Wagnerian Issue

One of Composer Richard Wagner's less important works last week stirred politico-patriotic debate in Britain. The work in question was his saucy Granddaughter Friedelind, 22, who has had as interesting a history as any of his operas.

In 1923, ten years before the No. 1 Nazi became Chancellor, Music Lover Adolf Hitler first met the family of his favorite composer. Widow Cosima would have none of him, but Hitler struck up a friendship with English-born Daughter-in-Law Winifred Wagner. Aged five at this time was Granddaughter Friedelind. She was dandled on Herr Hitler's knee while rumor that he was going to marry her mother rose but finally ebbed. When about the age of a U. S. debutante, Friedelind, by her own account, used to lunch now & then with the Fuehrer and chirp all sorts of criticisms of Nazi doings, which sometimes put him in a rage.

Over a year before the war Friedelind had enough of Nazi Germany, moved to Switzerland. At break of war, she appealed to music-loving Arthur Beverley Baxter, M.P., a Canadian-born British Tory, to get her admitted to England. She reached London just before France was smashed.

Miss Wagner soon produced a series of gossipy articles for British Allied Newspapers Ltd. She wrote that Hitler considers Mussolini "the only other great man'' and that in her opinion II Duce "felt like a nursemaid taking care of a victorious child" during some of his meetings with the Fuehrer. Hitler, riding through Berlin beside Mussolini, according to Miss Wagner, "gave the general impression of a fussy spinster seated beside the first real man who had come her way."

Then, having rescued Miss Wagner from Switzerland, the British arrested her last summer. In her luggage police found photographs of her and Hitler together and that clinched it. She was interned as an enemy alien. To her defense last week went eloquent Beverley Baxter in the

House of Commons. He demanded that she be released at once. Said he: "Arturo Toscanini has offered her a musical post in Buenos Aires."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.