are leaping ahead – the young Senta Klindworth had an innate capacity not to ‘notice’, which was a vital characteristic in anyone being selected as a bride of Siegfried Wagner.

  And when one says ‘being selected’ it is, of course, clear that the person making that selection was not Fidi but his mother.

  It was in 1914, when Senta Klindworth was sixteen and seventeen years old, that she became aware of a looming crisis, which threatened the peace and stability of everything. This was not the imminent conflagration of that mysterious and, by the Klindworths, seldom-discussed phenomenon, the world, nor the collapse of civilization brought about by the World War. The Klindworths, in common with all their friends, believed that war, when it came, would invigorate rather than undermine our country. The threat was posed, rather, by the court case brought by Siegfried’s sister Isolde against her mother and brother.

  In 1914, not yet quite turned to the papery old lady whom I knew when I worked in her house, Cosima Wagner was an in all senses lofty old survival of a vanished world. When one saw her, as one often did in the streets of our small town, she seemed like a visitant from a lost world – the long trailing dresses, the bonnets tied with chiffon, the elaborate Parisian parasols trimmed with lace. Her long melancholy face suggested that time itself had been defied and that this illegitimate daughter of a French aristocrat and of the Hungarian Abbé Liszt was in fact someone who had escaped the guillotine, possibly escaped the condition of mortality itself, in 1789. Her long nose, birdlike hooded eyes, high cheekbones and very pronounced, thin lips conformed to no convention of beauty but there was nevertheless something breathtakingly beautiful about her. She seemed ethereal, an emblem of eternal tragedy just as her son, Siegfried, so often at her side and holding her arm, with his pale Homburg hats slightly too small for him, his large, stiff, high choirboy’s collars, his pale suits and vaguely absurd spats, always gave off an air of inescapable comedy.

  This, incidentally, is one reason I am putting pen to paper. I want to answer a question for you about the Wagner women – or rather the non-Wagner women, the women the Wagner men married. The composer himself … we’ll come to that: by any standards one of the great geniuses of the nineteenth century but entirely lacking in dignity and giving off all the air of Vaudeville theatre into which he was born. Yet his second wife Cosima, guar
dian of his shrine, was all dignity. Likewise, while it was hard to take Siegfried Wagner quite seriously, Winnie his wife was a person of mysterious integrity. For all her mischievousness, she was totally dignified. I am not just saying this because … because of her relationship with you. Was Wolf a worthy hero for her or did he conform to the pattern of Wagnerian buffoonery?

  Anyhow, the scandal of 1914. This must be mentioned here. In 1913 the copyright in Richard Wagner’s opera ran out. It was a hundred years since the baby of questionable parentage had been born over an inn in Leipzig and it was thirty years since the great man had expired on a pink sofa in Venice (after a furious row with his wife about a young singer with whom he was trying to have an affair) and he had never been more popular. All of a sudden, however, it was no longer necessary for opera houses in New York, London, Milan, Munich, Berlin to pay the Wagner family a royalty every time they staged a production of Tannhäuser or Lohengrin.

  In the year in which I chose to begin my story, 1925, a year when Germany was enjoying the benefits of a liberal republican democracy, a million marks would scarcely buy you a cup of cheap coffee which was why, when I knew them, the Wagners kept all their money in Swiss bank accounts. In the year when the copyright ran out, however, the last year of peace under the Emperor Wilhelm II, the million marks brought in by annual royalties to the Wagner family were able to sustain four or five grown-ups in some state: the composer’s seventy-six-year-old widow; her daughters Isolde and Eva, with their husbands. (Eva was married to the increasingly infirm Houston Stewart Chamberlain.) And there was Siegfried. The family income must now derive from the Bayreuth Festival, and from Siegfried’s own operas which, surprising as this might today appear, were sufficiently popular in the German-speaking world to generate a goodish return.

  Cosima had first been married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, a passionate Wagnerian by whom she bore two children (Daniela and Blandine) and with whom she had been very unhappy. In the latter years of her brief marriage to Bülow she began her affair with Wagner. With Wagner she had Isolde, born 1865, Eva, 1867, and Siegfried, 1869. Isolde was certainly born while Cosima was still married to (and living with) von Bülow. Isolde was Wagner’s favourite child. By 1913, Isolde, the mother of the only Wagner grandchild born to date, the twelve-year-old Franz Wilhelm Beidler, and herself tubercular, challenged her mother and Siegfried in the Bayreuth local court since they were trying to reduce her 8,000-mark annual allowance. Cosima played an extraordinary card. Isolde, she declared to the court, was not Wagner’s child at all. Cosima claimed that she had slept with both her first and second husbands during the crucial month of Isolde’s conception but that she was certain von Bülow and not Wagner was the father. The claim, if true, would disinherit Isolde and prevent the only Wagner grandson from one day becoming the director of the Bayreuth Festival. It was an astounding move of Cosima’s in those puritanical times and her declaration, reported in all the newspapers, certainly confirmed the views of middle-class respectable people such as my parents that the Wagners were beyond the pale.

  Isolde’s claims were dismissed by the court in June 1914. She even had to pay costs. She had been born when her mother was still legally married to Hans von Bülow. Her mother had sworn an affidavit that she was the legitimate daughter of von Bülow. Case dismissed. But in the course of it some dreadful words had been exchanged, perhaps not the least of them Isolde’s dig that her forty-four-year-old brother had been the subject of ‘complaints’. In vain did he splutter back that such vile calumnies had been visited in his day upon the greatest king of all time, Frederick the Great, and that Prussia had expanded and grown strong by his hand. These were different times. Maximilian Harden, the Jewish journalist who had ‘exposed’ Philipp von Eulenberg and caused such scandals at the Imperial Court in Berlin, was now making innuendoes against the illustrious court of art in the Villa Wahnfried. Harden, with the skill of a blackmailer – or, as the word is sometimes rendered, investigative reporter – had uncovered many of Siegfried’s same-sex indiscretions and in the Berlin newspaper Future he wrote his bombshell under the headline SIEGFRIED AND ISOLDE, in which his snide little innuendoes were made, just before the Bayreuth Festival.

  Klindworth wrote consolingly to the mistress – die Meisterin – ‘You have lived through a terribly painful time. Yet again the frenzied mob of the Jewish Press and Race have raged against the godly and are even now rejoicing, sure of the Extermination of their prey!’ How chilling it is to read that word extermination – Vernichtung – used of mere scandalmongers in 1914. The flying Dutchman longs for it. Ew’ge Vernichtung, nimm mich auf – Take me, eternal extermination. Pass thirty years and there would be Vernichtungslager in Eastern Europe. And all our hands, all our German hands … are we guilty, did we collude, willingly, unwillingly, through deliberate ignorance? Did we all acquire Winnie-like blinkers, so that we did not see what was before our very eyes? In the case of Wahnfried and its circle, I would contend the truth was stranger. You would say I was bound to say that? That I colluded in the toxic little circle round H, flattering his vanity and hanging on his every word while he prosed on about the music of Richard Wagner?

  You decide – and condemn me if you will. These pages are not about me. They are for you, to see and to understand where you come from.

  In 1914, faced with extermination by their enemy, the Wagnerian enthusiasts presented Cosima with a solution for her difficulties. Siegfried could squash the rumour mongers by getting married. Clearly he could not marry a ‘normal’ person. Cosima herself had been the illegitimate daughter of a famous composer. Wagner came from ‘nowhere’. They could not have married their son to any normal German. To marry into the prosperous middle class would have been beneath them. To marry into the aristocracy would have revealed their own lack of real pedigree, their outsider status. A foreign woman was ideal and even more ideal would be the choice of a bride who did not lift an eyebrow at the allegations placing Siegfried in the company of Frederick the Great or Oscar Wilde.

  In the summer of 1914 Karl Klindworth produced the magical solution. Clad in his travelling cloak, his dark suit and his Homburg hat, the old gentleman emerged from a fly, which had conducted him from the station to the Festival Theatre on the Green Hill. On his arm, wearing a large-brimmed hat trimmed with flowers, a tightly waisted white dress reaching to her ankles, white stockings and white ballet shoes (slightly to diminish her height? she towered over her guardian), was the seventeen-year-old girl he called Senta. And he was taking her to her first-ever Wagnerian production.

  Memory makes narratives. To herself, and to others, she came to repeat the story of the first few days in Bayreuth so often that it ceased to be a memory. She was coming to her destiny, her new family, her life’s work – for it was to be she, and she only, who was ordained to save the Bayreuth Festival from extinction. How could she distinguish the countless hours she was to spend in the Festival House from those first impressions? Many were the summers and many the hours when she would climb the little Green Hill and, in a variety of evening costumes, greet the grandees as they came to hear operas composed by her father-in-law. Fifty and more times would she hear the fanfares of steerhorns from Götterdämmerung blare out to warn the audiences to take their seats.

  At seventeen Winnie had been untainted by any theatrical experiences. She did not know how unusual this particular theatre was. She knew nothing then, as she was soon to learn, of the extraordinary story of how it came to be built and why it was built as it was. At the time, before the experiences became memories, the first day at Bayreuth was a jumble of impressions, none confused, but all so acute that they were in danger of cancelling one another out. There was the anxiety about her foster-mother’s health. Henriette stayed behind in Berlin and Winnie was frightened travelling without her. In the train, old Klindworth had been unstoppable in his flow about whom they would meet – he named conductors, composers, the Chamberlains. It was as if you’d told a clever child that she was about to meet
the characters of the Brothers Grimm. She could not quite absorb the fact that these names of whom she had heard so much belonged to real people with whom she was expected to hold conversations. Conversations! How did one conduct them? What did one say? The jokes and shared confidences of the dormitory first of the orphanage, latterly at a boarding school were no preparation for knowing what to say to Hans Richter or Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

  But – too excited quite to think rather than to feel these fears – she experienced an extraordinary day: the train pulling through gently undulating countryside as they came into Franconia; Bayreuth appearing on the horizon, with its twin-towered City Church, its two royal palaces, its red-tiled roofs, its other church spires and steeples all clustered round hill and river; while at the other end of town – visible only when the bustle of arrival was half complete (porters paid, trunks dispatched in a fly to the hotel, reticule lost, found again, walking stick, spectacles ditto, ditto) – was the Festival Theatre on the hill, a building unlike any other and which had been … disappointing? All the other buildings in this baroque town in their honey-coloured stone were lovely and of the old world, as their fly rattled over cobbles past a theatre, a church, a palace, seemly old shops with sunshade awnings over their windows. The engine shed of a building Karl Klindworth had pointed out was striking a defiant attitude of difference, which told her something at the time she was unable to take in. The hotel – they stayed at the Golden Anchor of course – was a revelation: the warm old panels of the hall and the welcoming dining room; the old-fashioned comfort and pure German cleanliness of her small bedroom at the back, the pristine lavender-scented sheets. She had no evening clothes as such. The old man had retreated to his room, she to hers and they had emerged, with faces splashed with soap and water. Had they eaten? Was it that day, or another, when he showed her the town? Was it then that she had her first walk in the Hofgarten, or took a carriage ride beyond the station to the Eremitage to see the shell-encrusted grottoes and sunken gardens and mysterious carvings? Was it that day or another that old Klindworth told for the dozenth time how Richard Wagner had alighted on this place and built the Festival Theatre for the sole and (as he thought temporary) purpose of staging The Ring? His talk, when not of music or of the world being taken to hell by the Jews, was always of the Wagners, so it was not possible for memory to say whether on that day of days he had said thus or thus.