In 1945, Wolfgang Wagner found his grandfather Richard’s eyeglasses in the rubble of the Villa Wahnfried, the old family home in Bayreuth. When referring to this Wagnerian discovery, Nike, Wolfgang’s niece, asked this rhetorical question, “Would he [Wolfgang] have tried them on in order to understand that the narrow view through Wagner’s glasses might be connected with the destruction all around?”
Suitable reverence, tact and good taste will presumably restrain her from repeating that question next Saturday, April 11, at the memorial for her uncle Wolfgang Wagner who has just died at the age of ninety. No doubt many good things can be said about his life. For example, it was he who, in 1976, to mark the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, brought in Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez to present the Ring, thereby grievously upsetting the old guard.
But the world will be forgiven if it remembers that Wolfgang Wagner’s autobiography, Acts, contains few reflections on Nazi horrors. One might have welcomed a slightly greater effort in that direction, considering the close relationship between Hitler and Bayreuth. Hence, Nike’s acerbic question about the grandfather’s eyeglasses.
One can, of course, take the view that, his anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the deep humanity of Wagner’s work, not to mention his revolutionary past, would have prevented him from becoming a loyal Nazi for any length of time, or at least from remaining a loyal Nazi after Hitler came to power. Hitler was very different from his patron, the romantic, if mad, King Ludwig of Bavaria. But one member of the family who saw Richard Wagner with the same eyes as Nike was her cousin, Gottfried, Wolfgang’s son from his first marriage. He was born in 1947 and disowned by his father in 1990.
Already at the age of nine he thought his grandfather’s music had something to do with the horrible newsreels of the liberation of the camps. The need to know the truth about this connection turned out to be the main content of his life ever since. He has written an autobiography, The Twilight of the Wagners. He gives lectures all over the world.
He has not been invited to the memorial on Saturday.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I read about this somewhere. The great-grandson of Richard Wagner will lecture here, in LA, in the near future. I wonder whether he is worth listening to. Of course, I never heard about the eyeglasses.
I have heard Gottfried speak. As suggested in the blog, he is strongly biased in favour of Hermann Levi (who conducted the première of Parsival) and his crowd and blasts the Wagner family.