SONGS AND SOUNDS

AN OPERA HOUSE FOR ONE MAN: RICHARD WAGNER’S BAYREUTH AT 150

ISOLDE WAGNER-KLEIST

September 4, 2026

Richard Wagner wanted more than an opera house. He wanted the right theater, the right acoustics, the right audience, and, ultimately, the right way of experiencing Wagner. One hundred and fifty years after the first Bayreuth Festival opened with fifteen hours of gods, giants, dragons, gold, and family catastrophe, the theater on the Green Hill is still there, but Wagner’s control over what happens inside it has not fared nearly as well. From Adolf Hitler and the postwar reinvention of Bayreuth to Patrice Chéreau and artificial intelligence, the history of the festival has become a history of what happens when an artist builds an institution intended to preserve his vision and leaves it to the future to misunderstand him.

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There are easier ways to put on an opera. You can rent a theater, hire an orchestra, find some singers, sell tickets, and hope that by eleven o’clock everyone has understood roughly what you had in mind. Richard Wagner preferred to build his own theater.

Not just any theater, naturally. It would have to be constructed according to his specifications in a small Bavarian town, devoted to his works, and performed according to his ideas, before an audience prepared to travel there specifically to see them. The orchestra would disappear beneath the stage. The auditorium would go dark. The audience would stop looking at itself. Anything that might distract from Wagner would be removed until, eventually, there was mostly Wagner. It was an insane idea. It worked.

Richard Wagner, tireless promoter of Richard Wagner.

Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813 and died in Venice in 1883, and in the seventy years between, managed to become one of the most consequential, admired, disliked, and argued-over figures in European culture. Composer, conductor, essayist, revolutionary, exile, mythmaker, anti-Semite, enthusiastic spender of other people’s money, and tireless promoter of Richard Wagner, he did not so much write operas as attempt to reinvent what opera could be. Works such as The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Parsifal, and, above all, the four-part Ring pushed music toward new extremes of harmony, scale, and psychological intensity. He called his ideal the Gesamtkunstwerk: the total work of art in which music, poetry, drama, architecture, and spectacle would cease behaving like separate disciplines and submit to a single artistic vision. Wagner’s difficulty was that the world rarely arranged itself according to his vision. He spent much of his life trying to correct this oversight.

This year the Bayreuth Festival turns 150. The first festival opened on August 13, 1876, with Der Ring des Nibelungen: four operas, approximately fifteen hours of music, several gods, some giants, a dragon, a gold shortage, an environmental disaster, and enough family dysfunction to make the House of Atreus seem reasonably well adjusted.

Wagner had been dreaming of his festival for decades. Various cities had been considered before Bayreuth won, partly because its existing opera house had attracted his attention and partly because the town possessed the useful quality of not being anywhere particularly important. The foundation stone of the Festspielhaus was laid in 1872. Money was raised. Money ran out. King Ludwig II intervened. More money ran out. The theater was completed. The festival opened. Everyone important came. The festival lost a fortune. For the next six years the Festspielhaus was mostly silent. This was perhaps an appropriate beginning. Wagner had spent much of his life imagining a revolutionary artwork that would escape the corrupt institutions of bourgeois culture. It was ultimately made possible with the assistance of a king. Revolution is expensive.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria, patron of Wagner and early proof that revolution is expensive.

Bayreuth was never simply an opera festival. Wagner had more ambitious ideas than that. He wanted to redesign the circumstances in which art was received. The Festspielhaus remains a peculiar building because it embodies those instructions. The orchestra is hidden in its famous covered pit. The auditorium rejects the traditional hierarchy of boxes. Darkness suppresses the social spectacle of nineteenth-century theatergoing. You are not there to admire the diamonds on the woman opposite you. There is no woman opposite you. There is Wagner. Long before anyone used words such as “installation,” “immersive,” or “site-specific,” Wagner understood something artists would spend the twentieth century rediscovering: If you cannot control what people think about the work, you can at least control the room in which they think about it. Bayreuth was an artwork designed to contain other artworks. It was also a machine for producing Wagner. Then Wagner died. This should have presented a problem. Instead, the family took over.

Cosima Wagner ran the festival after her husband’s death. Then came their son Siegfried, followed by his widow, Winifred, then the grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang, and eventually Wolfgang’s daughter Katharina, Wagner’s great-granddaughter. One hundred and fifty years after the festival began, there is still a Wagner running Bayreuth.

Cosima inherited the festival and established genealogy as a form of cultural policy.

This is worth considering for a moment. Imagine if Pablo Picasso’s descendants still determined the conditions under which Picasso could be shown. Imagine if Sigmund Freud’s great-grandchildren controlled psychoanalysis. Imagine if every production of Hamlet ultimately required consultation with someone called Shakespeare. Bayreuth managed to turn genealogy into cultural policy. It also turned opera-going into pilgrimage.

Every summer people travel to a modest Franconian town and climb the Green Hill. They dress properly. They sit through very long performances. They spend very long intervals discussing the performances. They compare conductors. They complain about singers. They complain about productions. They complain about the heat. They complain about the difficulty of obtaining tickets. They return the following year.

This is how you know a cult has become an institution. The inconvenience is essential. If Bayreuth were in Berlin, Vienna, or Munich, something would be lost. You cannot accidentally end up there after lunch. You have to mean it. The journey removes Wagner from everyday life and puts him somewhere else, on a hill, in summer, surrounded by people who have all decided that listening to Parsifal for five hours is a perfectly reasonable way to spend an afternoon.

The trouble with pilgrimage, however, is that sooner or later someone asks what exactly everyone has come to worship. With Wagner, this question gets unpleasant quickly. Wagner was an anti-Semite. Not secretly, not occasionally, and not merely according to standards imposed retrospectively upon him. He wrote about it, published it, returned to it. The problem cannot be tidied away as an embarrassing personal defect unrelated to the work.

A certain Austrian visits the Wagner family, demonstrating how quickly cultural pilgrimage can become something considerably less innocent.

Then there is the Wagner family. Under Cosima, Bayreuth became increasingly entangled with German nationalism and racial ideology. Later, Winifred Wagner became close to Adolf Hitler. Hitler adored Wagner, adored Bayreuth, and was welcomed into the family circle. Photographs of him at Wahnfried, Wagner’s Bayreuth villa, possess the disturbing casualness of family snapshots: Hitler arriving, Hitler chatting, Hitler among the children. Wagner himself had been dead for half a century when the Nazis came to power, which makes assigning historical responsibility easy only for people who enjoy easy historical responsibility. He did not write Nazi operas. He did, however, leave behind a mythology remarkably available to people looking for one.

After 1945, Bayreuth faced an almost impossible problem. How do you reopen Wagner’s sacred theater after Wagner has been absorbed into the visual and ideological language of the Third Reich? The answer, surprisingly, was modern art. When the festival reopened in 1951, Wagner’s grandson Wieland began removing things. Gone were much of the picturesque scenery, medieval clutter, heroic forests, helmets, rocks, and accumulated Germanic furniture. Wieland’s stages became abstract. Light, darkness, circles, and bodies replaced illustration.

Wagner’s gods discover that industrial capitalism has not ended well.

The result was not an attempt to recover some innocent Wagner from before Hitler. Such a Wagner no longer existed, if he ever had. Instead, Bayreuth discovered an extraordinary institutional principle: To preserve Wagner, it would periodically have to destroy Wagner. This became the festival’s great trick. The most famous destruction arrived in 1976, for Bayreuth’s centenary, when Patrice Chéreau directed the Ring under Pierre Boulez. Chéreau looked at Wagner’s gods, dwarfs, contracts, exploitation, and catastrophes and noticed something rather obvious: This was not really a story about people wearing horned helmets. His Ring took place in the world of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The gods became something like the ruling class. The Nibelungs became workers. Valhalla acquired the atmosphere of property.

Wagner’s mythology suddenly found itself living in Wagner’s century. The audience was furious. This was useful. The production eventually became legendary, precisely because Chéreau demonstrated that Wagner could survive being disobeyed. In fact, Wagner seemed to become more interesting the less obediently he was treated. Here lies the wonderful failure at the center of Bayreuth. Wagner built the festival because he wanted control. He wanted the correct theater, the correct acoustics, the correct relationship between stage and audience, the correct performance, and, hovering over all of this, the possibility of the correct Wagner. Instead, he created one of the world’s most elaborate machines for disagreeing with a dead man. Every generation gets another turn.

Marxists find capitalism. Psychoanalysts find incest. Feminists find patriarchy. Environmentalists find ecological catastrophe. Directors find swimming pools, laboratories, petrol stations, and whatever else happened to be available in the rehearsal room. Wagner continues to protest from beyond the grave. Nobody listens.

Valhalla goes up in smoke, along with a century of Wagnerian stage directions.

Which brings us rather beautifully to 2026. For the 150th anniversary, Bayreuth has returned to the Ring, except that this time another Wagnerian personality has entered the building: artificial intelligence. The anniversary production incorporates imagery created from the enormous visual and historical sediment that has accumulated around the Ring: previous productions, documents, pictures, interpretations, and cultural associations. The imagery can change from performance to performance. This is almost too perfect. Wagner constructed Bayreuth in order to control how Wagner looked. A century and a half later, a computer has been fed 150 years of people ignoring his instructions and is, on its own, producing new Wagner imagery. The author has become training data.

There are other signs that the fortress has become porous. The anniversary program confronts the Jewish singers and artists who were excluded, persecuted, or murdered during the darkest chapters of Bayreuth’s history. And then, because 150 years is a long time and institutions eventually develop a sense of humor whether they intend to or not, the Festspielhaus is also opening itself toward the forecourt for an electronic music event involving Wagner motifs. So here we are: Wagner, Hitler, Boulez, Chéreau, historical reckoning, artificial intelligence.

And the building is still standing. There is something almost touching about this. The Ring itself, after all, is an enormous story about the failure of control. Everyone wants the thing that will finally allow him to determine what everyone else does. Alberich wants it. Wotan wants it. Gods, giants, and humans become trapped in contracts, debts, inheritances, property disputes, and disastrous attempts to secure the future. Eventually almost everything burns.

Wagner seems to have understood the impossibility of control perfectly well when he was writing about gods and rather less well when organizing opera festivals. Bayreuth was his attempt to defeat impermanence. Performances disappear. Singers age. Conductors die. Audiences forget. Wagner wanted something more durable. He wanted architecture. Ritual. Institution. Family. A place to which people would return. And on this point he succeeded beyond anything that could reasonably have been expected. The remarkable thing about Bayreuth at 150, however, is not that it has preserved Wagner. It hasn’t.

The Wagner encountered on the Green Hill in 2026 would probably horrify the man who opened the Festspielhaus in 1876. During the intervening century and a half, his work has been dragged through nationalism, fascism, exile, reconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction, environmentalism, and now artificial intelligence. It has been worshipped, appropriated, contaminated, denounced, rehabilitated, deconstructed, and denounced again. Somehow it remains alive.

The total work of art, now with enough personnel to constitute a small republic.

Perhaps this is because Bayreuth eventually learned something its founder never quite could. An artwork that requires obedience is already dead. The interesting ones survive misunderstanding. Museums often imagine preservation as the prevention of change. Bayreuth offers the opposite proposition. Perhaps culture survives because people are allowed to fight over it. Wagner remains troublesome because Wagner remains available: magnificent, ridiculous, politically poisonous, musically overwhelming, and permanently resistant to being settled. Every summer another audience climbs the same hill, carrying another century’s anxieties. The building awaits. Wagner wanted a theater in which the future would finally understand him correctly. Instead, he built a theater in which the future could misunderstand him forever.

Isolde Wagner-Kleist (b. 1968 in Munich) is a great-great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner. She studied musicology and philosophy in Vienna and worked briefly at the Bayreuth Festival before a disagreement with the family in 1997 concerning the appropriate duration of “Parsifal” resulted in what she describes as “a mutually satisfactory exile.” She has not attended the festival since 2004, although she continues to receive the family Christmas letter.

Cover image: The Festspielhaus: an opera house, a pilgrimage site, and a machine for disagreeing with a dead man.