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OPERA

Wagner’s great-granddaughters win Bayreuth succession battle

Two of Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughters were chosen Monday to run the annual Bayreuth Festival devoted to the composer’s music, ending a bitter succession battle—for now at least.

Published: 2 September 2008 08:30 CEST
Wagner's great-granddaughters win Bayreuth succession battle
Photo: DPA

The festival’s board chose the half-sisters Katharina Wagner, 30, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, to take over from their father Wolfgang Wagner, 89, who retired last week after 57 years in charge of the festival. However it was unclear whether the decision will mark a new chapter of warmer relations among the composer’s descendents, as the board was forced to chose Eva and Katharina over a rival bid from their cousin Nike Wagner, 63.

Nike, daughter of Wolfgang’s late brother Wieland, had proposed running the world’s oldest and most prestigious summer festival together with Paris Opera chief and future New York City Opera general director Gerard Mortier. Toni Schmid, head of the Stiftungsrat or board, told a news conference that 22 members of the 24-seat board had voted for Eva and Katharina, and none against, and that both would sign a contract of not more than seven years.

Eva had stopped talking to Wolfgang when he divorced her mother Ellen Drexel in 1976 to marry Gudrun, mother of Katharina. When the Stiftungsrat nominated Eva as the new chief in 2001, Wolfgang dismissed her as incompetent and vowed to hold on to his life-long tenure—at least until Katharina was old enough to succeed him. Gudrun’s unexpected death last November redrew the battle lines, with the shock and Wolfgang’s ailing health making him more open to a reconciliation with Eva.

Nike said in a statement on Monday she was “sad” about the decision and that she hoped that the artistic proposals that Mortier has proposed to the board would not be forgotten.

“The fact that members of the board go into a meeting having made up their minds and do not let themselves be swayed by argument is unfortunately nothing new,” she said.

“This makes my hope even greater than my cousins take on board the suggestions from Gerard Mortier and myself. I wish them lots of success.”

The festival was founded by the composer in 1876, and for the past 57 years it has been run with an iron fist by Wolfgang, 42 of them in sole charge after the death of Nike’s father Wieland in 1966.

The core of the month-long festival, held on the famous “Green Hill” outside the Bavarian city of Bayreuth, is usually Wagner’s four-part “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle of operas—a 16-hour work mixing German medieval epic and ancient Norse legend.

These and other Wagner works are performed in an austere, red brick opera house designed by the composer himself, drawing every summer thousands of opera aficionados from all around the world.

Tickets can cost as much as €225 euros ($330) — if you are prepared to wait up to 10 years to get them, that is.

The frail Wolfgang turned 89 on Saturday and earlier this year the white-haired patriarch decided it was time to stand aside and place the running of the world’s oldest and most prestigious summer festival in younger hands.

The duo of Eva and Katharina is one of experience and youthful ideas. Eva works as artistic consultant to the Aix-en-Provence opera festival, has worked at opera houses all over the world and was even senior artistic advisor to The Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Katharina masterminded the first-ever live Internet broadcast of an opera from Bayreuth this year, as well as a popular free public viewing. She has also promised opera for kids, a special academy for young talent and fresh efforts to come to terms with Bayreuth’s Nazi past. Hitler was a huge fan of the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner and a close friend of Winifred Wagner, Wolfgang’s mother. Wolfgang and the other children used to call Hitler “Onkel Wolf.”

Nike runs her own festival, the high-brow “Pelerinages” in Weimar, and Mortier cut his teeth as head of the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels before taking over the renowned Salzburg Festival in Austria in the 1990s. Mortier also founded the ambitious Ruhrtriennale music and theatre festival in western Germany, and is due to take up a new position of general director of the New York City Opera next year.

Eva told a news conference that she and Katharina would ensure continuity. “I don’t believe that the change will become noticeable quickly. Maybe in two to three years,” she said.

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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