• “A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?” Max Beerbohm once observed. No more so than the Wagners, a family whose head was the most fascinating and least likable great composer in the history of classical music. Even those who find Richard Wagner’s operas exasperating beyond endurance—a group that is legion and whose members include, more often than not, myself—are not infrequently willing to read just about anything about the man himself, provided that it’s sufficiently well-written and dislinclined to fawn over its subject. Jonathan Carr’s The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany’s Most Illustrious and Infamous Family (Atlantic Monthly, 409 pp., $27.50) hits the bull’s-eye on both counts.

A British journalist whose strangely sorted resume includes lives of Helmut Schmidt and Gustav Mahler, Carr clearly knows a fair amount about music, but The Wagner Clan is not primarily about the works of the composer of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde, nor is it solely about his wildly tempestuous life. Carr’s main interest, rather, is in Wagner’s family and what they wrought, with and without him. Cosima, the mother of Wagner’s children, was the daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife of Hans von Bülow, the great German pianist and conductor, until Wagner stole her from Bülow (who had previously been one of his adoring acolytes). After Wagner’s death she ran the family business, the Bayreuth Festival, with an iron hand undisguised by the slightest trace of velvet. Siegfried, Richard’s youngest child, was a second-rate composer, a highly accomplished conductor, and a secret homosexual who struggled throughout his life to come to terms with the burden of his family heritage. Winifred, Siegfried’s wife, developed a lifelong crush on Adolf Hitler and delivered the festival into the hands of the Nazis after her husband’s death. Wieland and Wolfgang, their sons, dragged Bayreuth into the 20th century and made it a postwar center of up-to-date thinking on operatic production style. To this day members of the Wagner family continue to run the summer festival, which has long been one of Europe’s hottest tickets.

All this adds up to an immensely interesting tale that Carr tells with great skill, and anyone who wants to know what became of the Wagners will find it both informative and entertaining. As for those whose main interest is in Der Meister himself, The Wagner Clan offers readers unfamiliar with the vast Wagner literature an exceptionally accessible short introduction to the complicated subject of his life and personality. What I like best about Carr’s book is that it is even-handed but not bland: he takes a distinctly jaundiced view of Wagner the man without ever failing to acknowledge the genius of Wagner the artist, and he seems to have no axes of any kind to grind.

I was especially impressed by the section of The Wagner Clan in which Carr discusses Hitler’s consuming interest in Wagner, a famously difficult subject that the author plays straight down the center:

If Wagner’s works really were “the exact spiritual forerunner” of Nazism, surely the Führer of all people would have drummed that point home ad infinitum. But one looks to him in vain not only for fascist interpretation of the music dramas but, stranger still, for direct references to the [anti-Semitic] theoretical writings. There is, indeed, surprisingly little evidence that Hitler read Wagner’s prose works…Grotesque though it may seem, Wagner’s life and works were almost certainly mirrors in which the Führer thought he saw himself reflected—at least in broad and, to him, imposing outline.

I couldn’t have put it better.