{"id":575898,"date":"2026-07-30T18:37:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T18:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/575898\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T18:37:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T18:37:20","slug":"germanys-most-famous-opera-festival-confronts-its-nazi-era-inheritance-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/575898\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany\u2019s most famous opera festival confronts its Nazi-era inheritance \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Wagner was a musical genius and world-class anti-Semite \u2013 with an unerring talent for monetising scandal.<\/p>\n

He would have nodded approvingly \u2013 then checked box office receipts \u2013 after outraged headlines marked the 150th anniversary of the festival<\/a> he founded in Bayreuth.<\/p>\n

The headlines were thanks to festival director Katharina Wagner, the composer\u2019s great-granddaughter, who invited – then uninvited – Michel Friedman, a German-Jewish journalist, to lecture on the burdened Wagner inheritance.<\/p>\n

Bayreuth is as legendary for its feuds as its music and Wagner, with an eye on the press, changed her mind again at the last minute and reinvited Friedman, who lost 50 relatives in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Onstage, he placed front and centre what the Wagner family prefers to forget: their intimate ties with opera obsessive and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n

\"KatharinaKatharina Wagner – Richard Wagner’s great granddaughter – with Andreas Zippel and Luca Maass at the Bayreuth Festival 2026 opening. Photograph: Tristar Media\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

In his early days in office, the Nazi dictator liked to say it was Wagner\u2019s opera Rienzi \u2013 staged this year for the first time at the festival \u2013 that inspired him to enter politics.<\/p>\n

Later, Hitler said: \u201cIt was in Bayreuth that the sword was forged with which we fight today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wagner was half a century dead when Hitler took power, but the composer\u2019s soaring music was as much Nazi soundtrack as metaphorical sword: at party rallies, in newsreels and wartime radio announcements \u2013 even in concentration camps.<\/p>\n

That all ensures the Bayreuth festival theatre stands on \u201ccontaminated ground\u201d, Friedman said, and \u201cstinks of Hitler, despite postwar efforts\u201d.<\/p>\n

After Hitler\u2019s suicide and Nazi Germany\u2019s capitulation, the Wagner family, caught up in the national amnesia epidemic, restarted the festival in 1951 with a polite programme request: \u201cIn the interest of a smooth staging of the festival, we ask politely to desist from conversations and debates of a political nature … here is for art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Nazi dictator liked to say it was Wagner\u2019s opera Rienzi \u2013 staged this year for the first time at the festival \u2013 that inspired him to enter politics. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images <\/p>\n

It is the long tail of this postwar self-exculpation that Friedman blames for modern Germany\u2019s growing political worries.<\/p>\n

With the far-right political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD)<\/a>, posed to take power in its first federal state in September, Friedman said the main problem \u2013 then and now \u2013 was not Germans who wanted to remember the past, but those who would rather forget.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are the eyewitnesses of our time, today,\u201d he said, \u201cand hopefully people won\u2019t ask us in 20 years why we gave away democracy so easily to those who want to destroy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedman praised Wagner, hoping her efforts to address the past would help secure the festival\u2019s future as it struggles with money troubles, artistic rows and ageing audiences. <\/p>\n

\"KatharinaKatharina Wagner has been praised for her efforts to address the past as a means to help secure the festival\u2019s future. Photograph: David Zorrakino\/Europa Press via Getty Images <\/p>\n

With her guest, the festival director visited an open-air exhibition in Bayreuth about Jewish artists with festival links who were murdered by what her grandmother called \u201cblessed Hitler\u201d.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s festival gave fresh momentum to the long-running row over whether it is possible to separate Wagner\u2019s music and politics. <\/p>\n

Defenders of Wagner say, for all of his many character flaws, his music lives in its own sphere as great art for the ages.<\/p>\n

Critics dismiss these arguments with the composer\u2019s own logic, as laid out in his notorious 1869 pamphlet Judaism in Music, that it is impossible to salvage ideologically compromised music: for him, it was the music of \u201coutsider\u201d Jewish composers; for his modern critics, it is the sweeping melodies of an anti-Semitic misanthrope.<\/p>\n

For all the offstage drama, the Wagner family\u2019s belated reflections on the real cost of human stupidity attracted more praise in Bayreuth than the onstage AI-generated backdrops of this year\u2019s new Ring tetralogy.<\/p>\n

\"Bayreuth’sBayreuth\u2019s \u2018Das Rheingold\u2019. The Wagner family\u2019s belated reflections on the real cost of human stupidity attracted more praise in Bayreuth than the onstage AI-generated backdrops of this year\u2019s new Ring tetralogy. Photograph: Bayreuther Festspiele \/ Enrico Nawrath \"TheThe AI software was fed Wagner scores, recordings and other historical material then, during live performances. Photograph: Bayreuther Festspiele \/ Enrico Nawrath <\/p>\n

The AI software was fed Wagner scores, recordings and other historical material then, during live performances, projected hallucinatory backdrop collages: historic Bayreuth production photos, images of writer Thomas Mann and, of course, the inescapable Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Wagner was a musical genius and world-class anti-Semite \u2013 with an unerring talent for monetising scandal. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49539,93,292,61,60],"class_list":["post-575898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-entertainment","tag-germany","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}