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.

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.