Settling Scores: Eva Rieger’s biography of Friedelind Wagner fills in gaps in the fractious history of New Bayreuth, finds Barry Millington

Review of Eva Rieger, Friedelind Wagner: Richard Wagner’s Rebellious Granddaughter, tr. Chris Walton (The Boydell Press, 2013).

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 88–91.

The full story of how postwar Bayreuth came to terms with its Nazi legacy has yet to be told. But the skeins of fabrication, subterfuge and score-settling misinformation are gradually being unravelled and a fuller picture is slowly emerging. Eva Rieger, in her impeccably researched and highly readable biography of Friedelind Wagner, one of the composer’s granddaughters, is both admirably forthright and even-handed in her evaluation of the postwar concordat known as New Bayreuth. The biography, published originally in Germany, has been translated sympathetically and accurately by Chris Walton.