Wieland’s Smithy Years: Simon Williams is intrigued by a new study of Wieland Wagner that leaves the reader to decide how much his wartime productions pre-empted his New Bayreuth revolution

The reception and interpretation of Richard Wagner’s operas has been progressively permeated by ideological arguments – both moderate and extreme – and, over the last seventy years, by their disquieting association with Nazism and Hitler’s patronage of Bayreuth. Wagner’s works have provided a battlefield upon which postwar generations have fought out their troubled relationships with their history. 

This is where Anno Mungen’s chronicle of Bayreuth and, more broadly, Germany’s military and political fortunes during the last four years of World War II serves such an elucidating purpose. At the centre of his narrative is Wieland Wagner, his work in the opera houses of Nuremberg and Altenburg, and his rising ambition to take over the directorship of the Bayreuth Festival, but this is far from the entire story.