‘Wahnfried’: Hitler steps on stage at Longborough
Image credit to Matthew Williams-Ellis
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was an upper class Englishman, brought up by his grandmother in France. This followed his mother’s death before he was a year old, and as a young man he worked on financial markets in Paris. It was not his metier, and after this initial failure he turned his attention to Germany, where in Wagner’s music he found a mystical spiritual force, absent in French and English cultures. When Wagner died in 1883, Chamberlain was in his late 20s and soon attached himself to the Wagner family, in particular the composer’s widow Cosima, the daughter of Liszt.
Chamberlain did some good in helping introduce Wagner’s operas to the world, but it is rather odd to make him the main character in an opera. Yet that is what Avner Dorman has done in this opera he composed, which received its premiere in Karlsruhe in 2017. Dorman was brought up in an Israeli household permeated by German culture, and is clearly trying to lay his own ghosts to rest. Chamberlain was a keen antisemite, believing German culture to be the future for mankind, and he was not the only one. A certain (later infamous) Austrian corporal appears in this opera as an uninvited guest at Wahnfried, the house Wagner had built for himself and his family.
Dorman’s struggles with his antecedents show very clearly as he juxtaposes the devil-may-care attitudes we see in the musical Cabaret, the artistic brilliance of German-Jewish culture, embodied by the appearance of the conductor Hermann Levi (Edmund Danon) who conducted the first performance of Wagner’s final opera Parsifal, and the ultra-conservatism of those like Wagner’s widow Cosima (beautifully sung by Susan Bullock), who fought to preserve his legacy against outsiders. An intriguing addition to the mix is Wagner’s son Siegfried (Andrew Watts), who like many of the cast appears in a clown costume.
But the main question the composer leaves us with is whether Chamberlain knew that what he was doing was wrong. Because wrong it certainly was, and Mark Le Brocq provides a brilliant portrayal of this vicious and supercilious man. Having no special creative ability himself, Chamberlain promoted proto-Nazi ideas and enabled Hitler to claim a remote connection with Wagner, half a century after the composer’s death.
In trying to extricate himself from this connection, Dorman has produced an opera set largely in Wahnfried, that is more Wahn (“delusion” or “madness”) than Friede (“peace”). Though I found it too full of angst, there were clearly members of the audience who loved it, and it is to director Polly Graham’s credit that she has arranged a production at Longborough, home to Wagner’s music in the Cotswolds. It was given a splendid performance under the baton of Justin Brown with the Longborough Festival Orchestra, but for my part I shall look forward to hearing Wagner’s own music at Longborough’s 2026 production of Tristan and Isolde, and their production of Meistersinger the following year, both to be conducted by the Wagner specialist Anthony Negus.
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