Krithika Varagur at the Paris Review:
Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, adheres to the pleasure principle. It can take years to get tickets to the Festspielhaus, the purpose-built Festival Theatre on a Green Hill (more of a slope) on the outskirts of town. Those who manage to do so must then sit on hard seats without cushions, which Wagner feared would hurt the acoustics. The operas tend to be epically long and there are no subtitles, in German or otherwise. The opera house itself is so hot that patrons regularly faint. And then there’s the sticky appeal of der Meister himself, whose visionary musical greatness is marred by his unapologetic antisemitism, and later co-opting by Nazism. Wagner, who died in 1883, was a nineteenth-century man—“furrowed by all the century’s features, burdened with all its drives,” per Thomas Mann—but few prefigured twentieth-century German nationalism like he did. Hitler (born in 1889) idolized Wagner and made his music the soundtrack to Nazi rallies.
more here.
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