Gottfried Wagner

300 pages of score settling and self-pity. Although the author makes it clear that he, and he alone, among his family is willing to acknowledge the link between the Wagners and the Nazis, his tale never clarifies itself to the point where the reader is never really sure what's going on. For example, the author spends a good deal of time and space harping on the feud between his father, Wolfgang, and his uncle, Wieland, which we're to understand had its origin in aesthetic differences concerning the production and staging of the music dramas at Bayreuth. But Gottfried never once specifically identifies what these differences were. The interested reader would do better to read Wagner and the art of the theatre by Patrick Carnegy, where it becomes very clear that the family discord had to do with more than just "making a clean start" theatrically.… (altro)