Festival harmony reigns as Wagner clan ends feud

BERLIN — It was an epic family feud perfectly suited for the stage: back-stabbing siblings, jealous divas and a stubborn patriarch all jousting for control of Germany's cultural crown jewel.

On Sept. 1, after years of squabbling, the guardians of Germany's beloved Bayreuth opera festival selected two great-granddaughters of master composer Richard Wagner to direct the annual event.

"White Smoke Over Bayreuth," decreed the banner headline in the Financial Times Deutschland, likening the news to the choice of a new pope in Rome. Left out in the cold was a third great-granddaughter, 63-year-old Nike Wagner, the director of an arts festival in the city of Weimar, as well as a stranger who applied for the job at the last minute claiming to be the illegitimate son of another Wagner descendant. Only biological members of the Wagner clan are eligible to run the wildly popular festival, which dates to 1876 and restricts its repertoire to the composer's works.

The Bayreuth festival has drawn classical-music devotees from around the world since King Ludwig II of Bavaria persuaded Richard Wagner to build a modest opera house there and stage his masterpieces each summer.

These days, there's a five-year waiting list to catch a performance during the monthlong event, a favorite of Germany's blue bloods, industrialists and politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A sense of national relief greeted the news that Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, and her 30-year-old half-sister, Katharina Wagner, had been selected as co-directors, seemingly putting an end to the long-running family spats.

"The Wagners are our Windsors and Sopranos," commentator Ruediger Schaper wrote in the Tagesspiegel, a Berlin newspaper. "Bayreuth, the German Buckingham Palace, has demonstrated the highest possible entertainment value."

The half-sisters had been rivals for years, competing for the affections of their father, 89-year-old Wolfgang Wagner, the autocratic festival director for more than half a century.

In 2001, the festival's board of directors announced it had selected Eva to take over upon her father's retirement. But the old man preferred Katharina, despite her youth and inexperience.

The board refused to back down. In turn, Wolfgang — whose lifetime contract prohibited him from being fired — refused to quit. An ugly stalemate ensued.

Critics asserted the festival was losing its juice, as a defiant Wolfgang Wagner became increasingly frail and hard of hearing. The drama grew even more complicated when his niece, Nike, staked her claim to the job.

The Wagner family has always drawn controversy and fascination in Germany. Richard Wagner, whose operas included "Tristan and Isolde," "Parsifal" and "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg," openly voiced anti-Semitic opinions. Decades later, this made a loyal fan out of Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi party embraced many of Wagner's works.

Hitler developed a particularly close friendship with Winifred Wagner, an Englishwoman and daughter-in-law of the famous composer. Boosted by Hitler's patronage, she ran the Bayreuth Festival during the days of the Third Reich but was forced to step down after Germany surrendered in World War II. Wolfgang Wagner is her son.

A compromise in the family feud was reached when Eva and Katharina put aside their differences and applied as a team to oversee the festival. After receiving their father's tacit blessing — he announced he would retire after the 2008 season — the board of directors ratified the choice.