Houston, We have a Problem: Barry Millington is thrilled by a new opera about the Wagner legacy

Review of Wahnfried (music by Avner Dorman, libretto by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz), directed Warner, conducted Brown, Karlsruhe, 2017.

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 66–8.

The Wagner family feuds have often been described as suitable material for an opera – or perhaps a soap opera. Avner Dorman’s two-act opera Wahnfried, with libretto by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz, offers a witty, shocking dramatic treatment of the extended family circle around Cosima in the half-century following Wagner’s death. In doing so, it also grapples courageously with the larger issues of the Wagner legacy: the anti-Semitism and nationalist ideology that gripped the Bayreuth Circle in and around Haus Wahnfried, making it an engine for the incipient rise of the Third Reich.