The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germanya's Most Illustrious and Infamous Family - Hardcover

Richard Wagner was many things--composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite--and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy. Now, in The Wagner Clan, biographer Jonathan Carr retraces the path of the renowned composer and his descendants with great verve. Along the way, Carr offers glimpses of Franz Liszt (whose illegitimate daughter Cosima married Wagner); the "mad King" Ludwig II, who saved Wagner from penury by becoming his sponsor; Friedrich Nietzsche; Arthur Schopenhauer; Richard Strauss; Gustav Mahler; Alberto Toscanini; Joseph Goebbels; Hermann Goring; and the "Wolf" himself, Adolf Hitler, a passionate fan of the Master's music and an adopted uncle to Wagner's grandchildren. Wagner's British-born daughter-in-law, Winifred, was a close friend of Hitler's and seemed momentarily positioned to marry him after the death of her husband. All through the war the Bayreuth Festival, begun by the Master himself, was supported by Hitler, who had to fill out the meager audience with fighting men and SS officers. After the war's devastation, the festival was dark for a decade until Wagner's offspring--with characteristic ambition and cunning--revived it. With the sweeping scope of a Wagnerian opera, The Wagner Clan stretches from the revolutions of 1848 to today to show how the history of Europe and that of the Wagners are inextricably intertwined. Jonathan Carr has drawn on extensive interviews with members of the family and on rare archival material to deliver a riveting chronicle of the ascent, decline, and rehabilitation of the German nation and its most infamous family.