Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus

The Bayreuth Festival (Bayreuther Festspiele) is a music festival held every July/August in Bayreuth, Germany. The festival features performances of operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). The composer conceived and promoted the idea of a special festival to showcase his own works, in particular his monumental operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal.

In the early 1870s Wagner himself personally supervised the design and construction – with the 31-year-old Leipzig architect Otto Brückwald (1841–1917) – of a new custom-built theater, the Bayreuth Festival Hall, uniquely designed to present his operatic works in the grand manner he envisioned. Among other things, the Festspielhaus features architectural innovations to accommodate the huge orchestras for which Wagner wrote, and the special staging he wanted in order to showcase his elaborate productions. Wagner also wanted a venue to present his works without the distractions of a normal theater repertoire in a large city.

The Bayreuther Festspielhaus as it looks today. Richard Wagner’s Festival Hall hosted its first performances on 13 August 1876. The annual summer Festival held in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth has become a pilgrimage destination for Wagner fans and classical music enthusiasts. It also attracts many German celebrities and politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Wagner’s Difficult Journey to Fund and Create his Theater

The town of Bayreuth, which even today has a population of only about 74,000 and is off the beaten track, was not Wagner’s first choice for his grand project. Even before the 1850s the composer had long had the idea for a special Wagner festival opera house in some city in German-speaking Europe, including Würzburg, where he had been a choir director. But he only became really serious about the idea in 1864 when King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a Wagner admirer, invited him to Munich – just at a time when Wagner had lost all hope of completing The Ring or building his theater. In the Bavarian capital, with Ludwig’s patronage, Wagner teamed up with his friend, the architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), who had designed the first Königliches Hoftheater in Dresden (1841) and later the current renowned Semper Opera House, after the Hoftheater burned down in 1869.

This bust of Richard Wagner is the work of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. It was installed in the park next to the Festspielhaus in 1982. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Though Ludwig had refused to believe the rumors of Wagner’s affair with Cosima von Bülow (Wagner’s “secretary,” the wife of Wagner’s concertmaster, and the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt), by December 1865 Ludwig was compelled by the growing scandal to banish Wagner from Bavaria. Thus Semper’s festival hall plans for Munich never got off the ground. In truth, Wagner was beginning to feel that the Munich project was getting a bit too grandiose, even for him. After Wagner went to Switzerland to live (with Ludwig paying the rent), he and the King continued to exchange letters, and the King came to Wagner in Tribschen for a surprise visit on the occasion of the composer’s birthday (22 May) in 1867. Cosima von Bülow, née de Flavigny, would become Wagner’s second wife in August 1870 in Lucerne, Switzerland following her divorce from Hans von Bülow, with whom she had two daughters. Cosima was 24 years younger and almost six inches (15cm) taller than her second husband. Before her marriage to Wagner, Cosima had given birth to daughters Isolde (1865 in Munich) and Eva (1867 in Tribschen, Switzerland), both fathered by him. Cosima left von Bülow to live with Wagner in 1867, but she did not get a divorce before giving birth to Wagner’s first son and heir, Siegfried, in June 1869. The divorce became official only a month before Cosima and Wagner married in August 1870. (Wagner’s first wife, Minna, had died of a heart attack in Dresden in January 1866.)

Around 1870 Wagner became aware of the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth. Soon Wagner and his new wife Cosima went to inspect the facility, but it proved to be unsuitable for what Wagner had in mind. However, he was still attracted to Bayreuth for several reasons. Although the existing opera house was inadequate, the city fathers were open to the idea of a completely new theater, even granting Wagner a building site with a view that Wagner called “charming and enchanting. Additionally, unlike a big city such as Munich, Bayreuth had no existing large cultural community that might compete with Wagner’s project. A Wagner theater and festival in Bayreuth would be the biggest show in town.

Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as it appeared around 1882. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

In an effort to finance his project, following an unsuccessful appeal to German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Wagner set up what has been called the first-ever “crowd funding” campaign. In 1870, Wagner had established a “patronage association” (Patronatsverein), a public subscription offer for which patrons paid 300 Taler in advance for a certificate that entitled the bearer to a seat in the future theater for three cycle performances in the first season. But even after Wagner Societies were established in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Vienna, and other cities, a total of only 340 certificates had been sold by spring 1873, raising only 102,000 Taler out of the estimated 300,000 required.

With a basic design borrowed from Semper’s Munich plans, Wagner worked with the architect Otto Brückwald to create his new festival hall; construction began on 22 May 1872 in Bayreuth. The lack of full funding threatened to halt construction in 1874. In desperation, following a second failed appeal to Bismarck in 1873, Wagner turned once more to his royal friend and patron, King Ludwig II, to obtain the additional funding he needed. Reluctantly the Bavarian king granted Wagner a loan of over 100,000 Taler (about 1.7 million euros today) from his personal fortune. (The loan was completely paid off by the Wagner family in the early 1900s.) Construction and other delays pushed the planned 1875 opening date up to 1876. Wagner’s wooden, spartan Festspielhaus structure now stood on Bayreuth’s so-called “Green Hill” in a park-like setting.

The 1876 Bayreuth Premiere and the Cosima Legacy

The very first Bayreuth Festival took place on 13 August 1876, featuring the premiere of Wagner’s complete Ring of the Nibelung over four evenings, with performances starting in the afternoon. (See the program below.) As it still does today, the first Wagner Festival attracted a true who’s-who list of notable people of the time. Among the invited guests were: Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Peter Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Semper, Emperor Wilhelm I, and several kings, most notably King Ludwig II, who attended on several different dates and refused any public acknowledgement of his invaluable support.

Richard and Cosima Wagner in Vienna in 1872. PHOTO: Fritz Luckhardt (Wikimedia Commons)

Despite a degree of artistic success (although Wagner was disappointed by some production problems), the first Festival season in 1876 was a financial disaster. So much so that Wagner’s Festival Hall stood empty for six years, and Wagner was forced to obtain an interest-free loan from the Bavarian government, backed by royalties from Wagner musical performances in Munich. On 26 July 1882, Wagner’s Parsifal premiered in Bayreuth, six months before the composer’s death while visiting Venice. A lesser man might have given up on his ill-fated project, but Wagner persisted and enjoyed moderate success before he died. His widow would help burnish his legend for years following his death, and the Bayreuth Festival became a Wagner family project.

After her husband’s death in 1883, Cosima Wagner took over the management of the Bayreuth Festival, enforcing the guidelines that she felt her husband would have wanted. (Some said she was too artistically rigid in this regard.) She accomplished what Richard Wagner did not have time to achieve in Bayreuth. Over the years from 1886 to 1906 she transformed what was more of a haphazard enterprise into an established debt-free institution with the solid Wagner repertoire that her husband had envisioned: his last ten completed operas. She might have done even more, but Cosima Wagner suffered an Adams-Stokes seizure, a form of heart attack, on 6 December 1906. Although it was not fatal, she remained a partially blind invalid over almost 24 years until her death on 1 April 1930. She transferred the management of the Festspiele to her son Siegfried in 1908. To this day, the Festival continues to be administered by Wagner family members, passing from one Wagner generation to the next. The current Festival head and artistic director is Katharina Wagner (b. 1978), Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter.

The Festival Hall Structure

From the beginning, the Bayreuth Festival Hall was designed and constructed with cost control in mind. Although the design in many ways was innovative and pioneering, the building itself consisted of simple, low-cost materials: wooden beams, a ceiling made of sailcloth, unpadded cane seats, and almost no ornamentation. The entire structure was not really intended to be permanent, with little thought to (and no money for) the plain, unadorned exterior.

The interior of the Festival Hall as it looked in the 1970s. Richard Wagner dictated that his theater direct the audience’s attention to the stage, without distractions. Today the same simple Greek-style cloth canopy of the original design forms the ceiling of the auditorium in Bayreuth. PHOTO: Josef Lehmkuhl (Wikimedia Commons)

After firing the first architect (Wilhelm Neumann of Berlin) for not listening to his concerns about costs, Wagner wrote a letter outlining his intentions for the building: “The theater building is to be provisional only; I should be quite content for it to be only of wood, like the halls used for gymnastic displays and choral festivals; it should be no more solid than necessary to prevent it from collapsing. Therefore economize here, economize – no ornamentation.” But when it came to theatrical production and presentation, Wagner wanted to spare no expense, writing: “Stage machinery and scenery, everything that relates to the ideal inner work of art – perfect in every way. No economies here: everything as though designed to last a long time, nothing provisional.*

Wagner had very specific criteria for his new Festspielhaus. He insisted on several things that were new or uncommon in theaters or opera halls before his time. In Wagner’s theater each of its 1,937 seats had to have a good, direct view of the stage. A single steep ramp of seats long and high enough for the last row to see the stage but not the cleverly hidden orchestra. Wagner’s unique design allowed the audience to hear but not see the large orchestra located below and between the stage and the audience – in a 12-meter deep “mystic chasm.” Wagner placed the instruments at various levels, with the bass sounds placed deepest, the lighter sounds (strings, flutes) higher. Although technically advanced, Wagner’s opera temple had no fancy frills. His festival hall barely had a foyer. There was no bar or restaurant. (Today both are located in a separate location outside the hall.)

SILENCED VOICES: This exhibit near the Festspielhaus tells the story of the many Jewish singers, artists, and musicians who were banned from the festival and persecuted by the Nazis. Some died in the Holocaust. This permanent installation follows the 2012 exhibition called “Silenced Voices: The Bayreuther Festspiele and the Jews from 1876 to 1945” that took place at the Bayreuth City Hall and on the Green Hill. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Even as the hall began to take shape on the Green Hill, Wagner had some vague hope of constructing something much more artistic and permanent in its place – once he had the money. But he never had enough money, and even if he could have managed the funding, there was a powerful reason not to change anything: acoustics. Once his music had been performed in the Festival Hall, it became apparent to Wagner and everyone else that the architects and builders had somehow created a hall with unparalleled acoustics. This feature, above all others, is carefully and religiously preserved. Other than minor renovations and improvements over the years, the building that stands in Bayreuth today is the same one that audiences sat in for its debut in 1876, complete with its notoriously unpadded, hard seats – all in the name of superior sound. In a television interview, the Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, who has both performed and conducted in Bayreuth, once declared its Festival Hall the best of all the opera houses in the world. Wagner would have been extremely happy to hear that.

Hard-to-Find Tickets
It can be difficult for normal mortals to obtain tickets to the annual Wagner festival, with some fans forced to wait as long as a decade to secure tickets. Serious opera lovers sign up with the Society of Friends of Bayreuth e.V. or a Wagner Society (still going strong since the original days), which is the best way to get a seat in Bayreuth. In any case, if you’re not a VIP or a celebrity, it takes some planning ahead to get tickets. See the bayreuther-festspiele.de link below for program and ticket info.

*Quoted in Opera in Context by Mark A. Radice – Amadeus, 2003, 410 pages, hardcover (from Amazon.com)

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Related Pages
AT THE GERMAN WAY

• Richard Wagner – A complete biography of the German composer from the German Way
• King Ludwig II – About the Swan King, Wagner’s Bavarian royal patron and friend.
• Castle Guides – Castles and palaces in Germany
• Mini Bios A-Z – More brief biographies of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Featured Biographies – More detailed bios of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Notable Germans, Austrians and Swiss – More bios
• Notable Women from Austria, Germany, Switzerland
• Famous Graves – The graves and cemeteries of the famous

ON THE WEB

• Bayreuther Festspiele (English) – The official Bayreuth Festival website with current information, tickets, and this year’s program.
• Art and Absolution at Bayreuth by Alison Kinney – A personal and well-written account of a Wagner fan’s 2019 Bayreuth encounter with the composer’s music, his anti-Semitism, and the Silenced Voices exhibit.
• Wagner Museum – Wagner’s former residence in Bayreuth is now a museum

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