Die Wagneren: A True-Life Opera

By Martha Duffy

Bayreuth has always been run by a Wagner, and now it is Richard's grandson Wolfgang, 75, who is in charge. As skilled a manager as his forebear, possessing just as combative and strife-prone a temperament, Wolfgang is the most visible person at the festival. He also conducts one of the behind-the- scenes highlights at Bayreuth, the press conference that follows a new production. This year he outdid himself in grouchy garrulity. Ignoring the journalists' humble need to get quotes from all major participants, he grabbed the mike and answered questions addressed to Rosalie or Alfred Kirchner.

Wolfgang has even more to say in Acts, his new autobiography. Mostly the book is an exercise in self-justification and a series of mud pies flung at his family. The Wagners are a contentious lot. At various times Wolfgang's son, daughter and a nephew have laid claim to his throne. He in turn insists that no blood relative is competent to rule.

The deep shadow over Wolfgang's life remains his brother Wieland, a director of rare theatrical imagination who revolutionized the staging of Wagner -- and all other opera -- by doing away with conventional sets. Wieland died in 1966, leaving Wolfgang in command of the festival. He too has had a busy career directing, but his work tends to be fussy and literal, and he is not taken seriously. The rumor is that Wolfgang started his memoir when he heard he had a rival, American author Frederic Spotts, whose Bayreuth (Yale University; $35) appeared in late June. Once again Wolfgang has been badly bested.

Spotts' great strength is the balance he maintains in his well-organized narrative. Music history, cultural comment and such issues as the family's embrace of Nazism are all deftly combined. Spotts told TIME he was so determined to maintain the right proportions that he omitted his biggest scoop: that Hitler sexually abused the young Wieland during the '20s. If he had gone into that scandal, Spotts says, "it would be all anybody wrote about."

The book gives a detailed account of the family's anti-Semitism and its attachment to Hitler. Even after the war, Wolfgang's mother Winifred said she longed to see the Fuhrer come through the door again. To his credit, Wolfgang ! has banished any trace of anti-Jewish bias from the festival.

The great subject of Bayreuth gossip now is, Who will replace Wolfgang? For the time being, no one; he shows that he is still more than capable of running a one-man show. He says the next boss may not be a Wagner at all, but he will probably choose his second wife, Gudrun, 50, formerly a festival secretary. That solution would follow tradition. When the composer died, his wife Cosima succeeded him for 23 years, then handed control to her son Siegfried. After he died in 1930, his widow Winifred continued in his place until after the war, when, publicly disgraced for her idolatry of the Nazis, she relinquished the festival in favor of Wieland and Wolfgang. Will there be a fight over Gudrun? As surely as the Rhinegold is cursed.