# Is Bayreuth still what it used to be?



## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

Frequently, in studying the history of the arts and the great artists from around the turn of the century, I notice references to the Bayreuth Festival. It seems that in those days, it was a nigh-essential pilgrimage for anyone who knew anything about great art or music. Composers, painters, writers, patrons, and dilettantes flocked from all over the world to see the Ring Cycle in its natural habitat, and I get the impression of a quasi-sacred, shared experience.

Of course, a lot has happened over the past century-and-a-half, but the Bayreuth Festival still goes on every year (with the notable exception of this year, in which it has been sadly cancelled). But is it still what it used to be? A mecca of artists, intellectuals, revolutionaries and royalty from the far corners of the western world? Or is it something else now—a ritzy, elite festival for wealthy and snobby Wagner heads? Is there anything of that old quasi-mystical feeling of the Bayreuths of yesteryear? Am I totally misreading this? Maybe it never was the way I described it, and it's just the work of writers and historians romanticizing the past. These are things I'm genuinely curious about.

I would love to hear input from some folks who have been to Bayreuth, especially if anyone has been going for several decades. (I don't know if we have anyone in our ranks like that). As you can probably tell from reading this, I'm really quite clueless about Wagner and the reality of the Bayreuth Festival, just what I've read in books and the like... 

Final question, does anyone find this as fascinating as I do, that a festival dedicated to a sole artist and his creations could have risen to such a revered status as the Bayreuth Festival?


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## Ulfilas (Mar 5, 2020)

You might find this article interesting:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/michael-tanner-remembers-the-greatest-musical-experience-of-his-life

This part especially relates to your question:

"One of the things that made the Bayreuth experience exceptional, which is wholly missing today, was the town itself. It was extremely provincial and charming at that time, without a university and lacking the hotels (that are actually conference centres) with which it is now swamped. When you booked tickets for the festival in the 1960s, you also booked accommodation, and a friend and I were allocated a room each in Tannhäuser Strasse 17, behind the Festspielhaus. Anja Silja, early in her career and with waist-long hair, was staying downstairs, and was shockingly informal in clothing and manner. There was an atmosphere, wholly missing nowadays, of friendliness and informality: in the intervals we walked into the area marked 'Only for artists' and queued with the performers for beer and sausages. None of that is an artistic experience, but it indicated what people had really come for, in a way that nothing now does."

We were supposed to be there this year! Waiting to hear from the Festival management.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

Thanks for the article Ulfilas. Sorry that things didn't work out. I know it can't have been easy to make arrangements to get all the way out there from NZ. Hopefully they will allow you a raincheck until next year?

So it seems that what this author is arguing is that no, Bayreuth is not quite what it used to be, that the town has been commercialized, and this takes something essential away from the atmosphere that people once experienced there, which was something much more intimate than today. Unfortunately it appears I must subscribe to finish the article but this looks great. Quite amazing that the author was staying in the same building as Anja Silja (who would have only been 22). It sounds like that kind of thing never happens now and there is much more isolation between performers and attendees...?


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