Wahnfried, review: Getting to the ugly heart of Wagner

Telegraph

28-05-2025

What do you do when you've done the Ring? Longborough Festival Opera has built a great reputation for its economical stagings of the operas of Richard Wagner's Ring, and completed its latest cycle last year. This season, they have shaken up their programming by importing a contemporary opera that starts with the German composer's death in 1883 and takes us to the 1920s with the rise of Nazis. This ambitious if flawed 2017 work by composer Avner Dorman and librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz, receiving its UK premiere, tackles the contentious and difficult issues around Wagner's legacy and influence, notably his anti-Semitic views.
The main character is the fiercely racist British writer and philosopher Houston Chamberlain (a huge role for Mark le Brocq, magnificently sustained). Described by critic Alex Ross in his fine book Wagnerism as a 'British botanist turned Symbolist Wagnerite turned German racial ideologue', Chamberlain idolised the composer and left his first wife to marry Wagner's youngest daughter Eva (both wives are played by Meeta Ravel here). The important question the opera raises is how much Chamberlain, through his writings, was a decisive influence in ensuring that Wagner's anti-Semitic racism was by taken up by the Nazis, or whether Wagner would have achieved that all on his own.
Dorman's lively, spiky music and Polly Graham's energetic direction turn Chamberlain into a deluded individual, whose quest to be seen among the German greats of Goethe and Kant is doomed to fail. In the relentlessly skittish first act, we see the Wagner family at the family home of Wahnfried in the wake of the composer's death, fighting and struggling to craft his legacy. This mission is led by his restrained wife Cosima (Susan Bullock) who is trying to erase his revolutionary past and form his biography with the help of Chamberlain. The music here echoes 1920s neo-classicism and the edgy spirit of the Weimar Republic, plus a few pre-echoes of The Rake's Progress.
Act Two offers some deeper set-pieces in a solo lament from a conflicted Siegfried Wagner (powerfully declaimed by Andrew Watts), who is hiding his sexuality and is expected to be a great composer like his father, and in the confrontation between Chamberlain and Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor whom Wagner had supported and who premiered Parsifal (Edmund Danon, strongly serious). Wagner himself hovers in the background in the form of the ever-jokey green ghost the 'Wagner-Daemon' (an agile Oskar McCarthy), smirking at his family's pretensions and putting Chamberlain in his place as a mere footnote to history.
Inevitably this story leads towards the appearance of a none-too-heavily disguised youthful Hitler – known as the 'Master's Disciple' (Adrian Dwyer) – visiting Wahnfried in 1923 and proclaiming Wagner as his inspiration. Siegfried's wife Winifred (Alexandra Lowe) is immediately besotted with him. The orchestra explodes sonically, but the implications of this disturbing moment for the future are left unexplored.
There is total commitment from the cast, with fine singing and acting throughout; Justin Brown, who commissioned the opera, conducts with vigour, and the orchestra, community chorus and young actors bound with energy. But, because this clever show fails to elicit sympathy for these unattractive characters – least of all Wagner – there is an emotional emptiness at its heart.