A unique acoustic

Robin Holloway on the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic

There was no space in my report last month, on a first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, for what was in retrospect its most exciting quart d’heure, a privileged informal investigation of the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic.

This, I was kindly permitted to explore one afternoon. Impossible to imagine from the auditorium the precarious peculiarity of this astonishing construction, steeply raked downward from the conductor’s chair at the summit, semi-circles of hell before the air-conditioning denied to the audience was installed to relieve the sweating players (though invisibility allowed them to dress, or undress, casually — something not permitted the visible, sweating spectators). All is as tight and neat below decks as a Man o’ War, with raised platforms to left and right for three harps each, and at the lowest level the timpani and the percussion used so sparingly by this often noisy composer.