“Anyone who loves Wagner and hates Jews can’t be a bad person.” A chilling verdict bestowed on a fervent young soldier who is welcomed into the Wagner family home, Wahnfried, in 1923. In the cast list of Avner Dorman’s opera he is unnamed, simply called The Master’s Disciple, but his identity is in no doubt: Adolf Hitler.
A notice in the foyer reels off the trigger warnings: antisemitism, German nationalism, pseudo-science, racism, homophobia, the rise of Nazism and the appearance of Hitler. Not exactly jolly fare for a country house opera experience. And yet if any opera festival is going to stage the power struggle to define Wagner’s legacy in the wake of his death, it is Longborough, which has long made a speciality of staging the composer’s music dramas, including two productions of the Ring cycle. Wagner’s statue stands loftily on the roof of the pink opera house, which is truly deserving of its sobriquet as “the English Bayreuth”.
Wahnfried is an ambitious opera, Dorman and his librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz taking the audience on a history lesson from the 1880s through to the 1920s. Caption cards are provided, but we could really have done with a family tree too.
The central character is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British Germanophile philosopher and Wagner acolyte, whose advocacy of Aryan superiority in his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century influenced the National Socialist movement. He travels from a butterfly-catching figure of fun into a fully-fledged Wagnerite, ingratiating his way into the family and marrying Eva von Bülow (Wagner second daughter). Cosima sees Houston as Wagner’s redeemer and he masterminds the creation of Wagner’s legacy, controlling the narrative, even if that means burning incriminating evidence that doesn’t fit their vision.
Wagner himself dies early in the opera, but is a constant presence in the form of the Wagner-dæmon, an impish figure who haunts the piece. The conductor Hermann Levi, the butt of the Wagner family’s antisemitism, also appears in reality and in ghost form.
Wahnfried received its world premiere in Karlsruhe in 2017. This is its UK premiere, in a production by Polly Graham, Longborough’s Artistic Director. Justin Brown, who conducted that Karlsruhe premiere, is also in the pit here, the orchestra playing with great panache.
Dorman’s music covers a wide range of styles, a pick’n’mix from Kurt Weill-influenced cabaret numbers to comic circus music to militaristic Prussian marches. Don’t expect Wagnerian pastiche or Leifmotifs, although there are occasional quotations, such as the Wagner-dæmon hammering out a theme from Tannhäuser on a toy piano. The opera is not without humour, although the line “Houston, we have a problem” induced an internal groan.
The score’s patchwork quality reflects the opera’s structure, a series of vignettes as we hurtle through the decades. Musical highlights include the song of lamentation on Wagner’s death, a duet for Houston and Cosima who, until that point, had been a caricature, and a quintet towards the end where the characters intone, “We’ve invented redemption”.
In the central role, Mark Le Brocq – a Chamberlain Doppelgänger – sang tirelessly, his tenor sounding robust. That fine Wagnerian Susan Bullock sang the indomitable Cosima indomitably (and with excellent German diction not shared by the entire cast). Andrew Watts sang Siegfried, Wagner’s homosexual son, here a Pierrot-like figure, his countertenor strong in a moving Act 2 aria. Alexandra Lowe impressed as Isolde, who is cast out of the clan and encased in a glass display cabinet, a trophy just like Houston’s butterflies; her bright soprano relished some of Dorman’s longer-breathed vocal lines. Lowe also sang Winifred, Siegfried’s wife who takes a shine to Hitler. Meeta Raval also had dual roles, confusingly both of them married to Houston.
Edmund Damon’s dark bass-baritone lent gravitas to Levi, the one sympathetic character in the whole opera. Oskar McCarthy lacked vocal power as the Wagner-dæmon, but made up for it in physicality. The Longborough Chorus – also Pierrot-like – threw themselves into the action with verve.
Unsurprisingly, given the range of its ambition, Wahnfried occasionally feels over-stuffed – Act 2 is too long – and some of the slapstick is overdone. But Dorman’s opera is a brave, unflinching work, a powerful cautionary tale that the spread of hatred and intolerance is just as alive today.
