Friedelind Wagner

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Friedelind Wagner (born March 29, 1918 in Bayreuth ; † May 8, 1991 in Herdecke ) was the second child (after Wieland Wagner , 1917–1966) of Siegfried Wagner and Winifred Wagner .

Life

The granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner grew up in the Bayreuth Villa Wahnfried . After various school changes, which she u. a. led to England, at the request of her mother Winifred Wagner , she attended the lyceum of the Stift zum Heiligengrabe monastery in Brandenburg. Friedelind Wagner was integrated into Bayreuth's festival operations early on. She had a very good relationship with her father Siegfried and after his death was considered an enfant terrible from the family's point of view . In 1939 she left Hitler's Germany because of family conflicts and political opposition. After short stays in Paris and Tribschen (Switzerland), the first stop of her exile was England, where she worked for various boulevard papers, among others. a. for the Daily Sketch. The articles dealt exclusively with Bayreuth and her experiences with the Hitler regime. From London, after some delays - temporary internment as a hostile foreigner on the Isle of Man , where she stayed for almost nine months (from May 27, 1940 to February 15, 1941) - she was able to travel to the USA via Argentina, where she met friends as Arturo Toscanini could count. When she left, she turned against her family, who had come to terms with the Third Reich and had close ties with Hitler. In New York, on February 13, 1942, she spoke out in the National Broadcasting Company against Nazi Germany and its appropriation by Richard Wagner. Thomas Mann's daughter Erika Mann wrote the text for this . The difficult relationship with her mother Winifred, who was a close friend of Adolf Hitler, deteriorated further. In the USA she lived from various temporary jobs, as a journalist and traveling speaker on Wagner matters. The founding of a "Friedelind Wagner Opera Company" with which she wanted to travel to the American provinces failed. In the spring of 1946, Bayreuth Mayor Oskar Meyer (CSU) asked her to return to Bayreuth and be the only politically unaffected member of the family to help rebuild the festival. She did not comply with this request. When the festival reopened in the summer of 1951, like her sister Verena Lafferentz, she was excluded from the management. This lay with the brothers Wolfgang and Wieland (both closely associated with the regime during the Nazi era). According to her father Siegfried Wagner's will, however, like her three siblings, she was an heir with equal rights.

Wagner published her memories, which reached from her early childhood to her emigration, in a book which was published in English in 1945 in the USA under the title Heritage of Fire . In 1945 the book was first published in German in Switzerland under the title Nacht über Bayreuth . It caused great unrest within the family and in music circles, as it was very critical of individual people, especially Winifred Wagner, Heinz Tietjen and Richard Strauss . Individual scenes from it were reprinted in magazines or read out in "Radio München", including the section in which Winifred Wagner threatened her daughter that she would be "exterminated" and "exterminated" if she did not return to Germany voluntarily. Although Winifred Wagner fiercely opposed this portrayal, the book played an important role in the court proceedings against them. A continuation of the book under the title Pardon my return was available as a manuscript ready for printing in 1967 , according to the Spiegel , but was never published.

Autograph Mrs. Wagner 1967

In 1953 Wagner, now a US citizen, returned to Bayreuth for the first time since emigrating and for a number of years led masterclasses for music students, some of which have a legendary reputation to this day, not least thanks to the participation of well-known directors such as Joachim Herz (director) and Walter Felsenstein . However, she was still excluded from the management of the festival by her two brothers, who had meanwhile divided it up among themselves.

Since she got into financial difficulties while emigrating, she transferred the valuable jewelry entrusted to her by Gerta von Eine (mother of the composer Gottfried von Eine ) for safekeeping, which after the war in Bayreuth led to lengthy lawsuits and speculation as to whether from one could gain access to the Wagner legacy through these demands. It was left to Wolfgang Wagner, who was responsible for the business aspects of the festival, to deal with the problems that resulted. According to her biographer Eva Rieger, she could not handle money out of naivety and carelessness. A planned tour by Tristan and Isolde in the USA turned out to be a failure, also because they did not take the bookkeeping very carefully. When she got money - so after the transfer of the Wagner legacy to the Richard Wagner Foundation in Bayreuth - she was generous to friends.

In 1960 she took part in the opening of the new Leipzig Opera House as a guest of honor . In 1967 she staged Lohengrin at the Bielefeld Theater . The production was received very ambiguously. No more should follow. In 1975 she became president of the International Siegfried Wagner Society , in which she campaigned for the rehabilitation of her father Siegfried Wagner. The musicologist and director Peter P. Pachl from Bayreuth gave the impetus . A first success was the concert performance of the opera "Der Friedensengel" in London, a work from 1914 that received international reports. In 1984 she resigned from the presidency due to political differences, which was taken over by the composer Hans Peter Mohr. In the 1970s she endeavored to establish master classes for opera, theater, film, musical, electronic music, multimedia art, etc. in her English country estate Teesside (starting in 1976). The concept was called "TTT": "Teeside Total Theater". She herself gave courses on Mozart's Figaro, among other things, but fewer participants came than expected. Important artists whom she had invited as course instructors did not follow her invitation, including a. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez . The majority were lecturers who had also given master classes on Wagner in Bayreuth. In March 1978 she decided to give up the project and leave England entirely.

She moved back to Bayreuth, first in the gardener's house in Haus Wahnfried , and later in an apartment on Liszstrasse. Her relationship with her mother Winifred had improved significantly in these years, although Winifred Wagner in the Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film "Winifred Wagner and the history of the Wahnfried house 1914 - 1975" was rather critical of "Friedelind or Die Maus" (as she was from of the family) had reported. She was deeply affected by Winifred's death on March 5, 1980. Four years later she moved to Luzern on Schweizerhausstrasse 5, where she wanted to work on a sequel to her memoir, which however never appeared. She refused to return to Germany because she was of the opinion that nothing had changed "in the land of the Nazis".

She came to Bayreuth only once, in April 1990, to meet the conductor Leonard Bernstein .

In 1991 Friedelind Wagner died in the community hospital in Witten-Herdecke, where she had been taken at her own request. Her ashes were scattered near Tribschen on Lake Lucerne near the former home of Richard Wagner.

See also

literature

  • Jonathan Carr: The Wagner clan. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-455-50079-0 .
  • Friedelind Wagner: Night over Bayreuth: the story of Richard Wagner's granddaughter. With an afterword by Eva Weissweiler. Dittrich Verlag, Cologne 1994 / Ullstein, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-548-30432-X .
  • Gerhard Müller: Two autobiographical aspects of the Richard Wagner case - National Socialism and Exile . In: exile. 1/1998.
  • Oliver Hilmes : Cosima's children. Triumph and tragedy of the Wagner dynasty. Siedler Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-899-1 .
  • Eva Rieger: Friedelind Wagner. Richard Wagner's rebellious granddaughter . Piper, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-05489-8 .
  • Eva Weissweiler : heiress of fire. Friedelind Wagner. A search for clues. Pantheon Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-55190-5 .
  • Brigitte Hamann : Winifred Wagner or Hitler's Bayreuth . Piper, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-492-04300-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carr, p. 290.
  2. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire. Friedelind Wagner. A search for clues . Pantheon, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-55190-5 , p. 195 .
  3. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 215 ff .
  4. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 224 ff .
  5. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 232 ff .
  6. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 234 ff .
  7. Night over Bayreuth: the story of Richard Wagner's granddaughter. Afterword by Eva Weissweiler. 2nd Edition. Ullstein, 2002, p. 328.
  8. ^ Opera / Friedelind Wagner. In: Der Spiegel. 53, 1967.
  9. ^ Friedelind Wagner - Sorrow in Bayreuth. In: Der Spiegel. 1954, no.13.
  10. a b Markus Thiel: The Wagner clan's rebellious Mausi. on: Merkur Online. Review of Eva Rieger's biography, last updated on August 29, 2012
  11. Leipziger Volkszeitung. October 10, 1960.
  12. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 280 ff .
  13. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 299 f .
  14. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 301 f .
  15. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 302 .
  16. Eva Weissweiler, heiress of fire
  17. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 303 .
  18. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 294 f .
  19. Eva Weissweiler: Heiress of Fire . S. 305 .
  20. Friedelind Wagner, WDR 3, pdf