Former German infantryman Hans Himsel lived through scenes in 1944 at the Bayreuth opera house worthy of the finale of Richard Wagner’s Gotterdammerung when Valhalla goes up in flames.
Hitler liked the music and all that Hitler likes is evil. I think that’s a curse of Wagner
In this bicentenary year of Wagner’s birth, Himsel, 90, recalled the last wartime production at Bayreuth. It was August 9, 1944, and the cast performed Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which contains the command “honour your German masters”. The Nazis had turned the piece into a propaganda pageant.
Although malnutrition was rampant and Paris was to be liberated two weeks later, Himsel, a butcher’s apprentice who was wounded five times and survived the Russian front, said for the last performance the backstage and catering crews were feted with a band, half a duck each and all the wine they could drink.
Adolf Hitler considered Wagner his favourite composer. History’s problem, compounded by Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism, has been disentangling the two.
“We danced at the feast while the soldiers died,” Himsel said in an interview at a Bayreuth restaurant and hotel where Wagner stayed when he was building his Bavarian opera house in the late 19th century.
Hitler was a Bayreuth regular and kept it going during the war by buying up tickets for soldiers to attend. Hitler’s use of Bayreuth for propaganda purposes, rivalled only by his manipulation of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, resonates still.
“Of course, Wagner’s reputation is terrible, I understand why people have the feelings they do about his music,” American soprano Deborah Voigt, who sings Wagner’s Ring-cycle heroine Brunnhilde, said.
“Wagner is a genius, the sound is extraordinary,” said Hungarian conductor Adam Fischer, who runs a Wagner festival in Budapest and is Jewish. “The music is not the person,” he added, saying what was important was “the intensity of Wagner’s music”.
From Seattle to Australia, and across Europe, Wagner compositions from the Ring with its Valkyrie cry “hojotoho”, to the romantic Tristan und Isolde which provides the soundtrack for the world’s end in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, draw audiences of all ages.
“It gives a higher feeling, you get goose bumps,” artist-photographer Christopher Gemenig, 27, said recently during the interval of Wagner’s swan-knight opera Lohengrin at the Dresden Semperoper.
Gemenig, and his companion Mia Mueller, whose flame-red hair bolstered their resemblance to Wagner’s doomed lovers Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde, acknowledged that despite Wagner having joined ranks with anarchists in a failed revolution in mid-19th century Dresden, the taint of Hitler ran deep.
“Hitler liked the music and all that Hitler likes is evil. I think that’s a curse of Wagner,” said Gemenig, whose favourite bit is the overture to Gotterdammerung. “
As they have every year since 1990, Germany’s first couple, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband Joachim Sauer, will attend the summer festival at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the opera house Wagner built with money he borrowed from Bavarian King Ludwig II and never repaid.
These days Bayreuth is always sold out and its waiting list can be as long as a decade.
A little way down the Green Hill from the opera house is an outdoor exhibition called Silenced Voices, displaying short biographies and photos of singers, musicians, conductors and stage directors who were progressively shunned by Bayreuth, as the festival drew closer and closer to the Führer.