Winifred Wagner

Winifred Wagner (born June 23, 1897, Hastings, Sussex, England—died March 5, 1980, Überlingen, West Germany [now in Germany]) was a British-born German cultural figure who directed the Bayreuth Festival of Richard Wagner’s operatic works from 1930 to 1944 and gained notoriety for her friendship with Adolf Hitler.

As a child, Winifred was adopted by the then-elderly musician Charles Klindworth and his wife Henriette and educated in Berlin. There she met and married Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, and, when both he and his mother, Cosima, died in 1930, she took over direction of the Wagner festival, which was in progress at the time. Some years earlier she had met Hitler and developed a close friendship with him; she supported the Nazi regime and in a 1975 television interview reaffirmed her admiration for its leader. She did, however, use her influence to protect Jewish musicians and singers, though actively supporting the association of Wagner’s name with nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes. After World War II she was tried, given a suspended jail sentence, and fined. When the Bayreuth Festival was revived in 1951, it was on the condition that she should not be associated with it. Her sons Wieland and Wolfgang successively took over direction of the festival and maintained the ban imposed on their mother.