Longborough Festival Opera Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult 2025 © Matthew Williams Ellis
The sun shone like a Siegfried sword on the Cotswolds for the final performance of Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried with libretto by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz. The world premiere commissioned by Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany was in January 2017, and the conductor then as now was the British conductor and former Karlsruhe music director, Justin Brown. Longborough Festival Opera delivered a thrilling production. It was a serious study in how obsession, ego, and racial ideology brewed in the Bayreuth cult that prefigured the darkest century for the Jewish religion.
Avner Dorman’s music is deftly constructed - structurally taut, thematically haunting, and emotionally agile. With Wahnfried, he doesn’t imitate Wagner; he interrogates him. The libretto by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz is a miracle of compression and clarity, capturing 40 years of operatic dysfunction in almost 20 episodic scenes. It zips along, sometimes terrifyingly as a sermon.
The story is so strange it has to be true: after Wagner’s death, his widow Cosima (daughter of Franz Liszt) sets about preserving the Master's sanctity. She enlists the British-born race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain who marries her daughter and becomes a kind of philosophical Rasputin of Bayreuth. All this while Wagner's bisexual, inept son Siegfried tries to survive the suffocating belief of being, well, a legacy disappointment!
Susan Bullock is formidable as Cosima Wagner. Part grieving widow, part Iron Lady of Teutonic propaganda, she stalks the stage in rich velvet like a Bayreuth banshee. Her voice - still commanding - carves through Dorman’s texture like a mourning blade. Her final descent into authoritarian certitude is utterly chilling, especially as she sings with steely calm about the need to “purify” the Bayreuth legacy.
Mark Le Brocq gives the performance of the evening as Chamberlain, a grotesque comic who slowly transforms into something far more sinister. In the early scenes, he’s a bumbling Englishman with butterflies and over-pronunciation. By Act II, he’s Goebbels with a monocle. His physicality is inspired -awkward, preening, explosive. His substantial Wagnerian tenor voice delivers pin-sharp diction lit with menace. His scene preaching blood purity is so frighteningly eerie.
Andrew Watts, countertenor extraordinaire, portrays Siegfried Wagner as a fragile dreamer, an artistic misfit trapped in a temple to someone else’s genius. Watts’s voice, ethereal and aching, becomes a vessel for queerness repressed and love denied. His relationship with his mother is Oedipal at best, always suffocating, manipulative, tragic.
Alexandra Lowe nearly steals the show in her dual role as Isolde (Siegfried’s lover) and Winifred. Her shift from vulnerable to monstrous is executed with unflinching clarity. As Winifred, her poise, her clipped English diction, and her starry-eyed adoration of “The Leader” land like ice water down the spine.
Another dual character role was sung by soprano Meeta Raval in the roles of Anna Chamberlain, Houston’s first wife and his second wife, Eva Wagner. She was captivating in both roles – frighteningly so as Eva Wagner.
Oskar McCarthy’s recurring role as the spirit of Wagner himself - half clown, half ghost, fully smug - adds a welcome strain of surreal mischief, a constant reminder that none of this cult existed without the man who couldn’t let go of the limelight, even in death.
Polly Graham, Longborough’s artistic director, has a genius for marrying conceptual audacity with emotional core. Here, she turns Wahnfried into a psycho-political circus, part Edwardian parlour drama, part dadaist cabaret. There's a knowing theatricality to the staging - ghosts’ flit between scenes, opera characters break the fourth wall, and Chamberlain makes PowerPoint presentations of his ideology. It’s funny, then appalling, then funny again - until it’s not.
The set is sparse but suggestive: a stylised salon that mutates with history, with hints of Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus looming in shadows. Costumes traverse decades and ideologies - from corseted grief to militaristic pomp - until, by the final scene, we see Winifred poised to offer Wagner’s legacy to a rising Führer. It’s history as opera, and opera as prophecy.
Justin Brown originally commissioned the piece and leads with assured authority. Under his baton, Dorman’s lean, inventive score sings with clarity. Longborough’s semi-sunken pit gives us a rich acoustic balance—airy strings, snappy percussion, and winds that bite like satire. No moment overstays; no climax is unearned. The orchestra is tight, expressive, and wholly engaged.
Wahnfried is not just a family saga. It’s a warning. A study in how fanaticism wears a familiar face - often one draped in culture and heritage. This Longborough production doesn’t preach; it performs a psychological exorcism.
The final confrontation and image of Winifred standing at the gates of Bayreuth as Hitler’s footsteps echoed in left the audience frozen which no applause could erase the chill.
David Buchler, Opera Spy
