For high opera read soap opera. The spears are sharpened and the Valkyries are screeching as Europe’s most dysfunctional musical family braces itself for a new round in the feud for the throne of Richard Wagner.

Katharina Wagner, the German composer’s 29-year-old great-granddaughter, has now bluntly stated her claim to lead the Bayreuth Festival, the hub of the Wagnerian universe.

She told Stern magazine yesterday: “I don’t think I am too young any more. I would be ready.”

Her father, Wolfgang, 87 and increasingly frail, has ruled the festival for 41 years and split the Wagner clan as surely as the scheming J. R. polarised Texan oil families in Dallas. The stakes are high: rule Bayreuth and you have a grip on the German soul.

Since Richard Wagner established the festival on the so-called Green Hill overlooking the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, a member of the Wagner family has always run the show. There is no male right of succession – two of the most formidable directors have been women: Cosima, widow of Richard and daughter of Franz Liszt, and Winifred Williams, the composer’s Welsh daughter-in-law.

Now three women are in contention. There is no doubt about Wolfgang’s favourite: his daughter Katharina has been given the chance to make her debut in Bayreuth next month by producing Die Meistersinger.

If it is applauded by the audience she is likely to be anointed soon afterwards. But the final word is held by the Wagner Foundation, which includes other members of the Wagner family as well as representatives of the federal and Bavarian governments, which subsidise the annual festival.

Katharina has two rivals. Nike Wagner, 62, is Wolfgang’s niece, a tart-tongued musicologist who runs the Weimar festival. She is not a fan of her uncle. “Both the institution of Bayreuth and its director are going senile,” she said.

The other candidate is Wolfgang’s daughter by his first marriage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, also 62, an opera administrator who has worked in Paris and at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She was, with Wagnerian bluster, cursed and banished when she took her mother’s side in a bitter divorce.

Eva was declared a suitable successor by the foundation some years ago. But Wolfgang would give up the job only if the directorship were offered to his wife, Gudrun, who would have stewarded the festival until Katharina was ripe to inherit. Nike laughed the Gudrun proposal out of court. “We all know that she owes her position to her place in the marital bed, rather than any understanding of art and culture,” she sneered.

So it has continued, with Wolfgang becoming more and more like a Franconian King Lear, exiling critics and disowning uncomfortable relatives. Yet the festival needs to open up for debate, about whether, for example, Bayreuth should perform works by composers other than Wagner.

The test of fire for a new director is how she – or he – tackles the question of Richard Wagner’s attitude towards Jews. After the Second World War Wolfgang and his brother, Wieland, who died in 1966, tried to produce their grandfather’s operas in a way that clearly distanced them from any hint of antiSemitism.

That is why Katharina’s Meistersinger is regarded as a crucial turning point in the battle for succession. The shoemaker Hans Sachs’s monologue can, if directed ineptly, seem an outpouring of nationalist sentiment.

“I don’t want to reveal how I’m going to tackle this scene,” an unusually defensive Katharina says.

So the tension is crackling before this year’s festival, which begins on July 25, and the stars of politics and culture have been scrambling for tickets.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will be there, together with her scientist husband, Joachim Sauer (who was once dubbed the Phantom of the Opera because Bayreuth was the only time he deigned to appear in public with his wife), as will José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission.

At least three former presidents of Germany will be attending along with a cluster of film directors and fashion designers.

Bayreuth, it seems, has become as compelling as any soap opera, even for lukewarm Wagnerians.

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