Germany’s cultural power-brokers yesterday piled the pressure on the 88-year-old grandson of Richard Wagner in the hope of persuading him to step down from the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, one of the world’s greatest musical events.

The man at the centre of the storm is Wolfgang Wagner, who has run the festival since 1966. Since the death of the composer the festival, on the so-called “Green Hill” of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, has been managed by a member of the clan.

Mr Wagner, frail and confused, refuses to surrender the post unless it goes to his 29-year-old daughter, Katharina. The politicians and businessmen who make up the majority of the Bayreuth Foundation, which supervises the festival, begged to differ at a crisis meeting yesterday. Mr Wagner decided not to attend the meeting and let his lawyer fight his corner in an often passionate and irritable debate.

Although they kept the old man in place — the statutes give him the job for life unless it can be proved that he has lost his faculties — the board called on all contenders to prepare their concepts for the future of the festival. Clearly the intention is to hold a beauty contest and line up a successor whether Mr Wagner approves or not.

The tide turned against Mr Wagner when his most loyal allies in the foundation, the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, began to doubt his physical and mental health. “Wolfgang Wagner has not been able to run the festival by himself for some time,” said Edgar Hilger, of the society.

Jürgen Flimm, the theatre and opera director, has already identified Mr Wagner’s wife, Gudrun, 63, as the real puppet-master of the Wagner festival — and it is she who is determined to put her daughter Katharina in charge.

“The situation has become absolutely critical and demands a solution,” thundered Karl Gerhard Schmidt, the chairman of the Society of Bayreuth Friends, demanding that Mr Wagner step down. It is known that the federal and the Bavarian governments agree. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor — and a great Wagnerian — was shocked when she tried and failed to make conversation with Mr Wagner in Bayreuth last summer. The Government fears that Germany’s prestige as a host of international arts events will suffer if the feuding rages on.

“[Mr Wagner] is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,” Wolf-Dieter Peter, a respected music critic, said.

There are three candidates for the job, all great-grand-daughters of the composer, and they hovered over the crisis meeting yesterday like Richard Wagner’s Valkyries.

Pitted against Katharina is Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 62, an experienced opera manager who has worked in London, Paris and New York. Mr Wagner, and more importantly his wife, will never give her the go-ahead. Eva is his daughter by his first marriage, which ended in acrimonious divorce.

The third contender is Nike, also 62, the successful head of the Weimar Festival. She is a sharp-tongued critic of Mr Wagner’s wooden directing style and has publicly said that Gudrun’s only claim to operatic experience is through the marital bed.

As long as Mr Wagner lives, neither Eva nor Nike has a chance of succeeding him, though both seem better qualified than Katharina. The Valkyries will have to await their moment; the foundation, though increasingly impatient, is playing for time.

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