Set aside the associations with the Third Reich, they say, and allow this enthralling music and elemental drama to touch your soul. The payoff, his admirers feel, is a direct encounter with the sublime. This year, for some 58,000 tickets offered for the five-week festival, there were 414,000 applications from 87 countries. Yet Wagner loyalists have not wavered, queuing up for a decade and more to attend. By 1951, the festival was up and running again under the direction of Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, who had reinvented himself as a post-Nazi opera visionary and rebranded Bayreuth as a haven for avant-garde productions that have periodically offended traditionalists. Wahnfried-the stately home and gravesite that is the Wagners’ equivalent to Graceland-was 45 percent destroyed in the first of four bombing raids that all somehow spared the Festspielhaus. In the same week Eva Wagner was born in a neighboring village in April 1945, Allied warplanes leveled two-thirds of Bayreuth. Through all the cataclysms of modern German history, however, the festival has endured. He was idolized by Adolf Hitler, whose rise was abetted by the Wagner family’s support in the early 1920s. ![]() After his death in 1883, the festival and the theater became a hallowed shrine for his followers, many of whom embraced his ideology of fierce German nationalism, racial superiority and anti-Semitism. ![]() At Bayreuth, however, only Wagner’s works are presented. The Bayreuth Festival became the first full-fledged music festival of modern times, the granddaddy of everything from Salzburg and Spoleto to Bonnaroo, Burning Man and the Newport Jazz Festival. It was built by Wagner himself to present his revolutionary works-among them his four-part Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal-in the innovative architecture and stagings he felt they required. “Wagner without Bayreuth,” observes the cultural historian Frederic Spotts, “would have been like a country without a capital, a religion without a church.”įrom July 25 through August 28, the faithful will ascend the city’s famed Green Hill to the orange brick–clad Bayreuth Festival Theater-known globally as the Festspielhaus. In this bicentennial year of the composer’s birth, Wagner devotees are now setting forth on their annual pilgrimage to the seat of his still-powerful cultural domain: the charming city of Bayreuth (pronounced BY-royt), nestled far from Germany’s urban centers, in the rolling hills of Upper Franconia. Since 2008, when Eva and her half-sister Katharina succeeded their father Wolfgang Wagner, they have directed the famed summer opera festival founded in 1876 by Richard Wagner and managed by his heirs ever since. The trip to Memphis was a lighthearted escape from the burdens of running a family business like no other. “It was superb! We stayed at the Heartbreak Hotel, of course.” “I’ve always wanted to go there,” she said, flipping open her cellphone to display the idealized image of Elvis she uses as wallpaper. ![]() So last year, joined by her American-born son Antoine, Eva finally trekked off to Graceland to pay homage to the King. She remembers the excitement he stirred up more than half a century ago merely by passing through a neighboring town on maneuvers with the U.S. But as a teenager growing up in Bavaria in the 1950s and ’60s, Eva Wagner-Pasquier went googly-eyed for an altogether different musical icon: Elvis Presley. She is Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, and her life has been dominated by the light and shade of his genius.
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