The South Bank Show: The Wagner Family

17 August 2009

Sunday 13 September 2009 – time tbc

The South Bank Show returns for its final season, with film maker Tony Palmer’s sixteenth South Bank Show which examines The Wagner Family – a passionate and incendiary film that makes the usual family soap opera feel tame. The film uses as its back drop the Wagner’s glorious but poisoned legacy the Bayreuth Festival – the highest profile music festival in the world.

This South Bank Show uncovers the private workings of a family, the nearest equivalent the Germans have to Royalty, who have survived World Wars, Nazi occupation and its own internecine lies; to become one of the most intriguing, dominant and ultimately dangerous cultural families in Europe. 

The characters have to be seen to be believed in this extraordinary film, including Wagner's homosexual only son Siegfried; and his son Wolfgang, the ailing 88 year-old current patriarch; Wolfgang's two daughters, the half-sisters Eva and 29 year old aspiring director Katharina (known as the “Bayreuth Barbie”); and the various cousins, nieces and anti-Semitic ghosts from the past who still threaten the Festival including Wolfgang's English mother Winifred and her 'very special friend' Adolf Hitler. 

It’s hard to think of another family saga—in the arts, business or politics—that rivals the four generations of Wagners.  Ironically, and perhaps tragically, Wagner's mesmerising masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen tells much the same story: a family's pursuit of power and glory and its inevitable consequences.