Radiant blue eyes, lips painted a garish red, dyed blond hair, flashy clothes: not everyone took a liking to Friedelind Wagner when she returned to Germany in 1953, after over a decade as an émigré abroad. Now a US citizen, she had come back to attend the Bayreuth Festival founded by her famous grandfather in 1876.

Friedelind Wagner, great-granddaughter of Liszt, granddaughter of Cosima and Richard Wagner and the daughter of Winifred and Siegfried, was a strong-willed personality who talked much: too much, some thought. Her arguments were loud and passionate, often undiplomatic to the point of tactlessness. Yet she exuded an aura that fascinated others. Certainly, Friedelind's profile was strikingly similar to that of her grandfather, whose oeuvre is among the most significant achievements in music history. But she also possessed a razor-sharp wit, intellectual agility and considerable charm, and all this had an impact on those around her. Nevertheless, hardly any other member of the extensive Wagner family has had to endure as much invective as Friedelind, or so many untruths. These have ranged from the implicitly derogatory (‘the Valkyrie of the jet age’) to vulgar, threatening letters. Such attacks were undoubtedly prompted in part by her often rebellious manner and her fondness for making provocative statements. But they were equally a result of her opposition to much of what was held up as holy in Bayreuth. She took a stand against her mother, against the rehabilitation of ex-Nazis in post-war Germany, and against attempts by her brother Wolfgang to block the next generation of Wagners from directing in Bayreuth.

Much would have turned out differently, had she been born a boy. Her dominant manner, her impulsive nature and her musical and artistic gifts made her stand out from her brothers even as a child – if she had been a boy, her pre-eminence among them would surely have been undisputed. Her ‘bad luck’, so to speak, was to have come into the world as a girl. Her grandfather Richard Wagner had in his day regarded his son Siegfried as the sole guarantor of the survival of his legacy, and Siegfried's birth had prompted an overwhelming sense of joy such as the composer had never before experienced. After the birth of his daughters Isolde and Eva, the birth of a male heir seemed to him to be an act of redemption and Siegfried was accordingly celebrated as a demi-god. ‘O hail to the day that illuminates us, hail to the sun that shines upon us,’ cried Cosima Wagner, Richard's second wife, quoting the close of the opera Siegfried from the Ring of the Nibelung. Richard was going to build a house just for his son and he wanted him to have a wild, oat-sowing youth – quite in contrast to the staid fate intended for his sisters. The birth of this son was immortalized in music in the Siegfried Idyll, composed by the proud father for Cosima and first performed on Christmas Day 1870.

Friedelind was not without plans. On the contrary, she held a cornucopia of them. Nor did she have a problem committing them to paper. Besides giving lectures she also wrote for various journals such as the German-language Aufbau. Founded in 1934 as the monthly newspaper of the German-Jewish Association, it helped German Jews to stay in touch in the USA, offered a venue for authors to write in their native German, and also gave advice to émigrés on finding a place to live, finding work and generally getting acclimatized. Friedelind had long cast off her early anti-Semitism and her circle of friends already included many who were Jewish.

She got up late and used her mornings to write letters and articles on her typewriter. Then she took a bath and, when the maid came at 2pm to tidy up, she would leave for her various appointments. Attending concerts remained her elixir of life. These included a series by the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini. She was particularly looking forward to a charity concert in late November 1942 when the Maestro was going to conduct only works by Wagner: ‘The young man is 75 now, but looking at his concert-schedule one wouldn't expect it.’

AGerman-language edition of Friedelind's autobiography was published in Switzerland in 1945, and in February 1946 the first extensive reviews began to appear in the German newspapers. It contained ‘many a spicy matter’, they wrote, and headlines were made by Winifred's threat that ‘You will be eradicated and exterminated.’ Winifred denied having uttered it, and blamed Friedelind's co-author Page Cooper for all the book's ‘lies’. ‘[Friedelind's] whole behaviour is still a mystery to me, because she is sending money to Lucerne for them to forward lovely food parcels every month to the head of the family!’ The news of the book's publication shocked the whole family, for they anticipated the worst and feared personal attacks. Wieland wrote to their mother that the book ‘will be its own downfall among decent people’ and did not change his opinion once he had actually read it. The family wrote it off as ‘trivial and mediocre’. Wolfgang wrote to Wieland: ‘The whole thing is a strange product and many a matter is psychologically puzzling to me.’ Gertrud Strobel aptly summed up the family's disgust with Friedelind – and at the same time their willingness to accept her food parcels: ‘Spoke of the book by Maus. The Swiss earnings are used to finance the care packets … The Wagner family is thus living off its own shame!’ A Swiss social democratic newspaper commented triumphantly: ‘Future generations will have to decide whether Bayreuth can have a reason to exist after all the horrors of National Socialism. But if Bayreuth ever blossoms forth again, then Friedelind will at that joyful time stand in the spotlight. Her highly developed sense of national honour and the untouched purity of human dignity have saved Bayreuth!’.

Friedelind spent Christmas 1949 with William Suida (1877–1959) and his family. He was an important Austrian art historian who specialized in the Italian Renaissance and was a nephew of Daniela's divorced husband, Henry Thode. After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis he had lost his professorship in Graz and had fled via England to the USA. Since 1947 he had been working as the head of art historical research at the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in New York.

When Friedelind saw Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Consul in New York in spring 1950 it moved her deeply, since it gave expression to something she knew all too well – the oppressive, helpless feeling of someone whose life depends on inhumane bureaucrats. She had experienced something similar in London, waiting for her exit visa. The American soprano Patricia Neway sang at the world première in Philadelphia on 1 March 1950 and also in the New York run two weeks later. Friedelind had intended for Neway to sing Brangäne in her abortive tour of Tristan and she was a good choice, for Neway went on to enjoy a major career in the years thereafter, remaining in demand as a singer until the 1970s. After The Consul performance, Friedelind went to Neway's dressing room and was moved by how the singer had changed. ‘The success makes her look like the proverbial million dollars … it is finally the long-deserved recognition’.

The equator was crossed on 1 March; on 5 March the Andalucia Star reached harbour in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Four days later it arrived in Montevideo and one day after that it reached its goal, Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. The journey had taken 23 days. The ship had come across just one submarine and had been able to outrun it. After her experiences in the Blitz in London, nothing could perturb Friedelind any more. She was met at the landing stage by Erich Engel and his wife, the soprano Editha Fleischer. Engel was an Austrian conductor who had lived in Buenos Aires for several years already and who ran the opera at the Teatro Colón, working closely with Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber. Fleischer had sung at the New York Met more than 400 times between 1926 and 1936, and now taught in Argentina.

Engel surprised Friedelind with the good news that Toscanini would conduct in Buenos Aires just three months later. Although Toscanini had claimed to the British authorities that she would be employed as a theatre director in the city, the idea had long been dropped after Friedelind had herself expressed doubts:

Wahnfried meant home. Siegfried and Winifred spent time with the children whenever they were in Bayreuth, though they were often absent, travelling. Breakfast and lunch were eaten together and at 4pm there was afternoon tea, which was an extended ceremony following the custom of the English upper classes. Siegfried was good-natured and indulgent and, since he was barely involved in the upbringing of his children, he found Friedelind's cheekiness amusing, whereas Winifred's concern was to tame her rebellious daughter. Friedelind possessed a penetrating voice and knew how to use it, which soon brought her the nickname ‘Krachlaute’ (literally, ‘racket’). Her brother Wolfgang wrote that she ‘dominated with big words – often flippant ones’, which ‘amused my father, but often compelled my mother to reprimand her … she always behaved flamboyantly and the volume of her voice alone drew the attention of all bystanders’. This barely flattering depiction already hints at the close relationship between Friedelind and her father. The latter's liberal ideas of how to bring up children were different from the rigid notions of his wife, who was perfectly able to dole out corporal punishment and other punitive measures that Friedelind often had to endure. She was the only child to be smacked by Winifred, though it did little to change her.

Now that the Festival had reopened and, despite Friedelind's gloomy predictions, was running successfully, she wanted to be part of it. As if to prove her determination to herself, she now moved back to Europe for three years. She would stay variously in England, France, East Germany and the Netherlands and would attend more than 300 opera performances and innumerable rehearsals before returning to the US in November 1957. Even Winifred – ever the energetic, go-ahead type – was sometimes exhausted when her daughter came to stay in Bayreuth. ‘Maus is coming more often than I'd like! – but she means well!’ She came regularly to the Festival now and earned her living from journalism, writing reports and articles, mostly about the Festival productions. The music journalist Irving Kolodin received long letters from her in which reports on European opera houses were mingled with flirtatious comments – thus she expressed regret that she couldn't come in person to get her ‘annual kiss’ and announced that she would let it gather interest.

From 1955 onwards Friedelind lived in the gardener's house next to Wahnfried, where she had four small rooms and a makeshift kitchen. She dubbed it ‘Haus Wahnfriedelind’. Since she would often be up till three in the morning, washing up after visits from friends (in German ‘abspülen’), she also called it her ‘Festspülhaus’. On one occasion, male visitors wandered into her bedroom by mistake, which she found hilarious.

Financing the master classes remained a matter of urgency. Nevertheless, Friedelind doubled the number of participants in 1960, inviting 23 young Americans to Bayreuth: set designers, future conductors, singers, répétiteurs, and six architects – among them Walfredo Toscanini, the grandson of the conductor. Convinced that her classes should include a study of how opera houses are built, she also increased the number of courses on offer. They would take a two-week trip to view famous theatres, see operas and discuss the results of an architectural competition. In June the group went first to Malmö in Sweden in order to visit the city theatre, then to Stockholm to the Congress Centre and the royal theatre at Drottningholm, and then they moved on to Copenhagen to see the Tivoli Concert Hall and the Radio House. In Berlin they visited Hans Scharoun (1893–1972), who was busy building the Philharmonie (it would be finished in 1963). There followed trips to the opera houses of Düsseldorf, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Hamburg and Münster. They went to the new theatre in Lünen, which was equipped for special lighting effects, and to the local Geschwister Scholl High School that Scharoun had designed. There followed the Beethoven Hall in Bonn, the Mannheim National Theatre, the Schwetzingen Court Theatre, the Frankfurt Opera House, the Liederhalle and Kleines Schauspielhaus in Stuttgart and finally the Festspielhaus in Salzburg.

For Friedelind 1970 was not a good year. She still had not paid off her debts from her master classes, and Wolfgang was the only person who could help her with them. She was back in Europe, and wrote to her lawyer Servatius in the autumn that she could not return to the USA before the debts were paid. ‘Twelve months have passed since my arrival in Europe and we have had nothing but empty talk.’ She was given no information about what was being concocted in Bayreuth. She learnt from the TV that there was progress in the plans to turn the Festival into a foundation, but that it could take a long time before any money was paid out to the heirs. And she was for the moment without any clear goal in life. She was still smarting from the death of her master classes.

Friedelind spent the summer partly by Lake Constance, but also in Salzburg, Zurich, Lucerne and elsewhere. She avoided Bayreuth. When she was staying with Verena in Nussdorf, she left a few hours before her mother was due to arrive – she did not want to see her. Instead she maintained contact with good friends, meeting Otto Klemperer and his daughter Lotte in October in Zurich, as well as Tilly and Fritz Zweig. The Zweigs remained her friends till the end. ‘They are fabulous artists, teachers and friends, both had splendid careers of their own up to Hitler,’ she wrote of them.

Why were Germans being interned, regardless of their political affiliation or opinions? In May 1940 Germany had opened up its western front, invading first the Benelux countries and then France, and this had put the British government on red alert. There was a fear that Nazi sympathizers might be lurking in Britain as a fifth column, waiting in anticipation of a German invasion and doing all they could in readiness for it. British intelligence was unprepared for the many tasks facing it at the outbreak of war. It had too few people in its ranks, and the reigning political uncertainty led to a rash turnover at the top. In May 1940 Winston Churchill fired the boss of MI5 and replaced him with Oswald Allen Harker, who was himself replaced by Sir David Petrie in April 1941. It was Petrie who reorganized the security services and was responsible for their many subsequent successes in the espionage war against the Nazis.

Great Britain had been accepting German refugees since 1933. There had been no doubt from the start that the Nazis wanted to erect a totalitarian, racist state, and by the end of 1933 already more than 37,000 people had left the country for reasons of politics or race. Some 2000 of these came to Great Britain. The situation worsened drastically in 1940 when Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were overrun by the Germans and an invasion of Britain itself was feared by many.

It was all over. In 1967 the master classes took place for the last time, after which Friedelind was once more an outsider, just as she had been in New York in 1941. She did not belong, was without a real home and yet again had to build a new life for herself. To make matters worse, the ‘Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (NPD), a new far-right party founded in Germany in late 1964, had managed to achieve a respectable 13.6% of the vote in Bayreuth. It offered a home to numerous ex-Nazis, and Winifred was delighted: ‘Well – the result of the elections was a real surprise – let's hope that the representatives of the NPD now prove themselves too. It's really time to muck things out!’

What's more, a former prominent Nazi called Hans Severus Ziegler was busy giving a series of lectures at the Bayreuth adult education centre (the ‘Volkshochschule’). He had organized the infamous Nazi exhibition of ‘Degenerate music’ in 1938 and had, in 1964, published his anecdotal book Hitler aus dem Erleben, in which the ‘Führer’ is portrayed as a cultured, intellectually interested man. After the book's publication the city of Bayreuth banned Ziegler from giving any more lectures, so Winifred invited him instead along with 80 other interested parties. Her daughter was annoyed to see how Winifred continued her old friendships with Nazi enthusiasts and made no secret of it.