It could be the making of a revolution in one of Germany’s most hallowed cultural shrines.
The two great-granddaughters of the composer Richard Wagner held their first Bayreuth Festival this weekend — and have promised to reveal the Wagner family’s link to the Nazis.They even want to tackle the question of whether their grandmother, Winifred Wagner, slept with Hitler.
Eva Pasquier-Wagner, 64, and Katharina Wagner, 31, took over the festival from their ailing father, Wolfgang, and are committed to making the event, which is a high point in the classical music calendar, modern.
The aim is to make it less elitist and less secretive. There are shortened children’s versions of Wagnerian classics, live-streaming of performances on the internet, open-air public viewing, new programme notes and an introduction to each performance.
Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer, but how close were the family to him? “I was repeatedly confronted with this topic when I was growing up,” Ms Wagner said. “Was my grandmother Hitler’s lover? To what extent was my father embroiled with Hitler? If my sister and I don’t ask the questions, who will?”
The plan is for historians to produce a report by 2013, the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. Wahnfried, the Wagner family villa, will house a permanent exhibition on the Nazi years.
A display of biographies of Jewish singers and musicians who were driven out of the Third Reich’s opera houses will be held next year.
Wolfgang Wagner, 89, remembers sitting at the feet of Hitler with his brother, Wieland. Hitler promised that he would be “director of the theatre of the East,” and Wieland theatre supremo of the West, just as soon as the Führer had conquered the world.
Mr Wagner’s daughters, by two wives, are aware that many Wagnerians are politicians — the weekend premiere was attended by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, several members of her Cabinet, the Bavarian Government, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, and assorted European statesmen who could feel uncomfortable about the don’t-talk-about-Hitler taboo.
Winifred Wagner, who was born in Hastings to the journalist John Williams, became a passionate supporter of Hitler.
She was one of the first members of the Nazi party, supplied him with paper and pens to write Mein Kampf when he was in prison in the 1920s, and sheltered him in the Wahnfried villa when he was a wanted man.
Mr Wagner’s sister, Friedelind, remembers Hitler going to the children’s room on one of his overnight stays and showing them his illegal revolver: “a small weapon that barely covered his hand, yet it contained 20 bullets, he told us”.
When Hitler took over in 1933, one of his first cultural engagements was to attend the Bayreuth Festival.
It remains to be seen what the historians will discover, but Mr Wagner recalls how his mother, still shocked by Hitler’s suicide, received Klaus Mann, the American war reporter, in May 1945. “In reply to the question that you don’t have to ask me, Mr Mann, I would say: No, I have never slept with Adolf Hitler” she said.
In an interview in 1975, she said: “If Hitler came in through that door today, I would be just as pleased and happy to see him as I always was.”
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