Volume 48, Number 13 · August 9, 2001
Bayreuth Blues
By Joseph Kerman
The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty
by Nike Wagner, translated from the German by Ewald Osers and Michael Downes
Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $29.95
A few weeks ago the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth celebrated its 125th anniversary. To the world (perhaps I should say, to the opera world) at large, things have been going along relatively smoothly at Bayreuth since the centennial year 1976, when Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez created a sensation by their bouleversement of Der Ring des Niebelungen, and when the former director of the festival, Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard, did likewise by celebrating her Nazi past on camera for Hans Jürgen Syberberg. For insiders, however, the interim has been marked by an intensifying struggle for the succession to the directorship held for fifty years by Winifred's son Wolfgang. Often reported in the press, and only very recently resolved, this 'soap opera,' as Nike Wagner calls it, forms the background for her impressive book The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty. She is a great-granddaughter of the composer and has been one of the claimants.
Review, 3807 words
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