Wolfgang Wagner (opera director)

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Wolfgang Wagner, 2004

Wolfgang Manfred Martin Wagner (born August 30, 1919 in Bayreuth ; † March 21, 2010 ibid) was a German opera director and set designer . Until 2008 he directed the Bayreuth Festival . He was the third child of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner , a grandson of Richard Wagner and a great-grandson of Franz Liszt .

Life

At the age of almost eleven, Wolfgang Wagner lost his father. He grew up in Bayreuth and also attended high school there. During his school days he learned to play the trumpet and horn. He graduated from school with a secondary school leaving certificate. The close friendship between his mother Winifred and Adolf Hitler during the Nazi era - who wanted to be called "Uncle Wolf" by Winifred's children - did not save Wolfgang from Reich labor service and military service. As soon as the war began in 1939, he was drafted and served on the Polish front. The serious war injury he sustained there was operated on in Berlin by the doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch . After his recovery, he first completed a practical theater and musical training in Munich, then from 1940 at the Berlin State Opera . There he worked as an assistant director to Emil Preetorius and in 1944 directed the opera Bruder Lustig by his father, who would have been 75 at the time.

In 1949, the Wagner family received the Festspielhaus and Villa Wahnfried back, which had been placed under trust by the US military government in 1945. Together with his brother Wieland , Wolfgang Wagner took over the overall direction of the Bayreuth Festival , which could take place again for the first time in 1951. The 75th Bayreuth Festival has been in preparation since 1950. In this context, the two Wagner brothers were seen as pioneers of the so-called New Bayreuth : This is a stylistic renewal that Wieland Wagner brought to the point as “clearing out” the scene, Wolfgang Wagner with the term “Werkstatt Bayreuth”. Overall, the focus for Wolfgang Wagner during these years was on the organization and the difficult financing of the festival. But in 1953 he made his debut as a Bayreuth director with Lohengrin . In 1962, when the brothers were still alive, an agreement was reached that the survivor of the two should continue the festival alone. After Wieland's death in 1966, Wolfgang was then solely responsible for running the festival. In order to secure their long-term existence, he gave up the legal form of the purely family business. The Bayreuth Festival Hall and the Wahnfried House , which had previously been family property, were transferred under his aegis to the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth , founded in 1973 . Both the family and public institutions are involved in it. From 1986 to 2008, Wolfgang Wagner was the managing director and sole shareholder of Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH (from 1987 with a lifetime contract). This gave him greater creative freedom and at the same time responsibility than would have been the case with a purely state-appointed artistic director .

Since 1967 Wolfgang Wagner was the sole director and fully responsible for the financing of the festival. His strategy consisted of engaging external directors for the festival and, in part, ensuring the continued existence of the festival through lower fees. He brought conductors such as Carlos Kleiber , Colin Davis , Woldemar Nelsson , Daniel Barenboim , Peter Schneider , James Levine , Giuseppe Sinopoli and Christian Thielemann to Bayreuth. While his own productions were classified as rather conservative, he opened the festival to innovative guest directors. The reinterpretations of Tannhäuser by Götz Friedrich in 1972 and of the Flying Dutchman by Harry Kupfer in 1978, the " Jahrhundertring " in 1976 by Patrice Chéreau (director) and Pierre Boulez (conductor), and the legendary Tristan production in 1993 by Heiner are both provocative and epochal Müller or the 2004 Parsifal production by Christoph Schlingensief . In contrast to normal opera operations, Wagner gave his directing teams the opportunity to develop their productions every year. Regardless of this, critics charged that the Bayreuth Festival had lost its pioneering role in the interpretation of Wagner.

In business terms, Wolfgang Wagner managed to keep the share of public subsidies in the total budget always below 40%. Thanks to extensive cultural sponsorship by companies and private donors, the entrance fees in Bayreuth are lower than at comparable music festivals. The maintenance of a corona of around 140 Richard Wagner associations with around 37,000 members worldwide (as of 2007) was also described as an economic and at the same time “ideological” achievement. By allocating tickets to the Wagner associations or their Richard Wagner scholarship foundation, Wagner was able to build a special bond with the festival. The aim of the scholarship foundation is to enable 250 students from all over the world to visit the festival free of charge every year. The members of the Wagner associations only play a supporting role here; According to their chairman, they themselves are not entitled to preferential treatment when selling tickets. A comparatively large contingent of tickets traditionally goes to members of the German Federation of Trade Unions , for which there were two closed performances annually at reduced prices from 1951–2009 (2010–11 one closed performance at regular prices). Funding institutions ( federal , state , city , district , Society of Friends of Bayreuth and others) and the youth festival meeting were also taken into account. How these institutions dealt in detail with the cards entrusted to them was difficult to verify for the public and was therefore partly controversial. The contingents at least reduced the number of free tickets from the original 57,750 tickets per season (with 1,925 seats and 30 performances) and thus contributed to the constant overbooking. In 2007, the waiting time for interested parties was estimated at up to ten years.

In his first marriage, Wolfgang Wagner was married to the dancer Ellen Drexel (1919–2002) from 1943 onwards . Two children emerged from this marriage: the theater manager Eva Wagner-Pasquier (* 1945), who worked for the Festival in Aix-en-Provence for many years , and the director and publicist Gottfried Wagner (* 1947). After the divorce in 1976, Wagner married his then secretary in the press office of the Festival Gudrun Mack (1944–2007). Their daughter Katharina Wagner was born in 1978. in 1994 his autobiography was published under the title Life Files .

In the last few years of Wolfgang Wagner's term of office, there were repeated long-term discussions about his successor due to his old age and poor health. In 2001 the Board of Trustees nominated Eva Wagner-Pasquier as future festival director with a majority of 22-2 votes. Wagner, who favored his second wife Gudrun, refused this vote, referring to his contract for life. In December 2001, an amicable agreement was reached between Wolfgang Wagner and the Board of Trustees, in which the Munich Artistic Director Klaus Schultz von Wagner was brought in as a mediator and hired as a freelancer for the festival management, in order to possibly be the director of the festival until a new festival management was appointed - if possible from within the family. Schultz performed this voluntary task until Wolfgang Wagner's resignation in 2008.

Wolfgang Wagner's grave in the Bayreuth city cemetery

After the unexpected death of Gudrun Wagner at the end of 2007, there was a “careful rapprochement” between Wolfgang Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier in spring 2008. In April 2008 Wagner signaled for the first time that he could imagine his two daughters Eva and Katharina running the festival together. The public also interpreted this as giving in to the grantors, who would no longer have been prepared to unconditionally compensate for the increased deficit of the festival.

After both Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier had declared their willingness to cooperate, Wagner announced in a letter to the Board of Trustees that he would resign from his position as festival director on August 31, 2008.

One week before the meeting of the Board of Trustees, which had to discuss the successor on September 1, 2008, Wieland Wagner's daughter Nike applied to take over the management of the festival together with cultural manager Gerard Mortier . However, the Board of Trustees voted for Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier with a majority of 22 votes (with 2 abstentions).

After handing over the official business, Wolfgang Wagner lived very withdrawn due to a serious illness. On March 21, 2010 at around two o'clock in the morning, he died in his house in Bayreuth.

Awards, memberships

See also

literature

Movies

  • Werner Herzog : The transformation of the world into music. Bayreuth before the premiere. 1994, production: arte , Unitel, ZDF
  • Percy Adlon : Wolfgang Wagner. Lord of the rings. 1985, production: ARD , BR

exhibition

  • Richard Wagner Museum in the Wahnfried House : The Principal , July 19 to November 3, 2019

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Wagner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Example: Conversation with Dieter David Scholz ( Memento from May 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), SWR2  / MDR Figaro, November 2007
  2. ↑ a b "Guardian of the Grail and Card Cartel" , Die Welt , August 17, 2007
  3. ↑ homepage RWVI ( Memento of 5 October 2007 at the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Interview with Josef Lienhart, Chairman of the Richard Wagner Association International , in BR-alpha , January 23, 2004
  5. ↑ "Unexpected chance for Bayreuth tickets" ( Memento from December 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Nordbayerischer Kurier , December 14, 2009
  6. ↑ Report on Spiegel Online
  7. ^ "Bayreuth controversy before the end" ( Memento from May 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), ORF , April 19, 2008
  8. ↑ Documentation: Wagner's letter of April 8, 2008 ( memento of August 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), festspiele.de, April 15, 2008
  9. ^ "Surprise in Bayreuth. Wagner for double leadership of his daughters ” , FAZ , April 12, 2008
  10. ^ "Eva Wagner-Pasquier ready for festival management" ( Memento from August 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), festspiele.de, April 18, 2008
  11. ↑ Foundation Board Ticker ( Memento from May 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ Festival personnel: Half-sister duo takes over management in Bayreuth , Spiegel.de, September 1, 2008
  13. ^ Obituary by Joachim Thiery at the funeral service on April 11, 2010 ( memento from April 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Christine Lemke-Matwey : The guardian of the hill. In: Der Tagesspiegel . March 23, 2010, accessed April 10, 2015 .
  15. ↑ Special exhibition “The Principal. Wolfgang Wagner and the 'Werkstatt Bayreuth' ”- from July 19, 2019 on wagnermuseum.de from August 1, 2019, accessed on August 12, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner, Wolfgang Manfred Martin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera director and set designer
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Bayreuth
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 2010
Place of death Bayreuth