Bayreuth Festival 2023
2023-07-24 - 2023-08-28 | Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
Bayreuth Festival 2023 presents the superb and essential operatic works of Richard Wagner.

A theatre created for a single composer: Richard Wagner – the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. With an auditorium in which his music unfolds like in no other theatre in the world. With no grandeur, reduced to the essential: to experience his works as a celebration. Connoisseurs, friends, skeptics – they all come to the green hill every summer to explore his legacy, away from the great centres of culture. Since 1876, when he first performed his “Ring des Nibelungen” as a cycle. Richard Wagner: visionary, utopian – his heritage remains alive here. At the most exciting musical theatre festival in the world.

THE FESTIVAL IDEA
“I am genuinely thinking of setting Siegfried to music, only I cannot reconcile myself with the idea of trusting to luck and of having the work performed by the very first best theatre that comes along: on the contrary, I am toying with the boldest of plans […]. According to this plan of mine, I would have a theatre, made of planks, erected here on the spot and have the most suitable singers join me here and arrange everything necessary for this one special occasion, so that I could be certain of an outstanding performance of the opera.”
Richard Wagner to Ernst Benedikt Kietz (1816–1892), 14 September 1850

Richard Wagner, who was born in Leipzig in 1813, collected his first theatre experiences in Magdeburg, Koenigsberg and Riga, where he was the first Kapellmeister from 1837 to 1839. The theatrical building there, called disparagingly “barn” by some musicians, impressed him with its simplicity. The biographer Carl-Friedrich-Glasenapp mentions that Wagner had retrospectively told a musician that three things had remained in his mind: “First of all, the high rising, like an amphitheatre rising parquet, secondly the darkness of the auditorium and third the rather deep lying orchestra. If he ever came to build a theatre according to his wishes, he would consider these three things.”
In 1846, Richard Wagner was appointed Royal Court Kapellmeister of Saxon. Preceding this were the highly successful premières of the Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer. He came into contact with revolutionary currents in Dresden, dealt with anarchist theses and formulated theses in this social environment to change the theatre and the art business. After he had actively participated in the political rebellions in the city in 1849, he had to run away from Germany overnight. In the Swiss exile, he designed his vision of the “Gesamtkunstwerk of the Future” (a synthesis of many individual forms of art) – and sketched for the first time his Festival idea in a letter to E. B. Kietz. On his desk was also a writing from his Dresden years: a prose preliminary study with the title “The Nibelungensaga” (The Song of the Nibelungs), written in 1848.
