by A. N. Wilson
‘Wolf, if it does not work out, we can send Tietjen back to Berlin and start all over again. I know how important it is to you that he isn’t One of Us … But we are hiring an artistic director, not a local party gauleiter … Well, we have differed about that before, my dear, and all I would say is … You don’t have to run an opera house … You couldn’t do it, Wolf, my dear … If the only people you hired were National Socialists, you wouldn’t necessarily have a very good cast of singers … Of course not.’
After this spat, they seemed to nestle into a tenderer phase of the conversation’s music. I still had not understood what it was she had not wished to discuss ‘in front of me’.
Clearly the main point of her telephone conversation was not to talk with Wolf about the advantages or otherwise of hiring Heinz Tietjen as next year’s artistic director. It was Fidi’s will she had rung up to tell Wolf about. ‘Yes … I have the house, the running of the Festival, the archives, and so forth and so forth … on condition that I do not marry again … I wanted you to know that.’
He did not say much in response to this, because she quite soon continued, ‘I wanted your advice … Do you think it would be worth my while to contest the will, or would it attract unwanted publicity?’
He spoke at some length in answer to this. Sometimes I could hear the rasp down the wires, sometimes he was obviously cooing at her, for she cooed back: ‘When you are Chancellor, you can do anything you like … Naturally, in accordance with the “Will of the people”.’ There were inverted commas round these words, but there could be no doubt that she believed them, believed them both – that he could do as he liked and that he did constitute, as his own rhetoric so frequently proclaimed, an embodiment of the German people’s will.
At this stage my parents were still dismissing the possibility of H’s ultimate political success. My father had this persistent belief in the electorate’s ‘good sense’, which used to inspire me to say, ‘If they had any sense they would sack von Papen [or Brüning or Stresemann on whatever date we were having the conversation and whoever happened to be the Chancellor], and have a man who undid the Versailles treaty, built up the army, did something about unemployment…’ The usual shopping list.
Of course my parents always had an answer to this, but it was at base – or so it seemed to me at the time – a snobbish base: namely that we did not want the affairs of the country placed into the hands of ‘people like that’ – they meant the small shopkeeper class, the non-commissioned officers, the disgruntled local civil servants who provided the hard core of the Nazi vote. It was my brother, who had now overcome his doubts and was about to become a Lutheran pastor like Father, who, during the elections of 1930, saw that something had changed and that very many ‘ordinary Germans’ (like myself) believed that enough was enough, that desperate times called for, if not desperate measures, then something more than a repetition of the tired old Weimar non-solutions.
No doubt, reading this, you will find it incredible that I should have considered National Socialism an answer to any problems, rather than being itself the greatest ‘problem’ to arise in European history. But you see, what I cannot emphasize too strongly is that it was precisely knowing Wolf that made us, at Wahnfried, so confident that everything would be all right were his political comrades to be elected to power. Some of them seemed very odd indeed, some of them were downright sinister, and the local Bayreuth Nazis, especially Gauleiter Schemm, were little better than thugs whom we all deplored from the beginning. But Wolf had the qualities of a magician. He had mesmerized his followers, and perhaps himself, into believing that he was capable of anything. Domestically, especially with the children, he was just a very gentle, genial person. I acknowledge in retrospect the compulsive talking and the flatulence, but at the time these did not particularly detract from his charm. I had come not merely to believe, with my brother, that the Nazis now really had a chance to turn our country round; unlike my brother I viewed the prospect with eager excitement. Anyhow, wedged in the dark in the stationery cupboard, the nation’s future was not my immediate concern – except insofar as it seemed, for the duration of a telephone conversation, as if it might be connected with the future of Winnie.
I should love to have intercepted that call and to have heard, word for word, what he had to say to her. Sometimes she replied, ‘But Wolf … you couldn’t … you could not … The entire burden of the Bayreuth Festival and the performance of Richard Wagner’s music in the place rests on me. But … I know … and there is no one who could share it with me more appreciatively, or more helpfully than … I know … But you will have on your shoulders the future of the German race and that is something important … even more important, I find, than the future of our Festival.’
There was more, much more, silence on the line while he spoke to her.
I am not fantasizing. It was clear to me that he was, if not actually proposing marriage to Winnie, discussing the possibility of a partnership of some kind.
The retrospect of thirty years changes one’s perspectives of everything. I am trying to re-create for you exactly what my impressions were in that stationery closet. I became aware over the next few years that Wolf had other women in his life apart from Winnie. As I have said before about public figures, especially those with innumerable political enemies, rumours circulate all the time. There were Fidi’s obscene speculations concerning what exactly happened between Wolf and his niece; I heard this story told by others in the coming years, especially after Geli’s death. There was the talk, which I heard from about this time onwards, of prostitutes arriving at the flat in Prinzregentenplatz – though I always discounted these stories as being essentially out of Wolf’s character. A little later there was the arrival upon the scene of Eva Braun, who was eventually installed as his semi-official companion. With her customary impenetrable Welsh mysteriousness Winnie never let on how much of this impinged upon her.
In the stationery cupboard that day in the late summer of 1930, however, I had no doubt that I was overhearing Winnie and Wolf discussing more than a friendly association, or a shared interest in an opera festival. They were contemplating marriage.
Did it mean that my earlier speculation was right and that, seven years before, they had become lovers, however briefly? Or had they kept alive a flame of love for one another precisely because it – whatever ‘it’ was – had never been fulfilled? Tristan und Isolde appears to have been inspired by Wagner’s unsatisfied yearning for Mathilde Wesendonck. Tannhäuser is about the shocking disparities between our erotic selves and the ‘rest of life’. We come back from Venusberg and find the same old world of decisions, routines, preferences – not erotic preferences, but how we like our coffee, or what newspaper we should buy of a morning – dominating life. The madness of ‘before’ is replaced by the comparative sanity of ‘after’. Or, if that is a wrong reading of the myth, the enchantments of Venus are simply so strong that they blot out the rest of life and can (as when Tannhäuser cannot stop himself from blurting out his Venus song in the anodyne little song competition) make the rest of life fade. Yet it is always this ‘rest of life’ which comes back; even in the life of an actual erotomaniac it will return – family, work concerns, money, the ordinariness of everyday. I do not know if they had, technically, been lovers, but I did know, as I overheard her from the stationery cupboard, that they had not been to Venusberg together. This was not the talk of two people who were caught up in shared madness. It was plans for the future. What was so electrifying is that she felt she had to tell Wolf (before anyone else?) about Fidi’s will and its forbidding of her remarriage.
Within a few minutes of her having hung up I began the speculation which, on and off, has haunted my mind ever since – why Fidi made that provision in his will. My first stab at an answer, which had entered my mind even before she had finished her phone call with Wolf, was that he had known she would have this conversation. It was precisely this that he had found more unbearable than any likely a
ffairs she might have. Of course, with his family background, Fidi could see the nightmare possibilities of family quarrels. The lawsuit with his sister Isolde, who might or might not have been the daughter of Hans von Bülow, or of Richard Wagner, had been ample demonstration of what difficulties result when there is more than one father in the picture. Winnie was a young, attractive woman, she liked men, she liked sex, she liked children. There would be every possibility of her marrying again and having children who would – unless Fidi guarded against it by his last will and testament – aspire to take a hand in the running of the Festival Theatre.
This was the common-sense reason why he stipulated she could only control the Festival for as long as she did not marry again. But … but … there was, beneath the prancing surface of Fidi’s mannerisms, beneath the jokes, the queenery, the outbursts of bad temper and the high vein of fantasy on which he liked to live, there was something more than sensible about him. I always felt he was a person who understood other human beings. He was a kindly father – the desolation of the children in the months after he died was awful to witness. He believed in those four children and, really more than the ‘unnoticing’ Winnie, he made convincing imaginative journeys into their inner lives.
I think he knew his Winnie very well indeed. I think he realized that, almost by chance, his mother Cosima, by accepting Senta Klindworth as the mother of the future Wagners, had bought the most extraordinary bargain. All she could have hoped for was a good-looking woman of child-bearing age whose background was sufficiently odd and disadvantaged to guarantee that she would be submissive, grateful even, for having been adopted into Wahnfried. None of them – not Karl Klindworth himself, not Cosima, not Fidi – could have guessed that this seventeen-, eighteen-year-old girl would have been the world’s most ideal director of an opera house. Fidi must have felt this. Yet her Welsh soul, so unlike the punctilious German mind trained by Immanuel Kant, had the capacity for hero-worship, the Celtic compulsion to leap into the irrational. Fidi had seen what she thought of Wolf, or he thought he had seen it. He feared that the two outsiders, the Welsh orphan and the Austrian corporal, would form a wrecking alliance if they were to marry. Maybe, even, Siegfried Wagner was sensible enough, and patriotic enough, to see how disastrous it would be to give licence to Winnie’s temptations to make the Festival Theatre into a political platform, or to Wolf’s temptation to turn German politics into a tragic opera? Maybe he had seen what I had only half intuited in 1925 when Wolf, carried away by the story from the Grimm Brothers of the fisherman and his wife, revealed his need to go beyond triumph to self-destruction. Perhaps his last will and testament was an attempt to prevent that? In the coming years I was to see another side to Winnie and her dealings with Wolf. Perhaps this too is very Welsh – namely that, together with her unshakeable loyalty and fervent zeal for Wolf, she was capable of exploiting him. Perhaps, even as they spoke together on the telephone that day, he was sensing that?
* * *
Papa Toscanini conducted Tannhäuser two or three more times that summer after Fidi’s death. The familiar hysterical themes, more distasteful, I think, to my parents than any of Wagner’s music, transported three happy audiences into the troublingly familiar chaos of sex. After the incident in the stationery closet, I felt a whole mingling of confused and painful emotions. There was a surge of relief when I realized that, for the time being at least, Winnie could not belong to Another. Unrequited love makes that cruellest emotion, hope, create all manner of impossible future scenarios. I had begun to construct a future in which Winnie would rely on me, more than on anyone else, for emotional comfort and support, that I would be her special little friend, now that she could not have a lover. Of course, Fidi’s will had not made any specifications about whom she took to her bed and I had no sense at that stage of how important sex was to this healthy young woman seven years my senior. It was not especially important to me – not sex, in the sense of doing anything about it. Like all of us who became grown-ups in the 1920s I believed that sex somehow ‘explained everything’ in the way that God was once supposed to have done, but although erotic confusion and desire surged through my being, I had no particular wish to ‘experiment’. Indeed, I was completely inexperienced, with both males and females, and could not imagine how one began the process of initiating a sexual relationship. Hence the comfortingness of thinking that Winnie and I could be special friends.
Her grief for Fidi was calm but real. She had lost her best friend and the life companion with whom she shared her children. How important that bond is. And how little I understood such things at the time.
Now, of course, it is obvious to me that the chief, perhaps the only, important thing lacking in her marriage to Fidi was something she would very quickly come to find with another man. And that man was not to be an inexperienced character such as myself. I don’t think she even considered me as an aspirant lover.
When the Festival was over she arranged to be away, and on her own, for two extended visits. The first was to Munich, where I know she visited Wolf several times. What they talked about I do not know, but she came home very worried about his niece and the talk that was circulating about their intimacy. She said it would do him terrible damage at the polls if any of the malicious scandal got out and that she could not understand the malice of Wolf’s enemies who were prepared to suggest things which were quite manifestly – manifestly to Winnie’s adoring eyes anyway – absurd. ‘They are uncle and niece. He is helping her in every way he can to become a student. That is the end of the matter.’ She said it in her highly emphatic way. These emphases were often, in my experience, to have the reverse effect upon hearers of the one intended.
The other visit, a rather longer visit, was to Berlin, which she went to in, I should say, October 1930. When she came back she was highly excited. She had, she said, spent a lot of time with Heinz Tietjen. ‘He is our man! He is our man!’ she kept saying. At quite what point this became literally the case I could not say, but something in the churlish reaction of the children whenever Tietjen’s name was mentioned – and this even before he came upon the scene – told me that they had nosed out, by the instinct which self-protective families always can, that their mother’s interest in the new artistic director at Bayreuth was to be more than merely professional.
The year 1931 was one in which so much outwardly happened, both in the history of the Bayreuth Festival and of our country. Both Winnie and Wolf were living through the great crises of their respective careers. She was being tested in her first full year as the Director of the Festival, and he stood poised between absolute ruin and absolute power. Perhaps it was this very fact which led them both to inhabit their separate Venusbergs that year. For I have no doubt that against all the background of their public lives, which you can read about in the books, their imaginative inner lives were dominated by Eros, perhaps in both cases for the first time. My own belief is that the telephone conversation I overheard between them intensified this. After the death of Fidi there had been something ‘obvious’ about the idea of Winnie, if not proposing marriage, then floating the idea of it past Wolf. The very fact that it was crazy must have been what appealed to both of them and I have sometimes wondered whether it would not have been the ideal solution, both to their own and to the country’s problems. He could have taken over the running of the Festival Opera and although, as she had told him, this would have meant a drastic reduction in the numbers of competent musicians in his employ, it would have kept his mind occupied. That isn’t how I saw things at the time, of course. But I ‘saw’ nothing at the time, not even the rather obvious fact that there was another person, apart from Wolf and myself, who was in love with Winnie: the maestro Toscanini himself.
Perhaps allowing ourselves to be caught up in the enchantments of Venusberg is the best possible distraction from the crises of ‘real life’? There was another thought of which, at the time, I would have been incapable. It certainly is not present in Tannhäuser, which is in many re
spects a simple-minded work. No wonder, as Cosima’s diaries told me, Richard Wagner was dissatisfied with it to the end of his days and spoke repeatedly of revising it. Tietjen was an unlikely lover for her. Small, gnome-like, with thick spectacles and a cold, totally unwinning manner, he had none of Siegfried Wagner’s charm. Perhaps this fascinated her. What he did know about was directing operas, conducting orchestras and making them work.
I soon learnt enough about his political affiliations to be able to guess what sort of things Wolf must have said about him on the telephone when he first heard of his appointment. He was said to be a card-carrying Social Democrat – the party supported by my gentle brother Heinrich. Certainly, Tietjen leaned to the left of the rest of us politically, but to imagine him as a softy would be a big mistake. I never met anyone – and this is saying something, coming from the pen of one who knew H – who gave off a bigger sense of absolute power when you were in his presence. No doubt if I’d seen H in action in his War Cabinets I should be telling a different story, but apart from his manic tirade against Friedrich Schorr, I never heard him misbehave himself at Bayreuth, whereas Tietjen would do anything to get his own way and he exercised a power over Winnie quite frightening to behold.
He was a strikingly clever man and he let you know it. Any remark addressed to him was received as if it were ridiculous and he would usually answer ‘quite’ (genau). He could inject such scorn into the two syllables of the German word. If it was a remark with which he agreed, the syllables implied, ‘Any bloody fool knows that.’ If it was something with which he disagreed, the word would be loaded with sarcasm and often followed by a whinnying laugh, which had much in it of the witheringly sarcastic teacher humiliating an unsatisfactory pupil.
He was very well read, in several languages, and his table talk, when not about the minute details of opera management and business arrangements, ranged over the books he could remember better than anyone else. Hearing I was a failed philosopher, for example, he quizzed me about my friend Martin H———’s Sein und Zeit, showing that he had read it. By the time I’d finished my blundering attempts to say what I thought of it, though to tell the truth – a truth no doubt obvious to Tietjen – I hadn’t managed more than about half the book, he stopped me with ‘quite’. And the laugh. And went on to speak about the clarity of Anglo-Saxon philosophy and, in particular, his fondness for the works of Bertrand Russell. He seemed in this respect much more English than Winnie, even though he was only half as English as she – like our Emperor.
