I'm standing on a lush green hill in Bavaria, sweating in the summer sun, amid a huge crowd of Germans in evening wear: burly men in tuxedos, glamorous women in flowing ball gowns (in my shabby lounge suit, I hope I don't look too out of place). There's a line of limousines, flanked by paparazzi and police. We're all here for the opening of the world's most famous - and certainly strangest - opera festival.
For opera lovers everywhere, the Bayreuth Festival is the Holy Grail - and like the legend of the Holy Grail, it divides music lovers into two rival camps: believers and non-believers. Why? Because this musical marathon is dedicated to Richard Wagner, a composer people either love or hate.
No other composer provokes such extreme reactions as Wagner. His work makes some people swoon. Many others can't stand him. Even people like me who love his music often feel deeply uncomfortable with other aspects of his legacy: his rabid anti-Semitism and his sinister association with the Third Reich.
From my earliest childhood my parents immersed me in classical music. They introduced me to all the great composers, but Wagner was conspicuous by his absence. I could tell they disapproved of him. Of course, that only made me want to seek him out - and when I discovered his emotional music, I loved it. Disturbing and exciting, it was unlike anything I had ever heard.
Many other people share my love of Wagner, which is why tickets to the Bayreuth Festival are so hard to come by. There is only one venue, the Festspielhaus, built by Wagner for the first festival in 1876. With only one performance per day during this month-long jamboree, demand is always sky-high. Fans sometimes have to wait ten years for tickets.
This year I was lucky. A friend of a friend backed out and gave me tickets to three of Wagner's greatest operas: Parsifal, Tannhuis And Tristan and Isolde. Finally! I couldn't wait to see these brilliant, mad operas, at a festival that has been both praised and reviled, like Wagner himself.
When Wagner arrived in Bayreuth in 1870, in his late fifties, he had already spent decades wandering around Europe. He was a superstar and his music was revered, but he was notoriously difficult to work with. Wherever he went, he ran up huge debts and fell out with his wealthy patrons. He wanted his own opera house, where he could do exactly what he wanted.
Bayreuth already had a magnificent opera house, the Markgräfliches Opernhaus, but Wagner did not like it. He found it too small, too opulent. Instead, he built a new building, financed by his greatest fan, the "mad" King Ludwig of Bavaria (famous for his fairytale castles like Neuschwanstein), on the green outskirts of Bayreuth.
Opera houses like Bayreuth's Markgräfliches Opernhaus (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) were pleasure palaces, built for light entertainment. People went there to flirt and gossip - the music was secondary. Wagner wanted opera to be a spiritual experience. His Festspielhaus was like a huge chapel, built for some strange religious ritual. Sitting in the stands, you feel more like a worshipper than a spectator. It's tense and intense - it's also rather creepy.
Performances at the Festspielhaus begin at 4pm each day and usually last until 9pm and 10pm. The simple wooden chairs are packed tightly together. There's not much room to move around. Fortunately, there are two long intermissions, both long enough to have a few drinks or a light meal.
Although everyone dresses up, the atmosphere is rather classless. For every couple drinking champagne and wolfing down fancy snacks, there are many people drinking beer and eating bratwurst. Most of the audience is German, but I also saw a fair number of Brits, Americans, Chinese and Japanese. Despite its strict Teutonic temperament, Wagner's music is revered worldwide.
When Wagner died in 1883, his widow Cosima took over the festival. It has been a family affair ever since, run by Wagner's son Siegfried, then by Siegfried's widow Winifred, then by their sons Wieland and Wolfgang, then by Wolfgang's daughters Eva and Katharina - and finally, to this day, by Katharina alone. With its numerous feuds, the Wagner family saga is like a Teutonic version of Succession against the backdrop of the long, dark shadow of the Holocaust.
The extent of the Wagner family's complicity in those terrible events is difficult to measure. Richard Wagner wrote terrible things about Jews and Judaism, but he worked closely with many Jewish artists (and he died before Hitler was born). Are his operas anti-Semitic? I don't think so, but this remains a matter of heated debate. Wagner's widow Cosima was also an anti-Semite, although she also had many Jewish collaborators.
The festival's most controversial figure was Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred, who took over the Festspiele in 1930 and ran it until 1945. Winifred Wagner, an Englishwoman born in Britain but raised in Germany, had been close to Hitler since the 1920s (there were even rumors that they were lovers). Hitler, an obsessive, lifelong Wagner fan, was a regular at Wahnfried, the elegant villa where Richard Wagner spent his final years and where Winifred and Siegfried raised their children.
After the war, a denazification court banned Winifred from the festival. Her sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, took over and restored the Festspiele's reputation. Wolfgang's daughters, Eva and Katharina, continued where they left off. Today, a moving exhibition outside the Festspielhaus honors all the Jewish artists who suffered under the old regime.
Attending an opera at the Festspielhaus is the highlight of any trip to Bayreuth, but even if you can't get a ticket, there are plenty of other things to see and do. The Wagner family home, Wahnfried, is now an evocative museum, with the great composer buried in the back garden. Further along, through a small gate, is the Hofgarten - the palace gardens that date back to a quieter, gentler era when Bayreuth was the picturesque capital of a tiny state, one of hundreds of tiny states that now make up modern Germany. These gardens are an enchanting mix of wild and formal, woodland and flowerbeds. You could picture Wagner walking through them in search of divine inspiration.
My favorite place to eat is Restaurant Eule, a cozy guest tube down a narrow side street serving hearty, traditional German fare (their sausages and sauerkraut are delicious). Wagner used to eat here, apparently, and it's been a popular hangout for Festspielhaus performers ever since, with signed photos of past and present stars plastered all over the wood-paneled walls. And sure enough, this time I saw the great British soprano Catherine Foster eating here (she's famous in Bayreuth for her performance as Brünnhilde in Wagner's operatic epic, The ring).
For me, this chance sighting summed up what I love about Bayreuth. Despite the festival's posh reputation, this attractive town is not exactly snooty. People buy fruit and vegetables from stalls along the cobbled main street. Children play in the ancient rooms of the old palace. Bayreuth's Baroque architecture is stunning, but the atmosphere of the place is pleasant and unpretentious, more like a prosperous market town.
I completed my Wagnerian odyssey at the Eremitage, a royal retreat a few miles outside the city. A hodgepodge of elaborate follies, spread across a romantic castle park This is where "Mad" King Ludwig stayed when he came to see Wagner's operas. On the horizon you can just make out the outline of the Festspielhaus, which Ludwig financed and Wagner built, now a place of pilgrimage. The Bayreuth Festival has weathered the worst of times - it may even have had a hand in them - but for any music lover it is a remarkable, unmissable event.
Stay there
Maisel's is Bayreuth's local beer, and the old brewery is now a lively meeting place, with a bustling restaurant, several bars and a smart modern hotel. Double rooms from €117 (www.maiselandfriends.com).
Get there
Fly to Munich from London Heathrow, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Manchester with Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.com), or from London Gatwick with EasyJet (www.easyjet.com). From Munich Hauptbahnhof (central station) it is an hour by train to Nuremberg, then another hour to Bayreuth (www.bahn.de). Trains to the city from Munich Airport take 45 minutes.
You can also fly with Lufthansa via Frankfurt from Heathrow, Birmingham or Edinburgh to Nuremberg and then travel by train to Bayreuth (Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof is a 15-minute local metro ride from the airport). Lufthansa operates an efficient, comfortable non-stop shuttle bus service between Munich and Nuremberg airports.
For more information about the Bayreuth Festival, visit www.bayreuther-festspiele.de. For more information about Bayreuth and Germany, visit www.bayreuth-tourismus.de or www.germany.travel.
