If you want to place-drop seriously, Bayreuth weighs in at a couple of tons. It has to be the snootiest place on earth to spend the height of one’s summer, though it’s not immediately obvious why. It’s not the Côte d’Azur nor the Amalfi coast, which offer the perfect climate and geology for beautiful people and brainless pleasures. No, Bayreuth offers only intense heat and high humidity, and as an excruciatingly bourgeois sleepy-town, it is only interested in intellectual stimulations. And the crowd is certainly not beautiful. Bayreuth is an ugly, giant Van de Graaff generator in the middle of nowhere in Bavaria. Yet when it begins to spark with the Festival, which lasts only one month from the end of July to the end of August, it becomes the hadj for everyone who is interested in Wagner. This month Bayreuth makes Walsingham seem like a dip at the local swimming bath.
The launch of the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1876 may have been the most seminal artistic event in the history of mankind. It also happened against all odds, as Wagner was utterly broke, and the few friends he had either did not understand what he was trying to achieve or were not wealthy enough to help, or both. But when it all came together, Wagner was not slow to observe that whereas composers had paid homage to kings, now kings came in homage to the composer. Kaiser Wilhelm was there, and of course the lunatic King Ludwig II (who almost single-handedly financed the project). Emperor Don Pedro of Brazil also attended (he checked into his hotel as ‘Pedro’ and filled in his occupation as ‘Emperor’), as did the King of Württemberg and countless grand dukes and lesser dukes, and a musical constellation of Bruckner, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns and Liszt to boot! Karl Marx would also have made it if there had been a spare hotel room for him and he was able to rest his piles, which had plagued his journey from London to Karlsbad.
It has taken me nearly 30 years to make Bayreuth. First, it’s difficult to get tickets (if it’s difficult even for Vivien Duffield, it’s difficult). Second, it’s well nigh impossible to find a hotel room (if it’s well nigh impossible for Karl Marx, it’s well nigh impossible). Third, it’s obviously a visit best made with a companion who appreciates Wagner and is mad enough to stew in the heat through (at least) The Ring, which lasts for 15 hours. Not easy to find for August. But this year, all these difficulties were overcome: I got my ticket and room, and found companionship not only in a very good Texan friend who, as an opera enthusiast, is obviously a freak from his state; but also Stephen Fry who was coincidentally there, making a film on Wagner. So like three men in a boat, we journeyed down the legendary Rhine of Wagner.
Every day was a ritual, unchanged for 133 years. In our black tie by 3.30 p.m., we would rendezvous to have a drink. Then on the penultimate fanfare of a leitmotif, we would file into the Festspielhaus and scramble across (no middle aisle) to our armless wooden seats (which Mark Twain described as sitting ‘with the dead in the gloom of a tomb’). There is no air-conditioning, and we were sandwiched elbow-to-elbow with 2,500 others to watch and listen and absorb the extraordinary creations of Wagner. At the intervals, we would debate Wagner’s obsession with ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ — the totality of the arts, i.e. the union of music, poetry and stagecraft. We would also desist from clapping until the end of each of the acts, and as Götterdämmerung finished, we applauded the entire orchestra which wore T-shirts and even shorts, as they had played for hours literally underneath the auditorium in oven conditions. Our week ended as a complete Wagner brainwash.
But it was all good intellectual fodder. At dinner, we would argue with animation and excitement, but also perhaps too loudly for the heavy Bavarian air. Invariably, we would get condescending looks from adjacent tables, and on one occasion, a very Germanic diner came over to tell us to shut up. The restaurant manager was slightly embarrassed as they recognised Mr Fry as a bit of a celebrity. This was soon confirmed when he was asked to sign their visitors’ book — although on the first page Stephen turned to, we all noticed Goebbels’s signature, and then a couple of pages later, Himmler’s! (The Führer’s had apparently been torn off.) For a nanosecond, I detected a modest hesitation from Fry’s pen. But he signed, though the Texan and Chinese escaped without making their mark.
Of course there is a stain on Wagner, of anti-Semitism. But it was an English orphan, Winifred (née William), Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who was most obsessed by Hitler and became the lynchpin of the Wagner–Hitler relationship. Hitler loved visiting Wahnfried, the Wagners’ home at Bayreuth. But going beyond that anti-Semitic stain, I can think of no other man in history who had a greater appreciation of our total artistic sensitivities than Wagner. When people, especially ignorant young people, exclaim to me about the ‘genius’ of Michael Jackson, I feel like strapping them up like Alex DeLarge from Clockwork Orange, and subjecting them to Wagner until they understand what real genius is.