Diary – 8 August 2009

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.