Bayreuth or bust?

I love Wagner for the human drama. Not the on-stage baying and slaying, but the demands made on us opera-goers. People going to Parsifal in Seattle recently were given a list of dos and don’ts: got to bed early the night before; eat a light meal beforehand; don’t drink alcohol. Queues outside an opera house at 5pm and platefuls of hot food inside mean only one thing: it is staging Wagner – and not just some throat-clearing trifle like The Flying Dutchman either. The Full Monty.

Wagner’s works are wonders – and the most wonderful of all is the Ring cycle, a rambling exploration of love and power, good and evil, life, death and the joys of metalwork that took him 25 years to complete, lasts 16 hours and has generated a host of conflicting exegeses. This summer I went to see the Ring in Bayreuth – in part to try and shed a little more light on what this baggy monster is really about, but also to sample the atmosphere of the world’s most famous music festival.

This was my second complete Ring, but I met an 80-year-old Scot who was on his 15th, most of them consumed in a productive retirement. Next year he was planning to fly to Adelaide for a Ring there. Once bitten, Wagner is a lifelong affliction.

Tickets for Bayreuth are desperately hard to come by, and the way this Scottish Wagnerian had acquired his may be instructive. He had last been to Bayreuth for Lohengrin in 1953 and last year he wrote to Wolfgang Wagner – grandson of the composer, autocratic head of the festival and a fellow octogenarian – to say how lovely it would be if he was able to return for a 50th anniversary visit. Some applicants have to wait more than 10 years for tickets. Eighty-year-olds have no wish to wait that long.

My plane had reached Munich late and I was in danger of missing the start of Rheingold, the brief (two and a half hour) preliminary evening that prepares us for Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The implications of being late were potentially devastating: I had to pick up the ticket half an hour before the performance, and since it covers all four operas there would be an eager crowd of Wagnerites at the returns counter trying to grab my uncollected ticket.

Originally, when I had negotiated with the press office for a Ring-side seat, I gad suggested coming only to the last two of the cycle. The line went strangely quiet and I could hear the thin whistle as the press officer drew his breath. “You only want to come to part of the Ring cycle?” he said incredulously. I hastily backtracked, rearranged my summer and signed up for all four, to be performed over six days (with two so-called Spielfrei days), starting on a Sunday. I was also to take in Lohengrin on the final Saturday as light relief.

The late flight and the fact that the train journey from Munich to Bayreuth was more convoluted than I had anticipated put all this in jeopardy. There was nothing for it but to take a taxi from the airport, through the forests of Bavaria, up to the stolid, provincial town of Bayreuth 200km to the north. “Are you with the army?” the taxi driver asked me – I was sporting a very short haircut and Bayreuth is close to a big military base. I don’t think he had ever heard of Wagner or the opera festival. The ride cost 260 euros, slightly less than half the price of a ticket for the entire Ring, so I guess it was worth it.

Stravinsky was splendidly rude about Bayreuth. “The very atmosphere of the theatre, its design and its setting, seemed lugubrious … The order to devote oneself to contemplation was given by a blast of trumpets. I sat humble and motionless, but at the end of a quarter of an hour I could not bear any more. My limbs were numb and I had to change my position. Crack! Now I had done it! My chair had made a noise which drew down on me the furious scowls of a hundred pairs of eyes … At last the ‘pause’ arrived, and I was rewarded by two sausages and a glass of beer. But hardly had I had time to light a cigarette when the trumpet blast sounded again, demanding another period of contemplation.”

This is a wickedly funny and very accurate account, though I wouldn’t share Stravinsky’s refusal ever to return. Behind the solemnity he saw something that disturbed him – “the principle of putting a work of art on the same level as the sacred and symbolic ritual which constitutes a religious service”. Many of the rituals remain today, but not the feeling of reverence. I expected more Wagnerite trainspotters, more young men with shiny faces looking for meaning, more grail seekers. At times I felt like that cranky English journalist in Robert Altman’s film Nashville, seeking big meanings while everyone else was happy just to listen to the music.

First, though, those rituals. They are numerous and give Bayreuth its distinctive flavour. It is primarily a black-tie affair, though a friend who had been before, mindful of the conservatism of this part of Germany, told me lederhosen would serve just as well. Some festival-goers forgo DJs, but this is a mistake: you’ve waited 10 years, you’ve forked out £400, you may as well look the part.

The imminence of each act is announced by a fanfare – Stravinsky’s “blast of trumpets” – from a group of eight musicians gathered on a balcony about the front door of the house (the foursquare Festspielhaus is exactly that – a house, a bigger version of Wagner’s actual house, Wahnfried, at the other end of town). This brass section play a snatch of the forthcoming act to warn the festival-goers gathered on the patio below to abandon their beer and file in. It is, pace Stravinsky, a wonderful call to arms, a lovely moment.

Most people in the audience remain standing until everyone is seated – necessary because of the vast length of the rows. Wagner designed the Festspielhaus – remember, he did everything: words, music, direction, planned the house, sold the ice-creams – along the lines of a Greek amphitheatre. There are no “class” distinctions between different sections of the house and the views from every seat are fabulous. But I worried about egress in the event of fire and wondered if the peculiar ending of this Ring – Brünnhilde lives, there is no funeral pyre – was a way of keeping the insurance premiums down.

My favourite moment each evening was just before the performance began: everyone was seated and beginning to quieten, the lights started to go down, and all the ushers simultaneously locked the doors to bar latecomers. You can get out if you suddenly feel faint or can’t bear any more of the Norns, but your departure will be difficult, noisy and highly visible. One person did quite 25 minutes into Rheingold. Adrian Boult said two acts of Wagner in an evening was enough for anyone, but this was ridiculous.

The other great Bayreuth tradition is beer and bratwurst in the interval, very Bavarian. Many in the audience – captains of industry on corporate tickets, aged Wagnerites dripping with diamonds – are worth a fortune, But here they are paying three euros for their hot dog. I found this charming. I also found it very fattening. The intervals last about an hour – enough time to consume a staggering volume of beer and bratwurst, not to mention salmon canapés, champagne and chocolate cake. Stravinsky may not have had time to finish a cigarette; I seemed to be able to manage a three-course meal.

Bayreuth was extremely expensive: not just the hotel, which bumps up its prices for the festival, but the associated Wagner fair into which you are drawn. Across the road from the Festspielhaus are stalls selling books, discs and postcards, and the town has at least three shops selling Wagner memorabilia. As you make your nightly pilgrimage, you feel moved to buy relics of the seer, and I came back with handfuls of volumes: George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite; a collection of Wagner’s thoughts on music and drama; Frederic Spott’s history of the festival; Nike Wagner’s lively account of her feuding family. I even came back with a book in German, Der Zweite Tod der Oper, by a delightful Slovenian professor I met called Slavoj Žižek, who had fallen in love with Wagner when he heard Parsifal at the age of 11. “It contained a very important lesson for a pubescent boy,” he told me. “Beware dodgy women.”

Žižek, who has written widely on Hitchcock (as he points out, a great Wagnerian) gave me a quick seminar of Wagner. He argued persuasively that Tristan und Isolde was a comedy in which the protagonists’ desire for death is constantly thwarted. The Ring he saw as a triumph over Valhalla’s “frigid joys”. “What if giving up eternity for the sake of love is the highest ethical act of them all?” he asked rhetorically. A night with Erda would, he implied, be preferable to unnumbered millennia with Fricka.

Žižek, with his anarchic beard, scruffy clothes (no DJ for him) and manic way of walking – rapid steps with his head down, knocking over Bayreuths princes and placemen – was my perfect Wagnerite, mulling over every line of a libretto I quickly realised I should have spent the past three months studying.

I left the deconstruction to Žižek and concentrated on conspicuous consumption. For me, this was really Buy-reuth. The stalls have recordings of every production, and you feel an unquenchable desire to have Furtwängler’s Parsifal, Karajan’s Meistersinger and anything conducted by Böhm. Perfect Wagnerites stand around swapping stories about Melchior and Windgassen, Flagstad and Nilsson. And Hotter of course. Not that it could get much hotter. It was the warmest summer anyone at the festival could recall, and, having survived 16 hours in 100-degree heat (air conditioning would be unthinkable at Bayreuth) in a DJ two sizes too small for me, I now feel ready for anything.

The performances; ah yes, the performances. No one much liked the Jürgen Flimm production – too fussy, too much stage biz, no overarching vision. I wasn’t too taken with it either, but that controversial ending – Brünnhilde did not die!, humanity triumphant as an army of casually dressed young people commandeer the stage – made me cry. I don’t think it was just the fact that the 16 hours were over or the suit was too tight. I felt genuinely moved by this affirmatory conclusion (though one distinguished dramaturge I spoke to said it had fascist overtones).
Evelyn Herlitzius, as Brünnhilde, and Christian Franz, as Siegfried, also get mixed notices. Alan Titus’s Wotan was well received, though you wished he would lighten up a bit – Wotan is a complete disaster as father of the human race and should ideally be played by Tony Hancock, full of bombast and self-pity.

The chorus, though, drawn from all over Germany, was unbelievable: the great set-pieces of Götterdämmerung, where Wagner threw away his music drama theories and reverted to writing old-fashioned grandstanding opera, had immense power.So one and a half cheers. You could tell it wasn’t one of the prize Rings from the reception: the standing ovation only lasted about 25 minutes. The record at Bayreuth is thought to be one and a half hours, for a Parsifal directed by Wolfgang Wagner in the 1980s.

I found a delightful shop near the station called Alles über Richard Wagner which sold books, posters, sculptures and autographs. I’d hoped I might pick up a letter from Wagner, but even a laundry list would cost about 2,500 euros. Instead, I chatted to owner Hanny Kopetz, drank her espressos and buttonholed her steady stream of customers. A young conductor who had come from Florida; an Italian Wagner obsessive who had been waiting 14 years for a ticket; the boss of one of the corporate sponsors who was also a fully paid-up Wagner lover; a gay couple from Berlin, one of whom was in the chorus at the Staatsoper and had sung at Bayreuth the previous year.

I talked to them about what the Ring meant, but didn’t get any coherent answers. I also asked them how they got tickets. The conductor, the boss and the chorus member had friends in the right places and got them quickly (the boss had been coming every year since 1961. The Italian had applied through more conventional channels.

“Ticketing is an even bigger mystery than what the Ring means,” said the singer. Bayreuth gets almost half a million applications for 50,000 tickets. There is enough demand for the five-week festival to run all year. The friends of Bayreuth and Wagner societies around the world get priority, but only those who donate big sums are guaranteed tickets. One person said it was relatively easy to get tickets via the Wagner society of Australia. I am currently setting up a Wagner society in Cameroon.

There is little sign of touting – a problem that had irritated Wagner at the inaugural festival in 1876 when, according to Shaw, “ticket speculators” had made attendance possible for “just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed”. You now have to sign your ticket and, at the door, you may be asked to produce ID so that the signature can be verified.

There are plenty of people in the street beside the Festspielhaus holding placards saying “Ich suche karte”. Here are the earnest young men with shiny faces I was expecting to see, thirtysomethings who have put on DJs in the hope of someone having a spare. I talked to a couple of the hopefuls and it seemed that, if you showed up early (performances start at 4pm, so be there by noon), you could expect to get a ticket one night in three.

There was also evidence, not least in the row in front of me, of ticket sharing: teams of people doing an act or two each – an approach that would greatly appeal to Adrian Boult. The Festspielhaus is surrounded by peaceful gardens, and act-skippers can sit here eating bratwurst and reading their librettos ahead of their next leg.

I have three other disconnected memories of Bayreuth, or Wagnerstadt as it is called on the side of the bus that took festival-goers from my hotel up the hill to the Festspielhaus. First, the marvellous 18th-century opera house, the Markgräfliches Opernhaus, a miraculous 500-seat auditorium with gilded boxes and a painted ceiling that also brought me close to tears, so peaceful and perfect was it. This was the house that first brought Wagner to Bayreuth when he was looking for a home for his works. It was too small for his grandiose purposes, but it must be experienced. Recitals are held here on Spielfrei days – expensive but worth every euro.

Second, Stefan Mickisch’s mid-morning piano transcriptions of the opera that will be heard that night. Götterdämmerung in an hour and a half with all the principal themes plus jokes – in German, of course, so I didn’t really get them. At the end of the work, as he reached the climax, someone’s mobile went off. It was the famous allegretto, Alla turca, from Mozart’s piano sonata K331. I tried to imagine what would happen if a mobile went off in the Festspielhaus: instant immolation for the transgressor, I suspect. Happily, none did in the 20 hours I was locked inside.

Third, Wahnfried (meaning “Peace from delusion”), the spaciou villa Wagner built for himself just down the road from the old opera house and in which he spent the final happy decade of his life with his wife Cosima. To sit in Wagner’s large drawing room, beside the piano he played, surrounded by his library of 2,000-plus books, with sunlight streaming through the tall windows and great Bayreuth performances being plated through speakers, was unforgettable. Wagner’s music is irresistible anywhere; in his own front room it is overwhelming. This was closer to a religious rite than anything at the Festspielhaus.

Wahnfried has many treasures: the desk on which Wagner composed Lohengrin (I fingered it discreetly), the sofa on which he died – shipped from Venice, its striped covering now torn, and behind a glass case to discourage further discreet fingering. There is a photographic record of the history of the festival, but not a single picture of Hitler – Wagner-lover, patron of Bayreuth and close friend of Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred. I asked an attendant about the lacuna, and got some weedy answe and an invitation to email the curator. Hitler, pursuing his own immolation and Liebestod rolled into one, is a significant part of Bayreuth’s history; he can’t just be airbrushed out.

Wagner is buried at the bottom of Wagner’s beautifully kept garden, in a large grave shared with Cosima and shaded by trees. The festival’s management have left wreaths – from the soloists, chorus and orchestra – on the grave, but there are only a few flowers from individual festival-goers, giving the lie to Stravinsky’s aspersions on the excessive religiosity of Bayreuth. People come primarily to hear live music, not to worship a dead composer. There is respect for his wishes, but less blind devotion than I had anticipated.

I had come to worship, though, and when a pine cone fell from a tree beside the house, narrowly missing my head, I had my personal relic. A little piece of Bayreuth, a symbol of my week spent wrestling with the Ring, a memento of Wagner and of Wahnfried. Peace with delusions.

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