The Wagner Clan
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
For over a century the Wagners have presided over the Bayreuth Festival, playing host to many of the greatest and ghastliest figures in the arts and politics amidst family in-fighting and political controversy. Drawing on extensive interviews with members of the family and on both archive and recent material, Jonathan Carr presents a balanced but gripping portrait of the Wagners and their circle; a story which presents a mirror of Germany's rise, fall and resurrection.
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The grandiose life of Richard Wagner the pronouncements on art and the German soul, the petty groveling for money and favors, the intermittently atrocious politics and intermittently glorious music was a tough act to follow. Carr (Mahler: A Biography) follows Wagner's descendants through three generations as they fight each other for control of the Bayreuth Festival and, at opportune times, embrace, reject or sweep under the rug their forebear's status as Nazism's spiritual godfather. (It's a bum rap, Carr concludes, after a nuanced analysis of Wagner's writings and music that finds his anti-Semitism vile but muddled and probably not eliminationist.) Much of the story belongs to outsiders who married into the family: Wagner's wife, Cosima, a "chillingly implacable" anti-Semite; his son-in-law Houston Chamberlain, a racist ideologue revered by the Nazis; and his daughter-in-law Winifred, who clasped Hitler affectionately dubbed "Uncle Wolf" by her children to the family's bosom. Carr's sprightly, fluent narrative places the family in its historical and intellectual context without reducing it to the symbolic effigy it has often become. Photos.
