Franz Wilhelm Beidler

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Franz Wilhelm Beidler (born October 16, 1901 in Bayreuth ; † August 3, 1981 in Zurich ) was a Swiss publicist . He became known as the "first grandson" of Richard Wagner .

biography

Beidler was the son of the Swiss conductor Franz Beidler (1872–1930) and his wife Isolde (1865–1919), the first daughter of Cosima and Richard Wagner .

Cosima did not recognize her daughter Isolde (at whose birth she was still married to Hans von Bülow ) as the legitimate Wagner heir and enforced this in a court case (Beidler trial, 1913 in Munich), so that her son Franz Wilhelm von der Bayreuther "Succession to the throne" was excluded even though he was Richard Wagner's first grandson. The “legal” first grandson Wieland Wagner was born in 1917 ( see: Richard Wagner (family) ).

Beidler first studied law and political science in Berlin. In 1929 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. He then worked for the music teacher and cultural politician Leo Kestenberg in the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art and Education. He unequivocally rejected National Socialism and supported socialist movements of the Weimar Republic. After Hitler came to power , he emigrated first to Paris and then to Zurich, where he belonged to Thomas Mann's circle of friends . Beidler became General Secretary of the Swiss Writers' Union in 1943 and remained so for 29 years. He published numerous essays (including in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung ) on the work of Richard Wagner, whom he always saw as a social-revolutionary poet composer. For decades he worked on his main work, a biography of his grandmother Cosima Wagner, which he accused of "shifting tendencies" in Richard Wagner's works. The biography with the title Cosima Wagner-Liszt, Der Weg zum Wagner-Mythos was published in 1997 by Dieter Borchmeyer .

In 1946 he was invited by the city of Bayreuth as a candidate for the successor to the Festival , but had only short-term opportunities.

Franz Wilhelm Beidler had been married to the Jewess Ellen Annemarie Gottschalk (1903–1945) since 1923 and had their daughter Dagny Ricarda Beidler (* 1942).

Bayreuth criticism

After the war, Beidler spoke openly about Bayreuth's "joint responsibility" for the emergence of National Socialism :

"If National Socialism even contains an ideology, a conviction, it is a shockingly large part of Bayreuth's convictions."

After being briefly appointed director of the Bayreuth Festival, in 1947 he developed “guidelines” for redesigning it and proposed a foundation for which he wanted to win Thomas Mann as honorary president . His ideas failed because of the resistance of the Wagner family. Franz W. Beidler never attended the Bayreuth Festival after the war (he refused to “forget”) and died in Zurich in 1981.

Fonts

  • The fight for the customs tariff in the Reichstag in 1902. A contribution to the history of German parliamentarism . Frankenstein & Wagner, Leipzig 1929 (Diss. Berlin).
  • Wagner as an idea . In: Melos . Vol. 12 (1933, 2), pp. 39-43.
  • Cosima Wagner-Liszt, The Path to the Wagner Myth. Selected writings by Wagner's first grandson and his unpublished correspondence with Thomas Mann. Edited by Dieter Borchmeyer. Pendragon, Bielefeld 1997, ISBN 3-923306-86-5 .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Beidler, Franz Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss publicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Bayreuth
DATE OF DEATH 3rd August 1981
Place of death Zurich