Wolfgang Wagner and Lady Walton - very different keepers of the flame

Wolfgang Wagner and Lady Walton, who have both died, nurtured the memory of composers Richard Wagner and William Walton respectively, but in distinctive ways



By Rupert Christiansen
Published: 12:05PM GMT 23 Mar 2010

Lady Walton (left) and Wolfgang Wagner Photo: PA - REUTERS



With the deaths announced yesterday of Wolfgang Wagner, at the age of 90, and Lady Walton, at the age of 83, two of the music world’s great keepers of the flame have been snuffed out. Their paths never crossed, and they could hardly have been more different in personality, but the coincidence of their simultaneous passing leads one to consider them in comparison.


Wolfgang Wagner was Richard Wagner’s grandson, and had vivid memories of his grandmother Cosima, Wagner’s widow. This closeness to the source of the cult made him a fierce defender of what he saw as the truth, the way and the light of Wagnerism, but one wonders if he had any profound understanding of them. His abilities were practical: from 1951, he was responsible for the business side of the revived, de-Nazified Bayreuth Festival, a task he continued to discharge for over half a century, latterly in collaboration with his second wife Gudrun.
The artistic decisions were initially left to his more intellectual and charismatic brother Wieland, whom Wolfgang loathed. (Nothing unusual about that — almost everyone in the Wagner dynasty loathes everyone else.) But when Wieland died young in 1966, Wolfgang took sole control and started directing the Wagner operas himself, in a style generally considered heavy-handed and dull. This folie de grandeur was his biggest mistake. Wieland had been a stage director of genius and originality, whose post-Nazi reinterpretation of Wagner’s operas were of great cultural importance. Wolfgang was in comparison a plonker, unreflectively conservative in his approach and lacking in flair for stagecraft.
Although he was often accused of being ruthless and unimaginative, even his worst enemies had to admit that Wolfgang was a highly efficient administrator, and the Bayreuth Festival prospered under his cunning and prudent management. Those who went to work there, always for very little money, always admired his attention to detail and his ability to keep order and ensure excellent working conditions — not common in the chaotic world of opera.
Yet the irony of Wolfgang’s career is that however much of a dull- witted reactionary he was personally, he had the shrewdness to see that if Wagner was to remain headline news and Bayreuth was to retain its international reputation and éclat, it was vital that it was seen to be open to young talent and radical influences = even if they were profoundly antipathetic to his own tastes.
From the 1970s onwards, he invited a series of left-leaning young directors to stage the operas, among them Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Werner Herzog, Harry Kupfer, Christoph Schlingenschief and Christoph Marthaler. It is their work — and the controversies, scandals, ovations and abuse that they inspired — that constitutes Wolfgang’s greatest achievement.
Susana Gil was born in Argentina. A striking beauty, she met the composer William Walton when he was visiting Buenos Aires on a post-war trip and she was a secretary at the local British Council.
They were married in 1948 and set up home together on the island of Ischia, where Walton could compose in peace.
Susana was a brilliant homemaker and soon learnt how to deal with Walton’s sexual appetites, which often led him astray. Girl friends were tolerated up to a point, but no further, and Walton always went back to his wife.
Susana wasn’t particularly musical and the couple had no children.
What united them — and what consumed most of Walton’s creative energy in his later years – was the magnificent garden they created with the gardener Russell Page on their estate at La Mortella. It is now open to the public and much visited.
After Walton’s death in 1983, Susana became fiercely active in the cause of promoting her late husband’s music, often driving others involved — orchestras, conductors, publishers – to distraction with her letters and phone calls. She could, without doubt, be a bit of a nightmare, and both her loyalties and her enmities were passionate and absolute. But there was great warmth, kindness and generosity about her too, as well as a terrific sense of humour, as evinced in her amusing warts-and-all memoir of her marriage Behind the Façade.
Wolfgang Wagner didn’t really have a chance in life, one feels. His inheritance was heavy and inescapable and poisonous, though his feuding with his own children and nephews and nieces only exacerbated the curse on the dynasty. In appointing Eva, the daughter of his first marriage, and Katharina, the daughter of his second marriage, as his successors at Bayreuth, he was taking his final revenge on Wieland by decisively excluding his lineage. But I wouldn’t bank on this being the end of the story.
Susana Walton’s final years, made physically painful by terrible arthritis, must have been made even more melancholy by the eclipse in Walton’s reputation, which all her efforts could do nothing to reverse. But she leaves behind her glowing memories of a vivid, life-enhancing personality — she lit up a room when she entered it — and the monument of a garden of great and lasting beauty. That’s a better human legacy than Wolfgang’s.