Bayreuth Festival

This is the Nietzsche Podcast.

The year is 1876, and Friedrich Nietzsche has just departed Richard Wagner's inaugural Bayreuth Festival.

Four years previously, Nietzsche had been present when the foundation stone was laid for Wagner's new opera house in Bayreuth.

and Nietzsche had enjoyed a relatively close friendship with Rickard and Cosima Wagner during their time that they spent at Lake Lucerne in Triebschen, which was a short journey from Basel, where Nietzsche was teaching, and therefore it would not be an exaggeration to say that Nietzsche was there throughout the entire gestation period of this festival, which was intended to be the annual gathering of Wagnerians, and located at the center of wagner's cultural movement and it still is by the way they still hold this festival every year in bayreuth wagner's music not only inspired a kind of musical fanaticism we might say but also carried with it a series of political and social ideas Central to Wagnerianism was the sentiment that Germany needed a cultural revival.

And the idea was that this cultural transformation would be affected by the total work of art.

which joins all art forms together as a holistic, all-encompassing force, which could then sort of wrap the audience up within it and lead them to perceive, to recognize the interconnectedness of all the different aspects of the artwork And so too, perhaps within the cultural meaning of the work, recognize the interconnectedness of all of these different aspects of society and culture, the relation of art to religion, to ethics, to politics, and so on and so forth.

Nietzsche had agreed with Wagner that there was a need for a kind of cultural revival, but what he experienced at the Bayreuth Festival was something far more mundane.

Wagner had secured the financing for the festival by courting rich and influential Europeans who were sort of treated like royalty there, and as a matter of fact, some of them were royalty.

My knowledge of the Arthurian legends is somewhat sketchy, but I'd be inclined to place dear Clarence somewhere between the jealous King Mark and Sir Mordred of melancholy memory.

It's a good thing you don't have the responsibility of casting Tristan and Isolde for the Wagner Festival.

I would be more tempted to see Wellman in the part of the sword Excalibur for the pleasure of seeing him thrown into the lake.

Say, not so bad for a boy who got straight Ds in medieval history.

She would relieve him of some of his silliness.

Shortly after this, the great Wagner Festival came on, and Bayreuth was filled with visitors who had read Nietzsche's book and bought excursion tickets to Bayreuth.

Wagner was over his ears in work, an orchestra of three hundred players to manage, new music to arrange, besides the humdrum but necessary work of feeding and housing and caring for the throng.

Of course, he did not do all the work, but the responsibility was his.

Without the guidance of The Golden Bough, I should probably, as the late M. Gaston Paris happily expressed it, still be wandering in the forest of Brocéliande.

During the Bayreuth Festival of 1911, I had frequent opportunities of meeting and discussion with Professor von Schroeder.

I owe to him not only the introduction to his own work, which I found most helpful, but references which have been of the greatest assistance.

For example, my knowledge of Comment les religions orientales and Scheftlowitz's valuable study on fish symbolism, both of which have furnished important links in the chain of evidence, is due to Professor von Schroeder.

The Ring Cycle epic, inspired by Norse myths, was first premiered in that form 150 years ago in Bavaria.

The composer, Richard Wagner, had built a specially designed theater, the Festspielhaus, in the town of Bayreuth to stage his works, and the Bayreuth Festival continues to draw thousands every year.

The festival expressed not only Wagner's musical and theatrical ambitions, but also his entire philosophical and political worldview.

Early audiences included the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who helped Wagner establish the festival.

Welcome to you both.

Um, maybe Mark first.

Why did Wagner found the Bayreuth Festival in this specially built venue? What was his whole vision?

Um, he, he really wanted to dissociate his works from the opera house, the opera houses that existed, the sort of things we'd been hearing about audience behavior and so on, and really that whole world which he saw centered in metropolitan France and Paris.

She would sing in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English.

In 1933, she was invited to sing at the Bayreuth Festival in northern Bavaria, and was chosen to carry the Holy Grail in Wagner's opera Parsifal, so she's doing well.

After that performance, by the way, it is said that a bouquet of crimson roses arrived in her dressing room, tied with a red sash and emblazoned with a swastika.

Oy.