Susan Bullock and Justin Brown (credit: Matthew Johnson)

As conductor Justin Brown starts to talk about Avner Dorman’s opera Wahnfried, which opens this year’s Longborough Festival, he appears on a flickering video from somewhere obviously far away. That having failed, we resort to phone, which isn’t much better, due to a power failure. It transpires we are just four miles apart in London. Once we get going he is fascinating on the subject of Wahnfried’s UK premiere.

‘It was first seen in Karlsruhe in 2017,’ Brown explains. ‘I was general music director there and wanted to commission an opera. I knew Avner Dorman and the idea for Wahnfried started, originally with the character of Chamberlain’. No, not that Chamberlain: read on. ‘It gave a tangential and unexpected angle and a story that hadn’t been told, and the more we developed it with the librettists (Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz) it became a surreal scenario across a wide time span. It all gelled together.’ The character Brown mentions is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born botanist and philosopher-turned-Wagnerite extraordinaire: Chamberlain adored Wagner’s widow Cosima and then married her daughter by Wagner, Eva. He was a violent anti-Semite, Aryanist, member of the ‘Bayreuth Circle’, friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and ultimately a Nazi, author of the racialist Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), that sold a quarter of a million copies and proved hugely influential on Hitler, who attended his funeral in 1927: enough said.

So, why Longborough? ‘Karlsruhe is a Wagner house and we had a new Ring cycle. As Nike Wagner once wrote, the Wagner family history is the fifth part of the Ring! Longborough had already done the Ring and Polly Graham (artistic director) and Anthony Negus (music Director) were looking for something that made a comment on it – I told Polly about Wahnfried and Anthony had seen it in Karlsruhe.’ Brown obviously loves the opera, named after Wagner’s villa in Bayreuth – ‘ I feel quite parental’ – and it is about the internecine squabbling as members of the Wagner family, notably battleaxe Cosima, slug it out to control Wagner’s legacy and to use it to create their own myth of the composer and his work. ‘I think there was a deliberate fixating on the one facet, that Wagner was an anti-Semite. In the 19th century that was pretty standard but Cosima made it into the pillar on which his reputation rests. So we take that process, up to the rise of Hitler’.

As Brown prepares for a second production of the opera, he points out that even a successful contemporary opera might only see one staging. ‘Keith Warner’s production at Karlsruhe didn’t simply take the libretto and perform it. The end of Wahnfried is a sort of cataclysmic Götterdämmerung which Warner eschewed – quite often he’d go against the stage directions and I am sure Polly, who’s directing at Longborough, will do the same. It will be fascinating. Wagner, but not as we know it!

The world premiere production of Wahnfried 

‘When we decided to create an opera about the Wagner family we contacted his great-granddaughter Eva Wagner-Pasquier as a courtesy. She replied, “I don’t mind you doing it as long as Cosima doesn’t come out of it very well”.’

The reception in Karlsruhe was really positive – ‘It was no holds barred and was a huge hit.’ And, Brown adds, ‘we even depicted Hitler on the stage, which is a huge thing to do: the younger generation is not burying 20th century German history, it is dealing with it. In Germany today the Wagners are like the Royal Family and the subject of tabloid gossip, so people in the UK generally won’t know so much, especially about Chamberlain and his work’.

Cosima will be performed by dramatic soprano Susan Bullock, a renowned Wagner singer. ‘The part is written for a Kostelnička or Klytemnestra voice,’ she tells me, ‘and since I’m now doing those roles they thought I’d be a good fit.’ I ask what it’s like playing such a ghastly character. ‘I knew a reasonable amount but it’s been fascinating learning more. Cosima’s childhood was very disrupted by her father, Liszt, and there was a great lack of stability. She had to fend for herself, which undoubtedly had a huge impact on her adult behaviour.’

And Bullock is looking forward to exploring Cosima’s character further. ‘It’s harder to play a person who existed – for example, Cosima was very tall and angular and I’m five foot four! So I’m going to have to create my own persona. I have my ideas but they’ll be thrown around in the rehearsal room with Polly Graham and Justin Brown. It’s fascinating to play Cosima and to be in a piece about her and the family and discover what they were all like as people, and how they dealt with the fight to control Bayreuth.’

Dorman approached the music in a surrealist way and promised ‘it won’t sound like Wagner’, and Wahnfried opens with four slide whistles in a canon. Brown explains that ‘with conducting Wagner there is density, a mass of sound in the pit, a momentum in the long sweep of the music, even though there is light and shade’. But Dorman’s music is a very different experience: ‘rhythmic, parodic, quicksilver’. For example, the Tristan chord appears in unlikely places. And, bizarrely, ‘Wilhem II’s car horn played Donner’s motif from Rheingold, so that’s in there, and there’s the Tannhäuser overture on a toy piano, which is more eloquent than words. There are many types of music in Wahnfried, a lot melodic, plus some very lyrical moments. It’s percussive but not so avant-garde that there are sounds that we can’t equate as music. For instance, son Siegfried’s Act 2 aria is very beautiful and wistful. Avner went for the opposite of a through composed opera – there are 21 short scenes, the opposite of a “Wagnerian” opera, and part of the point is the contrast: it covers 40 years and is filmic at times’. Combative stuff – seconds out!

Wahnfried: the birth of the Wagner cult is at Longborough Festival Opera from 27 May – 14 June. www.lfo.org.uk

This featured originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Opera Now – Subscribe today!