Richard Wagner may, in the words of WH Auden, have been an “absolute shit”, but he was unlucky in the acolytes and slavish disciples he gained, and who then created a cult that ended up in some very dark places.
One such cultist was an Englishman called Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), a racial ideologist educated at Cheltenham College who believed that the Germans were fated to destroy the Jews, whom he viewed as a bastard race of greedy inferior foreigners. Chamberlain idolised Wagner, married his daughter Eva and—along with Wagner’s widow, Cosima—helped cultivate a particular version of the great composer from which he has arguably never quite recovered.
Adolf Hitler was a fan of Chamberlain’s writing, but now the latter has been rescued from comparative obscurity by a contemporary opera, Wahnfried, which asks the question: what happens to an artist’s work after their death? Who controls the narrative? The opera, with music by the Israel-born composer Avner Dorman, opens at Longborough Opera in the northern Cotswolds at the end of May in a new production directed by Polly Graham. And therein lies a certain irony.
Longborough Opera started life as a converted chicken shed in the gardens of the home of Polly’s parents—a local builder named Martin Graham and his wife, Lizzie. Martin Graham’s musical education began in the 1970s by listening to the BBC Radio 2 programme Friday Night is Music Night. After watching the Boulez Ring Cycle on BBC Two in 1982, he decided there was no reason he couldn’t one day stage the Ring Cycle in that aforementioned shed. In terms of vaunting ambition, you could almost call it Wagnerian.
And yet the Grahams so succeeded in their plan, with Ring Cycles in 2013 and 2024, that by the time Polly took over as artistic director five years ago, Longborough had built a reputation as primarily a Wagner house. So was there not an element of sacrilege in performing this modern dissection of the towering figure who cast a spell across nearly all subsequent western music, not to mention painting, books and poetry?
“Well, he made a monumental contribution to western art, but I think there is more to life than Wagner,” says Polly Graham. “Even the German culture secretary last year said, ‘Please could the Bayreuth Festival consider presenting some other operas?’ I mean, look at Stratford, they don’t just present the work of Shakespeare.”
Graham saw a video of the 2016 German premiere of Wahnfried and initially recoiled at the size of the forces involved. “And then I just kind of thought, ‘Bugger this’. There’s only a point in me being an artistic director if I actually take risks. What would Dad do? Dad would take risks. So I started talking to Avner, the composer, who is an incredibly amenable, practical and delightful collaborator. And just as soon as he read about Longborough, he was like, ‘Of course, it needs to happen’.”
I ask her to describe what the opera is about. “Wahnfried is basically like the TV show Succession but set between the 1890s and the 1930s. It tells the story of the Wagner family after the composer died, and how they squabbled over the inheritance of the festival; fought for its survival; and, you know, facilitated… the appropriation of the music into a political system that became more and more disturbing.
“It’s about the first 100 years of Germany’s nationhood. It looks back to Wagner’s participation in the Dresden riots in the 1848–49 period, when he was an anarchist hanging out with Mikhail Bakunin… and it anticipates the cataclysm of 1945. The music is crowned with militaristic marches and very, very terrifying death rattles.”
Of the main character, Houston Chamberlain, Dorman has written: “The opera grotesquely celebrates his life, depicting the huge following he created at the time while clearly focusing on his vile and racist thoughts and rhetoric. Nevertheless, Houston’s commitment to these ideas does not go unquestioned, as the demons of Levi and of Wagner himself haunt and torment him.
“On some level, we believe that perhaps Houston knows that what he is doing is wrong. Houston’s hunger for power and influence ultimately overtake any sense of guilt or remorse, and he leads himself to his own downfall.
“The music of the opera creates a fantastical, at times, absurd depiction of Houston and of the Wagner household… but the story of Wahnfried is not simply the story of the birth of Nazism. The spread of hatred, intolerance, and fear that we see in Wahnfried and the ideas that Houston Chamberlain wrote over 100 years ago are still the same elements of the dark and hateful plague we see all around the world today.”
For Graham, as director, the work presents considerable challenges: “It spans 100 years. So you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, we’re in 1848… Hold on a minute, we’re in 1908’—you’re moving quickly through time. It’s a bit like The Crown for a German audience; everyone knows who the Wagner family are. So one challenge as a director is how to be unbelievably clear with these historical figures who really matter to the dramatic narrative, but [of] who[m non-German] people might just think, ‘I don’t understand who that is’.”
Graham grew up with an opera house in her garden and fell in love with the world of theatre from an early age. She now understands that her father’s project started out as a kind of midlife crisis. Did she ever rebel? “I would say that it’s quite difficult to rebel against an art form which continues to reveal other sides of itself and yield new ground.
“Sure, I’ve rebelled against the culture of ‘country house opera’, which we all find a deeply embarrassing term. Actually, we’re the least ‘country house’ of all ‘country house operas’, because there’s no grand estate. We’re in the village of Longborough, in a field. There’s no 4,000 acres to frolic in. It’s much more wacky than that, and the wackiness is completely our USP.
“You don’t have to dress up. You can dress up. Some people come in shorts. Some people like to wear very fancy clothes. I’ve definitely seen people in cosplay, especially in the Wagner operas, dressed up as characters that they might see on stage. All of that is welcome. Come as you are, but what we care about is that you care about the music. There’s also, you know, the odd chicken to navigate.”
Graham’s other innovations include creating a local youth chorus, which trains throughout the year. “Community has to be one of our huge strategic strengths, because the whole story of Longborough is local,” she says.
The main other highlight of the 2025 season is Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, conducted by Longborough’s very own Wagner specialist, Anthony Negus, who will be 80 next year. Then there is more Wagner to come: Tristan in 2026 and Meistersinger in 2027.
Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary: “He believes that after his death, they will drop his works entirely, and he will live on in human memory only as a phantom.”
Wrong again.
Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult plays at Longborough Festival Opera from 27th May to 14th June, with libretto by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz and music by Avner Dorman
