The descendants of Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth festival dedicated to his music began a new chapter yesterday with the death of the composer's grandson and long-time patriarch Wolfgang Wagner.

Mr Wagner, also the great-grandson of Franz Liszt, presided with an iron fist over the Wagner feast that is Bayreuth for an incredible 57 years, working to exorcise the family's and the festival's Nazi ghosts and attract the world's best singers and conductors to the famed Green Hill.

"Wolfang Wagner dedicated his entire life to the legacy of his famous grandfather," the festival in Bavaria in southern Germany said, "steering the fortunes of Bayreuth for more than half a century, securing him a place in history as the world's longest-serving director".

Wolfgang Wagner, who passed away on Sunday aged 90, was born on August 30, 1919, the son of Siegfried Wagner (1896-1930) and his British-born wife, Winifred (1897-1980), a close friend and fervent supporter of Adolf Hitler.

The feeling was mutual. Hitler was a great admirer of the works of the anti-Semitic composer, who had died in 1883, and was a frequent guest of the family and the festival. Mr Wagner and his siblings used to call the Nazi dictator Onkel Wolf.

At the tender age of 32, Mr Wagner took over the running of the Bayreuth festival in 1951, six years after the end of World War II, in tandem with his elder brother Wieland.

They swiftly moved to throw out all the dusty and creaky old productions, creating a visually minimalist but heavily symbolic style of music theatre that eventually became known as Regietheater. Mr Wagner's stagings were never quite so lavishly praised and he remained in his brother's shadow. When Mr Wieland died in 1966, Mr Wagner was left in sole charge. While he continued to stage some of the operas himself, he started inviting other directors into the hallowed halls of the Festspielhaus, the theatre built to his grandfather's own designs, keeping Bayreuth at the forefront of Wagner interpretation in the process.

But in his personal life, Mr Wagner sowed the seeds for a bitter internecine battle when he divorced his wife Ellen Drexel in 1976 to marry his secretary Gudrun.

Before the split, Mr Wagner and Ms Drexel's daughter Eva Wagner-Pasquier had been close, so much so that she came to be seen as his "right-hand man". But she took her mother's side and was consequently cast out of Bayreuth.

So deep was the rift that when the festival's ruling body, the Stiftungsrat, officially named the experienced Ms Wagner-Pasquier as Wolfgang's successor in March 2001, the white-haired autocrat openly rubbished her abilities.

Instead, the old man favoured his daughter with Gudrun, the much younger Katharina, born in 1978.

The unexpected death of Mr Gudrun in 2007 opened the way for a reconciliation. And instead of teaming up with her cousin Nike Wagner for a joint leadership bid as originally planned, Ms Wagner-Pasquier agreed to join Katharina instead.