# Movie: The Wagner Family



## Music Snob (Nov 14, 2018)

Has anyone seen this? It is available on YouTube. I'm posting this on general discussion because I have a simple question that I hope to get answered.

Does anyone know who is conducting the performance at the closing credits? The performance is at Bayreuth and the production is traditional and AWESOME! I would love to see more. My internet search yielded no answer so I ask the experts on this board to help.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

It doesn't appear to be a filming of an actual performance, but rather a sort of staged montage, as you can tell by the scenes from _Walkure_ and _Siegfried_ which appear in the midst of _Gotterdammerung,_ as well as by the drastic cuts in the music. The name "Erich Korngold" flashes onto the screen beneath the conductor, so I'm guessing that Korngold is making a guest appearance as conductor in the film. The voice of Brunnhilde is clearly dubbed.

While I'm here, I may as well point out that there are some inaccuracies and some outright deceptions (propaganda) in Tony Palmer's film,"The Wagner Family." It's always wise to be skeptical of popular entertainments and media presentations on the subject of Wagner. There is a whole thread on TC devoted to discussion of this film (in its short version) which might interest you.

https://www.talkclassical.com/53743-wagner-family.html?highlight=gottfried

POSTSCRIPT: Rereading my own final post in that other thread, I discover the answer to your inquiry: the filmed scenes from the _Ring_ are from the movie "Magic Fire," directed by William Dieterle in 1955. The conductor is indeed Erich Korngold, playing the role of conductor Hans Richter.


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## Music Snob (Nov 14, 2018)

Thanks Wooduck! I was searching for the conductor last night. At that moment the credit appears it actually says “Erich Kornold.” I looked up “Korngold” as well but didn’t see a resemblance... I should’ve looked closer! Now to check out Magic Fire by William Dieterle.

Edit: I just perused the thread in the link and I would agree with you about the deceptions. The movie went straight to Wagner family- Nazi connections instead of giving a fair chronological depiction of the family after Wagner’s death. I can go on about Gutman and Parsifal but it’s not worth wasting my breath on that dude. His book is even worse. It’s only good for the pictures.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Music Snob said:


> Thanks Wooduck! I was searching for the conductor last night. At that moment the credit appears it actually says "Erich Kornold." I looked up "Korngold" as well but didn't see a resemblance... I should've looked closer! Now to check out Magic Fire by William Dieterle.
> 
> Edit: I just perused the thread in the link and I would agree with you about the deceptions. The movie went straight to Wagner family- Nazi connections instead of giving a fair chronological depiction of the family after Wagner's death. I can go on about Gutman and Parsifal but it's not worth wasting my breath on that dude. His book is even worse. It's only good for the pictures.


I'm delighted to hear from someone who understands that scoundrel Robert Gutman. His "Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music" has done inestimable harm to Wagner scholarship and to the popular perception of the composer and his work. I read the book a full fifty years ago when it was new and when I was just digging deeply into Wagner's work, and even before I understood how shoddy and disingenuous Gutman's scholarship was I could hear his gleefully held prejudices cackling from the pages.

I wonder whether the original full-length version of Dieterle's film still exists. Apparently it was trimmed by about an hour for commercial release. It's quite an entertaining movie, but what's left of it focuses mainly on Wagner's earlier years.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

I just watched the film after seeing this thread. It's interesting in a tabloid way and the sinister links between the post-Wagner family members and the Nazi's is from the horse's mouth, but it's not much fun music-wise.

What _is_ startling is at about 56 minutes when Friedelind Wagner is talking to the camera, she looks so much like Richard Wagner it's like a glimpse of seeing the man himself. Moving in real time rather than just a photo!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

eugeneonagain said:


> What _is_ startling is at about 56 minutes when Friedelind Wagner is talking to the camera, she looks so much like Richard Wagner it's like a glimpse of seeing the man himself. Moving in real time rather than just a photo!


Those Wagner features did persist through the generations. Both Richard and Cosima had strong, unusual faces, so naturally exaggerated they were hard to caricature. The genes could be seen clearly in Wagner's grandchildren, Wieland, Wolfgang, Friedelind and Verena. Now Gottfried resembles his great-grandfather (which must give him PTSD when he looks in the mirror, poor fellow), and great-granddaughter Nike looks strikingly like Cosima.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Just look at Wagner's first marriage with Minna. They were arguing at the pulpit at the ceremony. Evidently that same turbulence and bullheadedness have been passed down the line. What a horrible story portrayed in the movie, though any family can be dramatically dysfunctional. But most of what this family has gone through seems to have been brought on by themselves, their creative differences, their politics, and the pressure of carrying out Wagner's legacy. Whatever legacy he created it certainly didn't help his family in its application in their personal lives- isn't that the point for everyone?-who apparently have no idea what he's talking about. How they're going to get out from under the pressure of it all seems impossible because they all want power or they don't want power. There is apparently little or no love in anything that they do toward each other. But I think the seat of the dysfunction goes back to Richard Wagner himself, his own turbulence, genius, and hedonism. Robert Schumann said that Wagner could never shut up, and people have been talking about him ever since. Whatever legacy Wagner left them, they seem to have no idea what to do with it without making themselves miserably unhappy or destroying themselves. Very sad and disappointing.

https://www.wagner-tuba.com/richard-wagners-life/marriage-minna/


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

That Wagner was volatile, opinionated, extravagant, driven, and poor marriage material as a young man seems to me not very relevant to the problems of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whose lives intersected with extraordinary historical circumstances the composer could not have imagined. Carrying on the immense artistic legacy of an eccentric genius would present artistic and logistical problems in the best of times, and families are notoriously prey to battles over how to handle their inheritance. But how does a family function when the inheritance has been stained by Nazism, and done so with the family's own complicity? 

Old man Wagner's family life with Cosima and the children seems to have been fairly serene, at least in Wagnerian terms, and his son Siegfried adored him and was by all accounts a gentle soul. Cosima, of course, was another story: she was apparently more antisemitic than Wagner, worshipped the ground he walked on, dressed in nothing but black after he died, and ruled Bayreuth with an iron hand until Siegfried took it over in 1906. He ran it until 1930 and then left it in the hands of his wife Winifred, who was an Englishwoman without a Wagner gene in her body. These years, unfortunately, saw the rise of the virulent ideology which ultimately brought Hitler to the shrine, and the non-Wagner Winifred welcomed him as a friend. Siegfried and Winifred's sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, had close relationships with their mother's companion, and in the wake of the horrors of the war years had a difficult assignment: to cleanse Wagner's legacy of the Nazi stain. While Wolfgang functioned mainly as business manager of the festival, Wieland, the more artistically talented, proceeded to mount abstract and nontraditional productions which sought to reveal the universality, as opposed to the Germanness, of Wagner's works. 

While Wieland determined the direction of the festival during the 1950s and '60s, life in Bayreuth seemed on a fairly stable and even noble course, the work being done there having a profound influence on operatic production worldwide and fulfilling the composer's own hope that his festival would be a cultural beacon. After Wieland's rather untimely death, Wolfgang assumed artistic direction, things began to go downhill, and the rest of the family were saddled with a responsibility which they've not always handled gracefully. They have to deal not only with the sadly mixed legacies of a titanic genius and the genocidal dictator who admired him, but with the guilt of their forebears and the changing artistic climate of a postmodern era, in which strident voices clamor for the deconstruction of old works of art when everything seems permissible except respect for the artist's intentions.

It's hard to imagine an artistic legacy more difficult to sustain than that of Richard Wagner in 21st-century Germany, assuming that we want his revolutionary festival to be more than a museum (a legitimate choice which would suit some people just fine). It will probably take another re-creative genius such as Wieland to ease the burden. Meanwhile, what in any other family would be perfectly ordinary frictions are exacerbated by the stress of it all and acted out on the stages of Bayreuth and the world. It's a tribute to Wagner's own vision, and to Germany's and the world's sense of responsibility toward it, that the festival has survived all of what's been done there. Conceivably it won't be in the family's hands forever, and conceivably it will be better off when it isn't.


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## Music Snob (Nov 14, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Conceivably it won't be in the family's hands forever


I nominate myself for artistic director of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Music Snob said:


> I nominate myself for artistic director of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth.


You'll need to submit a resume and undergo an interview before the board. Don't call us. We'll call you.


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## aussiebushman (Apr 21, 2018)

WoodDuck wrote: "He ran it until 1930 and then left it in the hands of his wife Winifred, who was an Englishwoman without a Wagner gene in her body. These years, unfortunately, saw the rise of the virulent ideology which ultimately brought Hitler to the shrine, and the non-Wagner Winifred welcomed him as a friend. Siegfried and Winifred's sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, had close relationships with their mother's companion, and in the wake of the horrors of the war years had a difficult assignment: to cleanse Wagner's legacy of the Nazi stain."

Anyone wanting more on this excellent analysis by WoodDuck should read the biography "Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth" by Brigitte Hamann. The publication earned her "Book of the Year" honors by Opernwelt (Operaworld) magazine and "Historical Book of the Year" honors from Damals history magazine. I have studied this period of history and found the book valuable for its insights into the period, as well as the Wagner family​


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