Bayreuth after Wagner : psychosocial perspectives on Cosimer Wagner, Winifred Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Abstract

The Wagner institution at Bayreuth, after Wagner, was shaped as much by the psychologies of those to whom the composer’s legacy was entrusted as it was by purely historical and political events. Entwining musicological, philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic discourses, this revisionist and hermeneutic history of Bayreuth focuses on three individuals whose lives were acutely intertwined with the cultural and political evolution of the establishment: Cosima Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Winifred Wagner. Their personal and social paths were embedded in larger political and cultural changes, especially German nationalism, yet despite the intensity of their nationalist affinities none was indigenously German and in childhood each lacked those influences now considered essential for effective individuation. Following an initial discussion on Wagner, character studies of each applying, particularly, Jungian and Eriksonian theory explore the extent to which those absences and related factors informed not only their personal development but also the dynamics of their respective relationships with Wagner from which our perception of the composer and Bayreuth as an institution derives.