The operatic festival Richard Wagner founded in 1876 is the oldest and most famous in the world. It is also the most controversial, for it became the cultural showcase of the Third Reich. In this prize-winning and generously-illustrated book - the first to provide a frank and fully rounded history of Bayreuth - Frederic Spotts describes the festival's performances and productions, the Wagner family who have run it, its debasement into 'Hitler's court theatre', and its postwar liberation from its chauvinistic, anti-Semitic past. Provocative and compelling, the book will fascinate all Wagner enthusiasts as well as those interested in European cultural and intellectual history since 1876.
'A vast body of historic data - musical, personal, political, and generally artistic - presented in smooth, witty prose ... Spotts tells in absorbing detail the complex story of the relationship between the Third Reich and Bayreuth ... As reliable a guide to Bayreuth as we shall ever have.' Michael Tanner, 'The New York Times Book Review'
'Bayreuth is not just a spiritual and political history of the Festival but a sustained attempt to explain the place, uniquely emblematic, that it holds, and has always held, in German cultural life.' Richard Law, 'Opera'
'A readable, authoritative account of the Wagner festival that is compelling and chilling, sketching the cult's evolution and surveying its achievements ... Definitive.' Edward Rothstein, 'The New York Times'
'Spotts knows his Wagner as well as any professional musician ... he writes illuminatingly about the political as well as the musical context of the Bayreuth phenomenon.' David Mellor, 'The Daily Telegraph'
'Music history, cultural comment, and such issues as the family's embrace of Nazism are all deftly combined.' 'Time'
Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for the best music book of 1994.
Frederic Spotts is an Associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a former member of the American Foreign Service.
Industry Reviews
A smart, splendid account of the world's most famous - and quirkiest - serious music festival. Less than a century elapsed between the age of Mozart, when musicians were the servants of great princes, and the age of Wagner, who made royalty his servants and idolaters. The crowning act in this unparalleled social role reversal was the erection in the early 1870s of a temple in which to stage the Meister's lengthy music dramas, particularly the four-opera, 19-hour Ring cycle and the "sacred festival play" Parsifal. It was (and still is) a peculiar, wooden barnlike structure on a hill in a drab, sleepy, and otherwise undistinguished provincial German town. Yet for 118 years, the Festspielhaus has hypnotized the world's musical and social aristocracy, who brave the August heat, the uncomfortable seats, and the cramped accommodations to sit in hushed reverence for hours of music - afraid to cough or stir for fear of their neighbors' icy glances. It's all very German, and Spotts, an associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard, does not slight the story's darker side: Bayreuth's symbolic significance as a shrine for German nationalism and, ultimately, fascism and anti-semitism. Richard Wagner died before the festival was a decade old; its management passed to his widow, Cosima, and later to his children and grandchildren. Unsurprisingly, given his own craziness, Wagner spawned a sizeable population of difficult characters and a few genuinely talented artists, in particular his grandson Wolfgang, a superb director who dragged Bayreuth into a new age of theatrical innovation after it had been tarred by the racist brush of the older generation. Spotts decribes them all perceptively and is also good on the unusual acoustics of the theater itself, with its famous hooded orchestra pit. An important, elegantly written, deeply engrossing cultural history of this unique (and uniquely strange) cultural institution. (Kirkus Reviews)
