At last, a pilgrimage to Bayreuth: Parsifal and Lohengrin, part 1

After intending to do so for 30 years, I have finally climbed the musical mountain and experienced the Bayreuth Wagner Festival in Bavaria. This is sort of a shrine to operaphiles (and to some unrepentant Nazis) since Richard Wagner built the theater to his specifications in 1876 and it remains nearly unchanged. Only the operas of Wagner are performed here, and only for two months each summer. Why did it take me this long to attend? Well, like many religious rituals, there is no quick payoff. To attend, one needs to apply in writing (no internet, fax) yearly. After an average of 10 years waiting, your lottery number comes up. If you forget to reapply, your name goes to the back of the line. These wonderful Germans! After participating twice in in this masochistic rite, the most recent being 8 consecutive yearly applications, my religious rite was interrupted by a move to Florida which prevented receipt of the annual application. I used my higher salary and advancing years to justify paying a black market tour distributor from Heidelberg for some tickets. Turns out he has a semi-official corner on the black market tickets, strictly illegal, technically. So I only profaned the altar a little bit.

Change comes slowly to Bayreuth. Yes, there is some cloth over the hard wooden seats now-thus diminishing my hoped-for echt German pain-inducing experience (think of a 6 hour Lutheran sermon on wooden pews, as was done in olden times when men were made of sterner stuff..now only Germans seem to be able to rise to this standard.) There are now electric lights rather than gas, the best of modern stage machinery, and a more eclectic international mix of well-to -do audience members vs the German nobility of 1876....sort of the modern version of the moneyed elite with nothing better to do than spend vast amounts of money to listen to long operas seated on uncomfortable seats. But otherwise the experience is much as Mark Twain and many others describe in their writings.

Bayreuth is a small city about 3 hours from Munich, near Nurnberg, the famous old cultural bastion that was bombed to smithereens by the Allies after it hosted Hitler's religious ceremonies to enshrine National Socialism in the 1930s. Wagner wanted it to be a struggle to get to Bayreuth so that on arrival one concentrated all the more on opera...I accomplished this in part by coming directly from the US with a 11 hour plane trip and 2 train legs. Wagner also wanted experiencing his "music dramas" (he preferred this to the term opera for his revolutionary creations) to occupy your whole day...none of this modern practice of fitting in a concert after work. So, the opera begins at 4pm and ends a little after 10, including 2 one hour intermissions during which you can eat a lovely meal in the festival restaurant (more on that later) or wander around in the nice Wagner park seeing busts of him and his family (interestingly, commissioned from Hitler's favorite sculptor AFTER WW2 in 1955)

You arrive from town by ascending the Green Hill 1 mile to the pictured austere brick-wood Festspielhaus (festival hall). It was hot my first day (90 deg) yet most attendees were in formal or semiformal attire, with very few people under 30. There were mostly Germans, but a number of Brits, Americans, and Japanese as well--pretty much the economic powers minus the Chinese, who are working too hard to squander their money here. There is little to do aside from waiting for the opera to start, allowing me to review the libretto loaded on my IPad so I can follow the German text. At 15, 10, and 5 minutes before the drama begins, 6 brass players from the orchestra play a 5-10 second fanfare taken from that day's opera. Just as in 1876, they play it once at the first warning, twice at the second, and thrice at the third. Amusingly, but deservedly, the massed attendees applaud after each fanfare...the brass players played with Teutonic perfection of intonation and chord voicing, sort of how you would imagine heavenly brass to play (assuming your model of heaven is very organized and regimented). At this point the supplicants enter through prescribed doors and the hall fills quickly, with all seeming to know just where to go and where to sit, and, remarkably, nearly all standing until the rows fill so you do not have to climb over people to get to your seat. Much as a drilled choir, when the row is full, people in your row make eye contact and sit down together. I do not think I have ever experienced anything so German. At precisely 4 pm all doors are secured (bolted?) by the grim grey-coated young women ushers. No late seating! After each act is complete, the auditorium is emptied and bolted shut, and the whole ritual repeats after each intermission.

This same sense of organization is applied to intermission dining. You are encouraged to submit your menu to the restaurant online in advance and to arrive before the opera to find your table, allowing maximum efficiency during the intermission chaos. On arriving at my table (shared with a humorless pharmacist from Passau) the soup and wine were already there, and I was able to consume 3 nice courses in the one hour break without anything seeming rushed. Thus between opera and eating, the 6 hours passes by rapidly.