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Musical Offerings
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2016
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Volume 7
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Number 2
63
Rienzi
which he saw in Weimar, “in that hour, it all began.”
31
More than
likely, this was not referring to his love for Wagner’s music, since he had
seen many of Wagner’s operas from a young age. In all likelihood, his
quotation refers to the moment when he first felt the desire to restore
German greatness, just as
Rienzi
tried to do for the Roman state.
32
Both Hitler and Wagner shared similarities, especially in regard to
Hitler’s career as a politician. Wagner’s participation in the 1848
revolution and his subsequent exile were uncannily similar to Hitler’s
own failed attempt at a coup, which “landed him in jail and forced him
to witness the proscription of his National Socialist Party. . . . Indeed
destruction itself, both conceptually and in practice, forms a bond
between the two men.”
33
This similarity between them must have
strengthened Hitler’s devotion to Wagner, as he more than likely saw in
Wagner a role model whom he could emulate in his attempt to unite the
German nation.
One of the ways in which Hitler showed his dedication to Wagner was
through his financial commitment to the Bayreuth festival. The festival
became officially instituted by Hitler in 1933, and he wanted to insure
that it would continue to run annually. In addition to all of this, in 1938
he “financed the promotion of Wagner research in the town.”
34
His
attendance at the festival every year was treated as a national spectacle
by the media and helped to put his own regime on public display.
35
The love that Hitler had for Wagner did not just stop at his music,
however. He was said to have had connections to the Wagner family,
specifically to Richard’s daughter-in-law, Winifred. Hitler first became
acquainted with the Wagner family in 1923 when he came to Bayreuth.
He was invited to breakfast by Winifred and her husband Siegfried, and
he cordially accepted, also stopping to visit Wagner’s grave. The visit is
said to be the start of his budding friendship with Winifred. She was
noticeably impressed by him: “He was modest, had good manners, and
showed how deeply impressed [by Wagner] he was.”
36
Although the
31
Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Wagnerian Self-Fashioning: The Case of Adolf
Hitler,”
New German Critique
(Duke University) 34, no. 2 (2007): 100.
32
Ibid.
33
Taylor, introduction to
Wagner’s Hitler
, 3.
34
Erik Levi,
Music in the Third Reich,
(New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1994), 35.
35
Kater,
Twisted Muse,
38.
36
Hamann,
Winifred Wagner
, 59.