Siegfried Wagner

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Siegfried Wagner around 1896
Siegfried Wagner as a conductor; Silhouette by Otto Böhler
Birthday card from the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra for Siegfried Wagner on his 60th birthday in 1929
Siegfried Wagner's grave in the Bayreuth city cemetery

Siegfried Helferich Richard Wagner (born June 6, 1869 in Tribschen near Lucerne , † August 4, 1930 in Bayreuth ) was a German composer , librettist and conductor . From 1908 until his death he directed the Bayreuth Festival .

Life

Siegfried Wagner was the third child of Richard Wagner and Cosima Freifrau von Bülow , a daughter of Franz Liszt . So that he could use the surname Wagner, Siegfried was only baptized at the age of fourteen months, on September 4, 1870. A marriage of the parents was only possible in the year after Cosima's divorce from Hans von Bülow had become final.

In 1870, on the occasion of the birth of his son, Richard Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll , a chamber music composition based on motifs from the opera Siegfried and intended as a birthday present for Cosima.

After his father's death in 1883, Siegfried Wagner initially thought about studying architecture , but then turned to music. He received his musical training from Engelbert Humperdinck and Julius Kniese . From 1886 Siegfried Wagner also appeared as a conductor at the Bayreuth Festival.

The thesis that Siegfried Wagner was the father of Walter Aign (1901–1977), the youngest child of a Bayreuth pastor's wife, turns out to be incorrect based on recent research by Brigitte Hamann . Wagner's homosexuality made him the target of blackmail, which he tried to defend himself through legal means.

In 1908 Siegfried Wagner took over the management of the Bayreuth Festival from his mother. With tireless zeal for work, he succeeded in resuming the festival tradition that was interrupted at the beginning of the First World War in 1924. To finance the costly festival - ticket sales were by no means as large as it is today - Siegfried Wagner made regular concert tours as a conductor , for example to the United States in early 1924. Siegfried conducted changing orchestras. However, the tour had only moderate success: instead of the hoped-for $ 200,000, only less than $ 10,000 remained for the planned purpose.

In 1914 Wagner announced that he would convert the entire Wagner legacy into a Richard Wagner Foundation for the German people . In 1915, at the instigation of his mother, he married the Englishwoman Winifred Williams , Karl Klindworth's foster daughter . The marriage to the later Bayreuth Festival director had four children: Wieland , Friedelind , Wolfgang and Verena Wagner .

In the years after 1924, Siegfried Wagner endeavored to modernize the festival performances in keeping with the times, in particular by hiring the set designer Kurt Söhnlein . In 1925 he and Winifred Wagner took over the honorary presidency of the national Bayreuth Association of German Youth .

On April 1, 1930, his mother, Cosima Wagner , died with whom he had a close relationship. In 1930 a new production of Tannhäuser was planned. To this end, Siegfried Wagner hired the important conductor Arturo Toscanini . The rehearsals for this performance proved to be extremely exhausting in the hot festival summer. Siegfried Wagner suffered a heart attack during one of the rehearsals on July 18, 1930 , from which he did not recover. He died on August 4, 1930 and was buried in the Bayreuth cemetery.

After Siegfried's death, his widow Winifred took over the management of the festival until 1944.

Political attitude

Due to his involvement in the anti-Semitic Bayreuth circle around Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain , Siegfried Wagner was brought close to the German national and ethnic movement at an early age and repeatedly blackmailed by his brother-in-law to suppress his cosmopolitan attitude. He was a subscriber to the Völkischer Beobachter , which had appeared since 1920. But because of upbringing, his wife Winifred was more interested in politics and much more committed than Siegfried.

After Adolf Hitler's visit to the Wahnfried house on October 1, 1923, shortly after the German Day in Bayreuth, arranged by Winifred , Siegfried Wagner judged the guest: “Hitler is a splendid person, the real German people's soul.” After a reception at the Italian fascist leader Mussolini wrote in March 1924: “All will, strength, almost brutality. Fanatic eye, but no love power in it as with Hitler and Ludendorff. "

In June of the same year Siegfried Wagner wrote in a letter to Bayreuth Rabbi Falk Salomon: "What I consider a misfortune for the German people is the mixture of the Jewish and the Germanic races." After reading Hitler's pamphlet as one of the few contemporaries had, however, made Siegfried "openly in philosemitism" (letter to Evelyn Faltis , Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). In an open letter to Püringer he confessed: "My father did the Jews injustice" and in his opera Das Flüchlein, which everyone noticed he drew Hitler as a brutal-sadistic robber chief Wolf (= Hitler's name in the circles of the NS), who in the third act is convicted. Siegfried Wagner put the libretto of this opera on the plate of all invited guests on his 60th birthday. In 1929 he told his colleague Evelyn Faltis: “You can work much better with Jews” (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).

A festive concert scheduled for November 9, 1923, Hitler's planned “seizure of power” in the Odeon in Munich is seen as evidence that Siegfried Wagner knew about the planned Hitler-Ludendorff putsch and assumed that the putsch would be a success. The composition Glück, which was to have its world premiere that evening, is not dedicated to Hitler, but, as u. a. Claus Victor Bock in his biography Pente Pigadia and the diaries of Clement Harris attests, Siegfried's childhood friend Clement Harris. After the failed coup and Hitler's arrest, Winifred Wagner corresponded with Hitler while he was in prison. He is said to have written on paper that Winifred sent to Landsberg . According to Friedelind Wagner , Nacht über Bayreuth, p. 33, her mother's enthusiasm for Hitler's ideas made her father sigh “Winni destroys everything I desperately try to build up”.

As he basically offered the "Du" to all young male Wagner enthusiasts who visited Wahnfried, Siegfried Wagner became one of Hitler's few dozen friends by 1925 at the latest. In a diary entry of May 8, 1926, Goebbels judged Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, whom he regarded as a “classy woman”, albeit with little conspiracy: “... She complains of her suffering. Siegfried is so limp. Pooh! Should be ashamed in front of the master. "

Compositional creation

In addition to his commitment to the Bayreuth Festival, Siegfried Wagner was also active as a composer. He created 17 operas for which he wrote the libretti himself, following the example of his father . He did not achieve a resounding success on German stages. His first opera Bearskin was in 1899 by the critics panned . Peter Raabe , who became president of the Reichsmusikkammer during the Nazi era , called it "stammering attempts at composition" in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung in 1899. Siegfried Wagner himself blamed the failures on “Jewish machinations” (“Judas hatred takes care of that”).

After Winifred Wagner in particular had blocked performances of her late husband's works, they have been experiencing a renaissance for several years (e.g. at the Rudolstadt Festival or occasional productions, especially of the first opera Der Bärenhäuter, on other stages), which also includes the sequence contributed to the term of protection (70 years after the composer's death). Several CD recordings have now been made, including recordings that document Siegfried Wagner's work as a conductor.

Afterlife

In 2017 there was a first international overview exhibition, which received a lot of attention from the national press, on Siegfried Wagner: Bayreuth's legacy from a box of a different color . It was shown in the Schwules Museum * Berlin. Die Welt wrote: “With its epoch-making show on Siegfried Wagner, the Schwules Museum is trying to do what the Museum Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth is actually responsible for, namely the connection between the erotic disposition of the 'master's son' and his artistic development and family dynastic politics of the Wagner clan. After all, this was done in collaboration with the director of the Wagner Museum in the festival city. Signs that Sven Friedrich is now at least taking over the informative Berlin exhibition and would soon show it in the Siegfried Villa, which he has since played with, are not yet discernible. Apparently he doesn't dare to tackle the issue of homosexuality in Bayreuth (for backwoodsmen). ”In May 2017, the Green City Council published an open letter on the question of taking over the exhibition in Bayreuth. It says: “The exhibition belongs to Bayreuth as soon as possible. It would be devastating if the impression solidified that certain aspects of the Bayreuth Festival history could be shown and discussed in Berlin but not in Bayreuth! ”In the meantime, the Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth presented its own Siegfried Wagner exhibition in spring 2019 on the occasion of 150th birthday of the former festival director ("Siegfried Wagner. A search for traces", from April 4 to May 26, 2019).

The Berlin exhibition was curated by Kevin Clarke, who works at the Schwules Museum *, and Achim Bahr and Peter P. Pachl from the International Siegfried Wagner Society. The Berlin institution campaigned for Siegfried's closeness to National Socialism to be a theme in the show, even if Siegfried's closeness to the Nazi movement is controversial and the interpretation of the International Siegfried Wagner Society e. V. as well as that of biographer Peter P. Pachl differs greatly from what one finds in documents presented by Brigitte Hamann in her book Winifred Wagner, or, Hitler's Bayreuth (2002). Curator Kevin Clarke summarized the situation in the interview "The Cross with the Gay Nazis".

A collection of essays, edited by Achim Bahr, was published by Are-Musik-Verlag Mainz for the exhibition; it deals, among other things, with the gay and lesbian artists in Bayreuth at the time of Siegfried's festival management, with Siegfried's love letters to the young conductor Werner Franz and with gays Subtexts in the operas of Siegfried Wagner.

Works

Operas

Other works

  • Sehnsucht , symphonic poem after Friedrich Schiller, before 1895
  • Concert piece for flute and small orchestra , 1913
  • Concerto for violin with orchestra accompaniment , 1916
  • Scherzo And when the world was full of devils , 1922
  • Glück , symphonic poem, 1923
  • Symphony in C major, 1925–1927

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Siegfried, the "heir of his adored father" at infranken.de, accessed on January 4, 2015
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 637.
  3. ^ Pet P. Pachl: Siegfried Wagner - Genius in the shade.
  4. ↑ Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner or Hitler's Bayreuth, Piper Taschenbuch, 5th edition 2009, p. 650, with reference to a homosexual relationship and a rumor after Aign's death.
  5. ^ BZ: The difficult legacy of the Wagner children
  6. ↑ Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner or Hitler's Bayreuth, p. 114.
  7. ↑ Quotations, unless otherwise stated, from Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 637.
  8. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 638.
  9. ↑ Tilman Krause, "Beautiful backs and lascivious spread legs", in: Die Welt, June 19, 2017
  10. ↑ Sabine Steininger and Stefan Schlags, open letter to the Mayor of Bayreuth Brigitte Merk-Erbe, May 15, 2017 http://www.gruene-bayreuth.de/uploads/media/Antrag_SiegfriedWagner.pdf
  11. ↑ https://www.wagnermuseum.de/2019/03/sonderausstellung-siegfried-wagner-eine-spurensuche-vom-4-april-bis-26-mai-2019/
  12. ↑ "Siegfried Wagner in the Gay Museum * The Cross with the Gay Nazis" , Interview with Kevin Clarke, queer.de February 23, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Siegfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner, Siegfried Helferich Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer and director of the Bayreuth Festival
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Tribschen
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1930
Place of death Bayreuth