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The Bayreuth experience

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Robin Holloway visits the town for the first time and sees seven Wagner operas

If the Festspielhaus recalls a city terminus, Wagner’s custom-built home in a privileged corner of the Hofgarten brings to mind the railway station of a small but ambitious provincial town — Grecian rather than Italianate, ostentatious in its very simplicity; then throwing taste to the wind at the front, with a large sgraffito panel and a grandiose inscription explaining the gnomic name ‘Wahnfried’, then, to the rear, the inscriptionless slab, beneath which repose the genius of the place and his gorgon wife. The interior has totally lost the redolent atmosphere exuded by images from its early days, and by Cosima’s 2,000-page diary wherein she recorded Richard’s every word over breakfast or after dinner. Merely as a museum, however, its contents are endlessly absorbing. Elsewhere in the town is an excellent museum of its history, trades, artefacts, social life, perfect of its kind, that manages to avoid almost wholly anything whatever to do with the Wagner takeover. Instead, a fascinating model of the plan Hitler commissioned for this his ‘lieblingsstadt’ — a layout of imperial Roman megalomania, quite thrilling in its way, that makes Wagner’s by comparison seem like a shrinking violet.

As to the interior of the Festspielhaus, here, too, financial stringency compelled absence of pomp and swagger. Corridors and staircases are distempered in parallel bands of blue, cream, brown à la Pompeii or Berlin; and the auditorium’s single space, unbroken by galleries or boxes, is framed within grand, debased Corinthian columns as might be from an old-time Hollywood epic. Only a quarter of a century or so on, architectural ornament would be declared a crime: a theatre absolutely stark and essential would have been featured in all the histories: bold, ahead of its time — in fact, timeless.