KEY POINTS:
In the realm of classical music, Richard Wagner ranks as one of the most controversial composers around.
First, there is the man himself, his genius tainted by the antisemitism that was fashionable in high circles in parts of 19th century Europe and ran through the core of Adolf
Hitler, Wagner's dearest admirer.
Then there is his music, most famously the Ring cycle - the extraordinary 16-hour panorama of greed and betrayal surrounding an all-powerful but accursed ring.
With a mad cast of Nordic gods, hero tenors, dwarves and breastplated Valkyries, and with a climax of Valhalla consumed by flames, the Ring beats all rivals for scale. And for duration, too. Goetterdaemmerung - The Twilight of the Gods - can run for up to seven hours with intervals.
Such indulgence is not to everyone's taste.
"After two hours, I looked at my watch and found that 18 minutes had gone by," a critic once wrote.
The comments may well have been apocryphal, but if they were true they could not have been uttered within earshot of Bayreuth, the home of the Wagner cult.
The small Bavarian town hosts an annual Wagner festival, running for just 30 or so performances in late July and August, that can only described as a musical pilgrimage, with the composer's descendants cast as high priests.
On Wednesday , the fans of Bayreuth await a decision that will determine the future of their annual congregation.
These lovers of Wagner are not your average opera buffs. Eight years is the average wait for a ticket to Bayreuth - although the wealthy find inside tracks - and to wait a decade is not unusual.
Their coveted slip of paper in hand, Wagnerians from around the world visit the composer's tomb before entering with hushed tones into the holy of holies, the Schauspielhaus theatre.
But the high emotion and low plotting on Bayreuth's stage is nothing compared with the real-life feud that has divided Wagner's descendants over who is his rightful heir.
Three generations of Wagners have been in control of the festival since its inception in 1876, with the inauguration of the Schauspielhaus, purpose-built just for the Ring cycle.
For the past decade there has been an open war of succession, in which four women have revolved, Valkyrie-like, around Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson and festival director.
Wolfgang has held a tight grip on the reins at Bayreuth's fabled "Green Hill" since the premature death of his talented older brother Wieland in 1966. His roots in Bayreuth are deep.
He sat on the knee of Cosima Wagner, Wagner's wife, and was embraced by "Uncle Wolf", the family name for Adolf Hitler, who was a frequent visitor to their house at nearby Wahnfried.
Wolfgang has been bitterly criticised as conservative in taste and autocratic in style and his relationships with his offspring have been characterised most favourably as oedipal.
In a devastating book, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy, Wolfgang's estranged son, Gottfried, paints his father as volatile, illiberal and a hypocrite who nursed deep admiration for the Fuehrer.
Hitler's "only real mistake" was ill-treatment of the Jews, Gottfried quotes him as saying.
Wolfgang fell out bitterly with the daughter from his first marriage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 62, and his talented niece Nike, also 62, who is Wieland's daughter.
Both were viewed by the festival board as the best candidates among the fourth generation of Wagners to succeed Wolfgang as festival director.
Eva has worked for several years at the Aix-en-Provence festival in southern France, while Nike runs a music festival in the east German city of Weimar.
But in 2000, Nike incurred her uncle's enduring fury by blasting Bayreuth as a "musty institution" and saying that, under Wolfgang, the festival had become "a perversion of the Wagner idea ... always returning to its old-fashioned roots".
A year later, Eva fought to be the new festival director, gaining thesupport of everyone on the board except her father himself, who said he had a lifelong contract and would remain in place.
Wolfgang then campaigned to have the daughter from his second marriage, 29-year-old Katharina, succeed him.
But the blonde-maned, black-dressed Katharina has no great adornments to her CV.
Desperate to prove she was ready to take the helm, Wolfgang last year let her make her Bayreuth debut.
Fearlessly, she chose Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, one of Wagner's most demanding pieces because of its Nazi overtones of racial purity. It was Hitler's favourite opera.
Katharina's avant-garde production featured waving plastic phalluses, full-male nudity and topless women, and, bizarrely, an actor portraying her great-grandfather who cavorted on stage in his underpants. It was intensely booed by the Bayreuth faithful and panned by the critics.
The power behind the throne has been Wolfgang's second wife and Katharina's mother, Gudrun.
Initially hired as a press officer for the festival, Gudrun married Wolfgang in 1976 after they both divorced, and her influence grew as his age advanced and his health waned.
To a caller wanting to speak to Mr Wagner, she said, "I am my husband".
Nike once said of her step-aunt: "We all know that she owes her position to her place in the marital bed rather than any understanding of art and culture."
But the death of Gudrun last November at the age of 63 from cancer has led to a surprise denouement that could be as messy as the climax of the Ring itself.
Now aged 88, white-haired and crippled by arthritis, and facing threats from the state of Bavaria, the village of Bayreuth and the Friends of Bayreuth to slash subsidies for the festival unless he relinquishes control, Wolfgang Wagner this month finally agreed to abdicate.
To the astonishment - indeed, bewildered amusement - of many Wagner fans, the two half-sisters, Eva and Katharina, have offered to jointly run the hallowed festival after years of enmity and plotting. Eva had previously teamed up with Nike to push her own bid but has now dropped her cousin and switched sides.
The 24-member festival board will meet to decide on their proposal on Wednesday.
Some music experts believe the unlikely combination amounts to a mix of nitro and glycerine and predict the festival will eventually have to look beyond the Wagner family for a more stable formula.
The relationship between the two sisters "is better than it used to be", festival spokesman Peter Emmerich says carefully.
"They have established that under certain conditions, they could imagine working together."
The intrigues go to the heart of a festival that some say is a reflection of Germany's national soul.
The event was born in the heady rise of nationalism in Germany in the last quarter of the 19th century. In the 1930s, the festival became a Nazi shrine, a propaganda stage for German might and myths.
After the war, under Wieland's radical management, "New Bayreuth" reflected a creative new start, artistic excellence and a willingness to challenge its Nazi past.
Wolfgang has been routinely criticised for yielding to Bayreuth's entrenched conservatives, but his defenders point out his innovations.
One of the most revolutionary Rings was in 1976, the festival's centenary, when director Patrice Chereau (with Pierre Boulez as conductor) reduced the gods to mere humans.
If they are crowned as the joint queens of Bayreuth, Eva and Katharina have a mighty task on their hands.
They must balance tradition and change, accommodating the demands of Bayreuth's passionate yet conservative following and also honour the dictum of their great-grandfather, who enjoined: "Children, create something new!"
They must set aside years of animosity, overcome the tribal divisions within the Foundation and ignore likely meddling by their father.
In Valhalla, the gods themselves would surely shake their heads at human folly in the face of such odds.
OPERA MAXIMUS
* Wagner's Ring - Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs) - is a cycle of four epic music dramas remarkable for its sheer length.
* A full performance takes place over four nights, with a total playing time of about 16 hours, depending on the conductor's pacing.
* The first and shortest opera, Das Rheingold, typically lasts two and a half hours, while the final and longest, Goetterdaemmerung, can take up to five hours in performance.
Intervals are extra.
