Patrick Bade
Bayreuth: A Troubled History

Patrick Bade - Bayreuth: A Troubled History

- These days, there are plenty of opera festivals around the world devoted to the work of one composer. There’s the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, and I shall be taking groups to the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago in August, and to the Verdi Festival in Parma in October. But in the 19th century, such a thing as a whole opera festival devoted to one composer was completely unheard of, especially a composer who was still alive. So many people regarded Wagner’s festival of his own operas at Bayreuth as an example of extreme megalomania. It was the culmination of 26 years work on his great Ring Cycle. And he very much wanted a special theatre for the presentation of “The Ring.” He wanted it to be in a small- or medium-sized town so that he could really take over the whole place. And he went to Bayreuth, because by Bayreuth had a theatre, a court theatre, that actually had the widest and deepest stage of any theatre in Germany. And here is the splendid court theatre in Bayreuth. It dates from the 1740s, one of the most magnificent opera houses in the world by the Galli Bibiena family. And it’s worth a visit to Bayreuth in itself. But despite the opportunities offered by the stage and the backstage, Wagner decided it really wasn’t suitable. The auditorium was too small. And also it hardly reflected the ethos of Wagner’s festival, which was meant to be open to everybody, it was opera for the German nation. This is clearly a very aristocratic opera house.

So he liked Bayreuth and he liked its situation, so he decided to have his own theatre built there. As usual, much of the money came from the long suffering King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Wagner stole the design, very typically, from the great German architect, Gottfried Semper. He just took the designs, paid nothing, and made no acknowledgement of his theft. Here is the theatre as it still stands today. And it was, although the layout and the design of the theatre come directly from Semper, it was much plainer than anything that Semper built himself, ‘cause he simply didn’t have the money. So it was by the standards of the 19th century, a very utilitarian building with cheap materials, with brick and with wood rather than with stone. And Wagner hoped that it would actually be a temporary edifice and that it would eventually be rebuilt in a more splendid form. Here are the notorious seats, famous for being extremely uncomfortable for sitting for very long stretches of time. The auditorium, which is laid out like a Greek amphitheatre, and as you can see, there is no central aisle. So if you happen to be caught short and need to go to the toilet halfway through act one of “Gotterdammerung,” which lasts two hours and 20 minutes, then all I can say is good luck to you. Here is a section of the theatre where you can see an enormous fly tower, as Wagner envisaged very elaborate productions, sets, and the innovation about which I spoke last time, the sunken orchestra pit, which is so advantageous, of course, to the singers who have to make themselves heard over some very heavy orchestration.

Oh, this is how Bayreuth would look today if Hitler had won the Second World War, 'cause he wanted to fulfil Wagner’s ambitions to rebuild it on a much grander scale. So here is, as though we needed one, I’d say yet another reason that we’re very glad that Hitler did not win the Second World War. So the first Bayreuth Festival took place in 1876, and there were three cycles of “The Ring” given and the great and good came from all over the world. The emperor of Brazil came, various other crowned heads, Tchaikovsky, Sulzer, Grieg, they all came to attend the first Ring cycles. And it was a tremendous achievement really to finally put it on, as I said last time, the demands, the scenic demands of “The Ring,” to this day, they’re absolutely colossal. I don’t think it could have been much fun to be singing one of the Rhine maidens in one of these contraptions and going through swimming motions while trying to sing. There were all sorts of practical problems. Actually, I feel a certain sympathy having gone through a number of tech problems myself with my computer over the last week. But there were certainly big tech problems with the first Ring cycle and the dragon, of course the dragon which has to breathe fire and it has to move, so that was a challenge. And they didn’t do good dragons in Germany apparently. The best dragons were to be found or manufactured in Britain, so they had to come to Britain for their dragon. And they may have been good at making dragons, but the Brits at the time, well at least the post, were not very hot on geography.

So parts of the dragon arrived in Bayreuth but crucial parts, including the neck, arrived at Beirut of all places. So it would’ve been a very truncated dragon that they had in the first production. Here are costumes for, you can see of the Valkyrie, this is Brunnhilde, they used to use real horses right up to the Second World War for the final scene of “Gotterdammerung.” Brunnhilde would come onto stage, well, with Marjorie Lawrence, the Australian, Wagnerian soprano, she actually rode onto the stage on a horse, but usually they walked onto the stage accompanied by a horse. And of course there’s the very famous story of a performance conducted by Beecham when the horse disgraced itself and shat on stage in the middle of Brunnhilde’s final immolation and Beecham in the orchestra pit was heard to exclaim, “Egad, a critic.” So here are more of the very splendid costumes, slightly Monty Pythonesque, I think, the giants and the gods could have come straight out of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” So, since I failed to play this to you last time, I’m going to try and play you what the audiences heard at the beginning of “Das Rheingold.” I won’t play the full five minutes 'cause we don’t really have the time for it. It starts very, very soft, so don’t worry if you can’t hear it. I think you’ll only probably hear it if you’ve got quite a good sound system and big speakers. But if you have that, this is the, it’s as I said, an amazing experience. This chord of E flat major that just goes, it builds up, builds up, builds up, just a single chord, played for over five minutes, at the end of which every fibre of your body should be vibrating with the chord of E flat major. I’m hoping it’s working 'cause I can’t actually hear it on my computer at all.

• [Speaker] Patrick, I can’t hear anything either.

• I’ll skip it. It’s very difficult for me to, is anything happening now? It should be a low rumble.

• I can’t hear it.

• Well, I’m going to move on. Yeah, yeah. So amazingly we can actually hear one of the singers who sang in the 1876 production. This is Lilli Lehmann. She sang a Rhine Maiden and she sang one of the Valkyrie. And she already attracted Wagner’s notice. I mean, she went on, of course, to become the greatest Wagnerian soprano of the late 19th century. And she made records at the end of her career. I can’t say that they give me an enormous amount of pleasure, but it is extraordinary to be able to hear the voice of somebody who sang for Wagner. So I’m just going to play you the opening of “Du bist der Lenz” from act one of Valkyrie sung by by Lilli Lehmann I think probably that recording, that doesn’t really do her justice. Now there was only one further Bayreuth Festival in Wagner’s lifetime. That was in 1882 when he first presented “Parsifal,” his inverted commas sacred music drama, though I can’t hear anything very sacred in it myself. In my last lecture I mentioned it caused quite a severe disagreement with Ludwig II, who as usual he was providing the orchestra, he was providing all the funds and, as I said, Wagner did not want Hermann Levi, who you see on the left, to conduct because he was Jewish and this was supposed to be a Christian sacred music drama. And Ludwig II, as I told you, insisted and said if you don’t take my conductor, you don’t have my orchestra. And then rather weirdly, Wagner and Cosima really took to Hermann Levi. But their correspondence actually makes rather gruesome reading. And poor Hermann Levi, I think he was kind of mollycoddled but also bullied by both the Wagners. Here is the first production of “Parsifal” in 1882. Wagner dies, of course, the next year, death in Venice, he dies in Venice. No doubt his death was what inspired the title of Thomas Mann’s famous novel. And Cosima takes over, and this is where I think Bayreuth takes a turn for the worst, in a sinister direction, particularly through the influence of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which I talked about last time.

And this is when Bayreuth becomes a centre of antisemitic thought. So in 1908, Cosima hands over the reins of power of Bayreuth, the direction of the Opera house, and the festival to her son Siegfried. You see the two of them here. And then he directs it up until 1930. Siegfried Wagner was a more or less, I would say, openly homosexual in his younger years. It was very well known. It was known to everybody that he was what we would today call gay. But in the wake of the Eulenburg scandal, which I imagine William has talked about, he was pressurised to marry. And everybody was rather astonished. 1913, he was in his mid-40s and he married the 17-year-old English woman Winifred Williams. And they went on to have four children. And as far as I know, it was a happy marriage. And certainly when I had my long conversations with Friedelind, who’s the little girl on the right here, she was very devoted to her father, far more really than she was to her grandfather. So Winifred is the one who really embraces Nazism, she was a big fan of Hitler. She took food parcels to Hitler when he was in the Landsberg prison in 1923 to four, she took him the paper on which he wrote “Mein Kampf.” And they actually got together a petition of visitors to the Bayreuth Festival to try and get Hitler released from the Landsberg prison. But Siegfried found himself in a rather conflicted position, as you can see in this political cartoon on the left-hand side. 'Cause the bizarre fact was that Bayreuth depended extremely heavily on Jewish money. I don’t know what to make of this quite, I probably truly would’ve a lot to say about this. It’s the great unrequited love of German Jews. German Jews wanting to be more German than the Germans, embracing Wagner in such an extraordinary way.

As I said, Siegfried and Siegmund become two of the commonest Jewish names in this period at the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century. So what this caricature from a satirical magazine is pointing out is that the fact that Siegfried Wagner is going round with his cap begging for money from the Jews, and at the same time they’re plastering the opera house with swastikas. It was after Siegfried’s death, I think Winifred sort of regarded herself as Hitler’s partner in life. And certainly she provided him with a family life that he didn’t have otherwise. He certainly regarded himself as a father figure to Winifred’s children. He was Uncle Wolfie as far as they were concerned. And Bayreuth in the '30s, it’s heavily subsidised by the state, by the Nazis. This is an image here of the opera house and Villa Wahnfried, the Wagners’ house in 1939 for the celebration of Hitler’s birthday. So Winifred survived the war and she survived into a very truculent and irascible old age. You can see it in her face, can’t you? She was an absolutely unrepentant Nazi. When Thomas Mann’s son went round Germany at the end of the war interviewing all the top cultural and political figures of Germany, he said all of them denied having been Nazis, all of them said, oh, I wasn’t really a Nazi, even if they were members of the Nazi party. He said I could only find one person in the whole of Germany who openly admitted to being a Nazi and loving Hitler and that was an English woman. And of course he meant Winifred Wagner. Now, in the 1970s, a german film director called Syberberg recorded five hours of interview with Winifred Wagner. I don’t know how available they are now. I went to the National Film Theatre and I sat through them all and I found it absolutely riveting. This is a woman with absolutely no filter whatsoever. It all comes out really what she thinks.

And she had some very extraordinary stories to tell about the Nazi period and what went on in Bayreuth during there, but with no sense of shame whatsoever. Utterly, utterly shameless, was a huge scandal in Germany, a huge scandal. And she was then sort of banished from Bayreuth, and it was her son, Wieland, at the time who was, or Wolfgang I think Wieland had already died, it was her sons who took over after the Second World War. And as I said, she was banned and she was also forbidden to talk to the media. And a couple of years later, there was a big documentary about Bayreuth, and she was forbidden to speak in it. You saw her in it and it’s a wonderful moment where you see her arriving and getting out of a Volkswagen car and slamming the door furiously. And the critics writing about this documentary said, well, you know, the way she shut the door of the car, it tells you everything. But in fact, when I talked, had my long conversation with Friedelind, who had no reason to love her mother, who had actually threatened to have her murdered, but Friedelind did defend her on that account. She said, well, actually that was the car door didn’t work and the only way to shut it was to slam it. So it wasn’t necessarily an expression of Winifred’s character. Here are the four Wagner children dressed up as Wagnerian characters. And again, it’s Fri Friedelind on the right-hand side. Now, the period of the 1920s in particular was pretty well everywhere, actually a golden age of Wagnerian singing at Covent Garden, at the Metropolitan in New York, Berlin, and Bayreuth itself. This is the great Lauritz Melchior. I told you about him last week.

There’s some debate as to whether he was Jewish or not. It was not something that he advertised if he was, and he was the greatest Wagner tenor of all time without a doubt. And in fact, he began his career at the first Bayreuth Festival after the First World War and the first full season at Covent Garden, both took place in the summer of 1924. And in that season at Bayreuth, he made his debut, his first important performances as Siegmund and Parsifal. And I’m going to, I hope, be able to play you the excerpt that I was unable to play you last time, to give you a sense of the monumental, elemental, incredible power of this man’s voice. It’s more like a brass instrument than a human voice. But he was also, I would say, a great artist who could modulate the voice and he could sing with exquisite tenderness when required. But anyway, it’s not required in this bit. He’s just required to sing a very heroic top note in act one of Valkyrie. And this is a recording, as I said, from 1941. It’s the 6th of December, 1941. And he just hangs onto these top notes forever. The poor conductor has to just fold his arms and wait ‘til the great Melchior has run out of breath. But of course, you’d never have been able to do anything like this at Bayreuth, that would’ve been regarded as absolutely sacrilegious. I hope you weren’t holding your breath while he was singing those top notes, otherwise, you’d probably be on the floor by now. So many of the, well, as I said, I’m not sure one way or another whether Melchior was Jewish or not, but there were plenty of great Jewish singers who sang at Bayreuth in this period, notably the Ukrainian bass Alexander Kipnis, I’ve said this many times before, for me, he is incomparably the greatest Wagnerian bass on record. It’s the most splendid, most dark, velvety, rich, impressive voice.

And he was, I mean even the Nazis regarded him as being irreplaceable. So in Berlin, where most of the Jewish singers were dismissed instantly that the Nazi regime took over at the beginning of 1933, he was forced to stay and to serve out his contract in Berlin right up 'til 1935. It was only in 1935 that he was able to escape and came to Britain and then went on to finish his career in America at the Met. So I’m going to give you an excerpt here of “Parsifal” conducted by Siegfried Wagner with the splendid Kipnis as Gurnemanz. So like Melchior, of course the voice is absolutely huge, but also like Melchior, he can modulate it and sing an exquisite pianissimo and sing with great beauty and tenderness. So 1934, of course, was the second season of the Nazi regime and the greatest Wagnerian soprano of all time, I would say, Kirsten Flagstad, she made her debut. She’d actually made her debut there in 1933 singing little roles and she was invited in 1934 to sing the larger role of Sieglinde. And she sang that with the other great Wagnerian soprano of the period as Brunnhilde, which was Frida Leider. And she was, in fact, Frida Lieder had come back from New York and she needed to be replaced in New York. And almost by accident the management of New York picked up Kirsten Flagstad hoping that she might be good and the rest is history. Her debut in New York was one of the most sensationally successful debuts of any singer in the 20th century. Now, the petition to have Hitler freed prematurely from the Landsberg prison was successful. And he was released and straight out of prison he was invited to Bayreuth for the 1925 Ring Cycle.

He was invited by Winifred and it was his first visit to Bayreuth, of course, but he was scandalised by the fact that the Wotan in the Ring Cycle was sung by the Hungarian Jew Friedrich Schorr. And he’s another singer who is regarded by many connoisseurs as being the greatest, the greatest Hans Sachs, the greatest Wotan, beautiful, sonorous, again, a very velvety voice. And he sang at Bayreuth every season from 1924 when it reopened up until '33 when the Nazis took over when he was dropped shamefully. I mean, he also sang at Covent Garden from 1924 to 1933. Covent Garden also dropped him, apparently because they didn’t want to offend the new Nazi regime by employing a Jew to sing Wotan. But here is the great Friedrich Schorr singing the role of Wotan in the last act of “Die Walkure.” So Friedrich Schorr was lucky. as Kipnis was. They went on as to have glorious careers at the Met in New York. And the irony is that if you really wanted to hear great Wagner in 1940, you wouldn’t have gone to either Bayreuth or to Berlin, you would’ve gone to New York. They had all the greatest singers. They had Schorr, they had Kipnis, they had Melchior, they had Lotte Lehmann, and they had Herbert Janssen. And so they were putting on the most spectacular Wagner performances in United States all the way through the Second World War of a level that could not have been achieved in Germany. But there were other singers who were not so lucky.

And these two great women singers, Ottilie Metzger and Henriette Gottlieb, both died in the Holocaust. Here is Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann, as she was known, very splendid, very, very fine mezzo who was an absolute stalwart to the Bayreuth Festival in the 1920s. Sadly, both could easily have been saved. There was a New York impresario called George Blumenthal. He wrote his memoirs, which are very fascinating, and he came up with a brilliant scheme to save the German Jewish Wagnerian singers. He was going to put on a full Ring Cycle in New York, in German, entirely sung by German Jewish refugees. It’s such an extraordinary story. I think it would actually make a great movie, if only it had come off. Both Metzger-Lattermann and Henriette Gottlieb would have been saved. They were both still in good voice in 1933. Here is Henriette Gottlieb. She should have had a greater career than she did. Her disadvantage actually was that she was so short, as you can see here. So audiences found it rather difficult to take her seriously in roles like Brunnhilde, where she’s supposed to be a great female warrior. So she never achieved quite the fame of Frida Lieder, and Flagstad, and some of the other great Wagnerian singers. But I’m going to play you an excerpt of Brunnhilde’s awakening scene from the end of Siegfried. And this, in my opinion, this is the most beautiful version I know of this music. She has a stunning top C and she has a perfect trill. I mean, I can’t remember all the Brunnhildes I’ve heard, or actually I think Rita Hunter had a good trill, but very, very, it’s very rare to have a huge voice Wagnerian soprano with a good trill like this one.

Stunning top C there at the end, too. I think I mentioned before when I was talking about “Fidelio,” that Henriette Gottlieb, she was a major singer in Dresden and one of her colleagues was Erna Berger. And Erna Berger late in life, in her autobiography, she said she asked herself, why didn’t I know what happened to Henriette Gottlieb? Did I not know because I didn’t want to know? And that’s a degree of honesty, I think, which was quite unusual amongst many of the people who lived through the Third Reich. But of course, I hear this so often, people saying hof course people knew, you must have known, how could you not know? But I’d like to tell you another story about another great singer at Bayreuth, Emmi Leisner. She was also a mezzo. And during the latter part of the Second World War, she was on a sort of entertainment propaganda trip to entertain troops in Eastern Europe. And another member of the group was Lale Anderson, of course, who you will know about because she was the first singer to sing “Lili Marleen.” And Lale Anderson had tried to escape from Nazi Germany over to the border in Switzerland 'cause she wanted to join her Jewish lover, Ralph Lieberman. But she was caught and she was sent to a concentration camp, and she was released because the BBC actually broadcast the fact that the great Lae Anderson, “Lilo Marleen,” was in a concentration camp. So the Nazis, to safe face, they were forced to release her.

And she went on this tour with Emmi Leisner and they got to Warsaw and all the artists who were in this troop were forced to go through the Warsaw ghetto and to witness the degradation of the Jewish population in the Warsaw Ghetto. And Emmi Leisner, she became completely hysterical and she was weeping helplessly and she collapsed on the floor of the bus and she refused to get off the bus. And she kept on saying that she couldn’t bear the thought of the fact if she got off the bus that she might meet somebody who she had known before the war. And I think it’s very interesting, and there’s a lot to be got out of that story actually. So 1930, the last year that Siegfried is in charge of the Bayreuth Festival, the great Arturo Toscanini, at the time regarded as the world’s leading conductor, he conducted several performances at the Bayreuth Festival and he came back in 1931 where he shared performances with his great rival Furtwangler. Of course, the two of them absolutely loathed one another. So that must have been quite a tense occasion. Then he was supposed to come back in 1933 but the Nazis had taken over. And it’s very famous, of course, that Toscanini refused to conduct in Nazi Germany. And later after the Anschluss, he refused to conduct in Austria. What is not so well known, and I don’t think it’s documented or in any books, is the fact that Toscanini really hesitated. It wasn’t an immediate decision. This letter is in a private collection, it belongs a friend of mine and I asked permission to photocopy it and use it in lectures.

And it’s a letter from the Jewish conductor and pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch And you can see he’s writing to somebody called Dr. Wise and he says, thank you for your letter of April 14th, you speak of Toscanini and Bayreuth. As you know, I have exhausted all possible efforts for the purpose of influencing him not to go to Bayreuth but to no avail. But in fact it was to some avail because then Toscanini changed his mind and it was a very important gesture, really, for the world’s greatest conductor to refuse to conduct in Nazi Germany. So here is Hitler with Winifred and Winifred’s oldest son Wieland, who is being groomed to take over the festival and did so. And I’m going to do a talk about that later in the series. We’ve seen this. So Bayreuth festival really became a vehicle of Nazi propaganda. And this is, you could see Richard Wagner and the new Germany, and it ends with Heil Hitler. So that’s in the programme of one of the Bayreuth Festivals of the 1930s. There’s an evolution already in the style of performance. This is the same scene of act three of Valkyrie as it was in the original production, top left, and in a rather more simplified abstracted version of the 1930s, bottom right. This is Tannhauser of 1930. Maria Muller, interestingly, as Elizabeth, who was a very ardent Nazi. Most singers, as I’ve suggested, were fleeing from Nazi Germany to go to New York. And if they were lucky, they were taken up by the Metropolitan Opera House. She had a career at the Metropolitan, but she went in the other direction. When the Nazi regime took over, she felt she had better opportunities back in Germany. So it’s kind of ironic that her costume at Saint Elizabeth is actually closely based on the costume of the figure of Synagoga on Strasbourg Cathedral.

This is the 1936 production of “Lohengrin” from Bayreuth that was considered a huge success and won plaudits from everybody. And Hitler offered it to Britain as a present for the coronation, what would’ve been the coronation of Edward VIII. Edward VIII actually hated opera, he hated Wagner, he wasn’t very keen on it, but in any case, it was decided by the British government not to accept this present from Hitler. I think there’s a key moment really in 1936. on the bottom right, you see, of course, it’s the battle of Cable Street that the British Nazis, the black shirts of Oswald Mosley invaded the East End of London to intimidate the Jewish population. And the Jews of East London rose up against them and fought them. And it was a turning point, I think, in British attitudes towards Nazism and encouraged people, I think, to turn against Hitler. That is except of course Edward VII the Duke of Windsor and his American wife, Wallis Simpson, who were ardent fans of Hitler, as you can see in this picture. So there’s a very, very, you could say, we should put up a statue to Wallis Simpson. She really did Britain a great service by causing Edward VIII to abdicate. It would’ve been an interesting, dangerous situation, I think, to have had him as king of England during the Second World War. So this famous production was broadcast all around the world. And I’m, first of all, I’m going to play you a little bit of the announcer announcing the production 'cause just the clipped tones, I think, get a real sense really of the chilling propaganda of German radio.

Here’s the announcer announcing the cast of “Lohengrin” in 1936. And let’s hear a little bit of the performance, the bridal chamber scene, absolutely ravishingly conducted by Furtwangler. Whatever you think of him as a man and his morals and his behaviour during the Third Reich, boy, could he ever elicit the most seductive sounds from an orchestra. It’s extremely, extremely slow. And you think you have to feel sorry for the poor singers, you think, my God, where did they find the breath to sing it at this kind of speed? The final opera given at Bayreuth in the summer of 1939 and, odd enough, it was the final opera given at Covent Garden for their summer season was Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” And in both cases starring the very great French heroic soprano, Germaine Lubin. I’ve talked about her before, of course, in the context of of Paris during the war. She was considered to be a national glory. And the French were extremely proud that this French singer had gained such a tremendous success at the Bayreuth Festival. And she was, as you can see, greatly admired by Hitler. Although this photograph did her terrible damage after the war, she was treated very, very brutally in the epuration, during the trials of collaborators. And I think this a photograph played a big role in that. But in Bayreuth, there was another drama going on during these performances of “Tristan and Isolde.” This is, in the central photograph, you can see Hitler with Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda, and three of their several children.

Well, in the summer of 1939, the Goebbels marriage was going through a big crisis, partly 'cause Goebbels was having an affair with the beautiful Czech actress Lida Baarova, who you see on the right-hand side. I must say the very thought of Goebbels having an affair with anybody is so disgusting. It’s enough to put me off my dinner tonight. But there you are. Magda Goebbels was having an affair with a handsome Nazi officer called Hanke, who you see on the left-hand side. And they both wanted to split because they were both deeply in love with their lovers and Hitler wasn’t having it because the Goebbels family was meant to be the ideal German family. So he really knocked their heads together. And it was during these performances of Tristan at Bayreuth that he summoned them and he said, get rid of your lovers. In fact, Baarova was banned from Germany and Magda was forced to give up her lover. And so during the performance of “Tristan and Isolde,” they’re all in a box, it was Hitler, Goebbels, and Magda, and Magda was just sobbing uncontrollably through the whole performance of “Tristan and Isolde,” hours on end, to the great embarrassment of Hitler and Goebbels. So in Britain, of course, when war broke out, the Royal Opera House closed.

The only two opera houses, permanent opera houses, Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House closed. In Germany, they wanted to keep opera going through the war right up until 1944, 'til the declaration of of total war and the Bayreuth Festival continued also until 1943. And it was used to provide, I dunno what, I wouldn’t really, could you really say that “Gotterdammerung” and “Meistersinger” are entertainment? Well, they are for some, but not necessarily for German factory workers or troops exhausted from their atrocities on the eastern front. They were all taken to Bayreuth and they were, here you see wounded soldiers from the eastern front who were then made to sit through performances of “Meistersinger” and “Gotterdammerung.” They were fed, as you can see. They were forced to not only to sit through five hours of “Gotterdammerung,” but sit through lots of speeches explaining the meaning of the opera and its importance for Nazi Germany. Let me carry on here. Images of, this is the “Meistersinger,” designed by Wieland Wagner, it’s his first important effort as an opera designer or director. The backstage atmosphere was extremely tense. The Meistersinger, Hans Sachs was a singer called Jaro Prohaska, who was an absolute ardent, passionate Nazi, as was his wife. In fact, when his wife was introduced to Hitler, she fainted with emotion. Maria Muller, I’ve already said, who’s the Eva, was also a passionate Nazi who came back to Nazi Germany from America. The mezzo Camilla Kallab, on the other hand, was an anti-Nazi.

She was one of the very few people who was brave enough in Dresden to refuse a Nazi petition against the conductor Fritz Busch. And most complicated of all was that the tenor in the “Gotterdammerung,” and of course in the “Meistersinger,” was Max Lorenz. In the interviews with Winifred Wagner, she tells a very extraordinary story. Max Lorenz, once Melchior had gone, Max Lorenz was really the only tenor in Germany capable of singing the really heavy Wagnerian roles of Siegfried, and Tristan, and so on. But he had two black marks against him as far as the Nazis were concerned. He was homosexual and he was married to a Jewish woman, who, despite his sexuality, he deeply loved and refused to divorce. He was caught in flagrante with a male member of the chorus. And he was arrested and on his way to a concentration camp. And Winifred tells how she rang Hitler, Wolfie as she called him. And she said, look, you’ve got to give me back Max Lorenz. No Max Lorenz, no Siegfried, no Bayreuth Festival. So scandal was covered up and he was released. And so he was at these Bayreuth Festivals during the war with his Jewish wife to the great scandal of the Nazi members of the cast. So there’s a very interesting story. I think there’s a plot for a movie for somebody.

But I want to finish, I don’t want to finish on a horrible negative note, a lot of what I’ve been saying has been possibly quite negative. I’d like to end with something very beautiful and, I think, very moving that gives you pause for thought about Wagner. This is the so-called Wahn monologue, the madness monologue from the “Meistersinger.” And you really wonder what the audience thought if they were listening to the words of this piece. We’re going to hear it with the great Jewish bass, Friedrich Schorr. And he, in act two of “Meistersinger,” there has been, violence has broken out in the city, there’s been a riot. And you can see the words he says, wherever you look in history, there is violence in man’s inhumanity to man, people tormenting one another, drawing blood, foolish anger, all these sort of things. And then he talks about Nuremberg being the peaceful heart of Germany. Of course, Nuremberg was the heart of Nazi Germany, there’s no doubt about that, it was not very peaceful. But anyway, so beautifully sung and I think it does raise many contradictory thoughts about the work of Wagner. So I probably don’t have time to play the whole thing, but I’ll play you a little bit of it. I think I better finish and see what questions we’ve got.

Q&A and Comments:

I’m not sure what you, oh yes, you must have been talking about the Rheingold Prelude.

Oh, somebody could hear it. Oh dear, well, there you are.

Q: When I spoke to the daughter, what were her feelings?

A: Well, of course, Friedelind was passionately, passionately anti-Nazi from the very first and denounced the Nazis and fled to America. So, her feelings were very, very clear that she loathed and detested Hitler, even though he’d been her cuddly uncle when she was a small child.

Reverse swastikas, I hadn’t, yes, I’m not sure if that, that might be accidental.

Yeah, the witch, now, it’s the same son, I can never remember. It’s not Golo, Golo’s the historian, it’s the man who wrote the novel “Mephisto.” So if you look up Mann Mephisto, you’ll find the name of the son.

The big scandal I referred to when talking about, oh yes, the big scandal was that she had given five hours of interviews and she carried on talking about Hitler, saying how much he loved him, what beautiful eyes he had. She said that in her circle of friends after the war, they were afraid to mention him by name. So they called him Uh-Es-Ah, U-S-A, , our beloved, our holy Adolf.

Yes, it was the fact that she was so unrepentant and, especially in West Germany, people really didn’t want to hear that. Ooh, this is Marilyn, you were born on the 6th of December. Wow. You are born on the, you should get that performance. You can get it, you know, on CD. But to think that that was being, while your mother was in labour, that performance was going on at the Opera House.

This is Barbara again, somebody else said this last time, that Melchior comes from a long line of Danish rabbis. It’s very interesting, how extraordinary.

Q: Has Covent Garden ever apologised for their dastardly behaviour?

A: I don’t think Covent Garden ever did officially. But that story, that’s the Rosenthal official book on the history of Covent Garden, that story is told. And he says in the book how utterly disgraceful it was and how hurt Friedrich Schorr was. And Covent Garden, in their archives, they actually have a latter from Friedrich Schorr asking them why after singing every year from 1924 to '33, he had been dropped. But I’m afraid the answer was all too obvious, but I doubt whether they gave him one.

Yes, thank you very much, Judith. Oh, that’s interesting. Well, I could see that he was a rabbi, Dr. Steven Wise, but I didn’t know that he was the leader of American Jewry at the time. A very interesting letter that needs to be more widely known. The underlying theme, I did mention this last time, I think the underlying theme is that power corrupts and love redeems. And so, I mean, Wagner is such a contradictory character because that is not the theme that you can really reconcile with Nazi ideology.

And the text that I’ve just played you of the Wahn monologue, even though “Meistersinger” became really the party piece of Nazi Germany, and I find parts of “Meistersinger” very difficult to listen to. I have an almost allergic reaction to the opening of the overture. It just makes me really shudder because it became so associated with Nazi festivals. But you know, there’s much in the “Meistersinger,” which you can’t really reconcile with Nazism.

The Ring, there’s a lot of brutality in The Ring. I mean, Siegfried is a completely repulsive character. He’s an absolute thug. Did the British aristocracy ever truly turn against the Nazis? Well, I don’t think you can generalise about that. There are certainly elements in the British aristocracy that were sympathy to the Nazis, but the Nazis actually greatly overrated that. The Nazis were convinced, they also overrated incidentally the influence of Sir Thomas Beecham. They really cultivated him because they thought he had kind of links to the British aristocracy that they wanted to cultivate.

Thank you very much, Diane. Yeah, I agree with you, Barbara, I’ve never heard that duet from “Lohengrin” sound quite so languorous and sensual as it does there. Why is the figure called Synagoga? It’s one of two figures on the facade of Strasbourg Cathedral. There are other cathedrals in the world that have the two figures, for instance, Tunis Cathedral has it. One figure represents Ecclesia, that’s the Christian Church, and the other one represents Synagoga. And you can see the figure of Synagoga is blindfolded and her staff is broken. And the symbolism of that is the triumph of Christianity over Judaism.

Can’t think of a worst matchmaker. I think you’re probably talking about the Goebbels story. Yes, Magda, I mean what, thank you, yes, David, of course. I mean, the Magda, there is a very good biography of Magda Goebbels, which I recommend if you can stand it. She was an absolutely horrible woman, horrible woman. And the way they murdered their children is unspeakable.

Thank you, Rita. Festivals this year, I’m taking a group to the Puccini Festival, and one to, you’re based in Lucca and the festivals at Torre del Lago, and I’m taking one group to the Verdi Festival, I do recommend that in Parma in October. It’s a lovely time of the year to go and it’s my favourite trip to do every year 'cause it’s such a fantastic combination of wonderful music, beautiful art, and the most delicious food on the planet. If you haven’t eaten pasta in Parma, you dunno what pasta can be like.

This is Sandy, yes, I think that’s a point that the best of Wagner is in the orchestra. What I really recommend, you’re so right about Puccini, of course, there’s never a spare note in Puccini and Puccini is, for me, beyond criticism, a composer I so love. But let me recommend you, Sandy, the Stokowski orchestral syntheses of the Wagner operas. If you don’t know them already, it’s a great way to appreciate Wagner. And also, as I mentioned last time, Wagnerian singers are often an absolute pain, shrieky, wobbly, and enough to put anybody off. Thank you for your nice comments. Is there anything at Bayreuth acknowledging, yes, about the architect, no, no, there’s nothing to acknowledge Semper. But there is that monument I showed you which acknowledges the Jewish singers.

Yes, Gabrilowitsch was a great pianist, but he became the conductor of Detroit. And it’s true, he was married to a daughter of Mark Twain. That’s a very interesting fact, isn’t it?

The Verdi Festival, it’s the beginning of October. That’s with Kirker Holidays, if you want to check that one out, Kirker’s K-I-R-K-E-R. And they’re already taking bookings I know. Bologna and of course Parma are very close to one another, very similar cuisine, but I believe that Parma actually has the prize as the best place in Italy to eat. I can well believe it.

And yes, Magda Goebbels, a terrible woman.

So that is it for today. Thank you all very much and I’ll see you again on Sunday where we’re going to be looking at one of my favourite cities, Munich.