Fascinatingly sordid story, gripping read.

I love music, but for years I couldn’t hear the music of Richard Wagner without seeing in my mind visions of Hitler brooding on the fate of the Jews. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve begun to delve into and enjoy the music, and now I wanted to learn more about “the master,” as Wagnerites invariably call him, as well as the dynasty he and his mistress, later wife Cosima (Liszt’s illegitimate daughter) engendered, the youngest offshoots of which still rule the festival house on the green hill in Bayreuth, nearly 140 years after its inauguration.

Jonathan Carr’s book turned out to be an ideal introduction. He writes in a sprightly style, only occasionally straining to make an effect with his prose, and rarely resorting to cliché. His judgments seem balanced, a neat trick since so much about Wagner and his heritage is ambivalent or contradictory. He seems especially struck by the paradox that Wagner began as a revolutionary, not only musically but more so politically, yet his music became the emblem of Germanness in Wilhelmine Germany, deeply affecting an adolescent Hitler, although many of his cohorts had to be dragged unwillingly to performances.
Beyond Richard, there is a multitude of family members: the imperious Cosima, their only son Siegfried, in a way Cosima’s favorite “daughter,” Siegfried’s wife Winifred, whose undying love was reserved for Hitler, a frequent guest of the family, who knew him as Uncle Wolf. These visits began before his failed Munich beer hall putsch and continued into the war years. I was fascinated by two other women: Siegfried’s sister, the mercurial Isolde, and one of his two daughters, Friedelind. With regard to her, Carr doesn’t fully accept the version of her as the good, anti-Fascist Wagner, but he also questions why the family continued to view her as the black sheep. Here is one of many places where it is evident that Carr did his homework.

In this extensively researched family portrait, Carr also draws on his deep knowledge of twentieth-century German political history (he earlier wrote a highly-praised biography of Helmut Schmidt). His excursions on this sometimes intrude on the narrative flow, but for the most part they provide context vital to an assessment of the tangled interplay of the Wagners and wider German culture (and politics). This analysis is a thread that runs throughout the narrative, then in the final chapter, Carr forms a judgment that strikes me as simultaneously sympathetic and unsparing.

Quibble: the Kindle edition omits the photos from the print version, although it teasingly retains the list of them. Despite this, highly recommended for anyone interested in music, modern European culture, or well-told family sagas.
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A fair minded and authoritative history of Richard Wagner and his descendants, and of the Bayreuth Festival that still remains under their control. ( )

Readable and interesting book, especially for someone (like me) with little or no prior knowledge about Wagner and his legacy. The narrative flows well and does a nice job of tying in the story of the Wagners with the history of Germany.
Also, there isn't much detail about Wagners music, so it is very accessable to people who have not listened to it before or know anything about it. Infact the narrative cleverly draws you in, and at the end left me wanting to find out more about the music and understand what all the fuss was about. ( )