Wolfgang Wagner

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Wolfgang Wagner (born 30 August, 1919) was the director (Festspielleiter) of the Bayreuth Festival from 1951 to 2008, a position he initially assumed alongside his brother Wieland in 1951.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

[edit] Biography

Wolfgang is the son of Siegfried Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner, and the great-grandson of Franz Liszt. He married twice, to Ellen Drexel and Gudrun Mack. Gudrun died in November 2007.^[1] He has three children: Eva, born 1945, Gottfried, born 1947 and Katharina, born 1978^[2]. He was reportedly estranged from the children of his first marriage; with Gottfried over the family's connection with Adolf Hitler, a friend of Wolfgang's mother Winifred; with Eva over control of the Bayreuth Festival.^[3] Eva was eventually named as his successor as the director of the Bayreuth Festival in conjunction with his preferred candidate Katharina after the two women reached an agreement following the death of Katharina's mother.^[4].

[edit] Career

Wolfgang worked with his older brother Wieland Wagner on the resurrection, in 1951, of the Bayreuth Festival following Germany's collapse after the Second World War. The festival has run on an annual basis since then. On Wieland's death in 1966, Wolfgang became the sole director of the festival. Under his directorship, the famous Bayreuth Festspielhaus underwent extensive renovations. It was announced on 29 April 2008 that he would step down on 31 August 2008 when the year's festival had finished.^[5]

Both brothers contributed productions to the Bayreuth Festival, but Wolfgang did not enjoy the same critical reception as Wieland did. Like his brother, Wolfgang favoured modern, minimalist stagings of his grandfather's works in his productions. As director of the festival, Wolfgang commissioned work from many guest producers, including innovative and controversial stagings such as the 1976 production of the Ring Cycle by Patrice Chéreau. He, however, confined the stagings at the festival to the last ten operas by his grandfather that make up the Bayreuth canon established under the direction of his grandmother Cosima Wagner.

Wolfgang attracted some criticism for what was seen as his autocratic sway over the Festival.^[3] Much of this criticism comes from within the Wagner family itself. Wieland's daughters, Daphne and Nike Wagner, have accused their uncle of ill-treating their branch of the family, saying that he drove them and their mother out of the family home following their father's death and destroyed the scenery, models and correspondence with artists relating to their father's work. There are also what Wagner writer Barry Millington notes as two rather inconsistent threads of criticism about Wolfgang's role in managing the presentation of the family's connection with the Nazis. Daphne accuses him of blackening her father's name by releasing information on Wieland's connection with the Bayreuth satellite of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, while Wolfgang's own son, Gottfried, accuses him of having tried to suppress all information about the Wagner grandchildren's connection with the Nazis.^[6]

Nonetheless, he helped make the Bayreuth one of the most popular destinations in the world of opera. There was a ten-year waiting list for tickets.^[7] In 1994, he invited Werner Herzog (who had staged Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1987) to make a documentary about the festival, which was released under the title Die Verwandlung der Welt in Musik (The Transformation of the World into Music).

[edit] See also

• Wagner family tree

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Carr, Jonathan: The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's Most Illustrious and Infamous Family. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007. ISBN 0871139758

[edit] External links

• Die Verwandlung der Welt in Musik on IMDB
• Wolfgang Wagner Photo Gallery