Part of the Wagnerism Audiovisual Companion. Most audio samples are by kind permission of Pristine Classical.
A poster for the Amsterdam Wagner celebration of 1933, at which Thomas Mann gave his address "Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner."
p. 520: Siegfried Wagner conducts excerpts from the Ring in the 1920s.
p. 525: Mann's diaries and listings of his record collection allow us to reconstruct what discs he might have been listeneing to while he was writing The Magic Mountain. The scholar Volker Mertens points out that Heinrich Schlusnus is a likely candidate for the "noble baritone" singing Wolfram's aria "Blick' ich umher in diesem edlen Kreise" from Tannhäuser:
Mann testifies that he enjoyed this Richard Tauber recording of Schubert's "Der Lindenbaum":
p. 534: Hitler in the front row at the Wagner commemoration in Leipzig in February 1933, with Winifred and Wieland Wagner sitting to his right. At the podium is Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig, who later joined the anti-Nazi resistance. If the July 20 plot in 1944 had succeeded, Goerdeler would have become chancellor in Hitler's place. He was executed in early 1945.
Another view of the same event, with Karl Muck conducting.
p. 535: Music from the Meistersinger Act III Prelude at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl's Victory of Faith, depicting the 1934 Nuremberg rally:
Footage of Hitler in Bayreuth, 1934.
Hitler with the Wagner granddaughters Verena and Friedelind, photographed by their brother Wieland.
More footage of Hitler at Bayreuth can be seen at 1:43 in this 1940 newsreel, held in the digital collections of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Excerpts from Meistersinger at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally, with Furtwängler conducting:
Footage of Wilhelm Rode rehearsing and performing Meistersinger at the Deutsche Opernhaus in 1935, with the singer making a gesture resembling the Hitler salute at 2:05:
A Nazi poster quoting a statement attributed to Wagner: "To be German is to do something for its own sake." (From Randall Bytwerk's German Propaganda Archive.)
p. 536: Posters of Hitler in Wagnerian poses.
p. 537: The names of various Nazi leaders can be seen in the old guest ledger of the Hotel Goldener Anker. Thomas Mann looked through it in 1949, noted that the whole "devil's brood" was there, and signed his own name with some satisfaction.
p. 541: Alfred Roller's sketch for his 1934 Parsifal at Bayreuth.
The gay Heldentenor Max Lorenz sings Siegfried's forging song in 1937.
p. 542: Thomas Mann denounces antisemitism on American radio in 1942.
p. 545: Thomas Mann in Malibu, California.
p. 552: Toscanini conducts "The Ride of the Valkyries" at the Red Cross benefit of 1944.
The program booklet for the benefit can be seen in the New York Philharmonic digital archives.
p. 554: Édouard Dujardin, former editor of the Revue wagnérienne, writes to Hitler in 1943. From the Dujardin Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
pp. 555–56: An excerpt from the Bayreuth scene in Karl Ritter's film Stukas.
p. 557: The Silenced Voices exhibition around the Breker bust of Wagner in Bayreuth.
p. 559: An image from The Eternal Jew.
p. 561: American soldiers inspecting Wahnfried in 1945.
