Bayreuth 1876: Triumph, Disillusionment and the Birth of a Legend

On August 13, 1876, an event that was destined to change the history of opera began in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth. On the Green Hill, the Festspielhaus, specially built according to Richard Wagner’s vision, opened, and with it came the first Bayreuth Festival.

This was not simply the premiere of a new opera. Wagner created his own theatre for his work, a special auditorium architecture, an orchestra hidden from the public, and an entirely new principle of theatrical perception. For the first time, the entire Ring of the Nibelung — four music dramas united into a single cycle — was presented as a unified artistic work.

The first cycle took place August 13–17, 1876: August 13 — Das Rheingold, August 14 — Die Walküre, August 16 — Siegfried, and August 17 — Götterdämmerung. Two more complete cycles followed, and the entire first festival ended on August 30, 1876.

Today, Bayreuth seems almost like an eternal part of European musical history. But in August 1876, no one yet knew whether Wagner’s grand vision would become the beginning of a new era or remain a monument to his artistic ambition.

It is especially interesting to read the accounts of those who were there for the first time.

Tchaikovsky and Cui in Bayreuth

Two famous Russian composers came to the first festival not as participants in the musical programme, but as newspaper correspondents. Pyotr Tchaikovsky represented the Moscow newspaper Russkiye Vedomosti, while César Cui represented St. Petersburg Vedomosti. They found themselves in the same city, observed the same events, but saw them in completely different ways.

Cui immediately noticed that Bayreuth had ceased to be an ordinary Bavarian town.

"In all the shop windows you see photographic, lithographic, engraved portraits of Wagner of all periods, appearances, and sizes; numerous medals with Wagner’s image, no fewer busts, pamphlets, librettos, scenes from the "Nibelungs"; views of the theatre, plans of the theatre, Wagner’s house, and so on and so on. In short — everywhere there is only Wagner and the Nibelungs."

The tiny town was literally taken over by the festival. For several weeks, Bayreuth became an international musical capital. Cui, with his customary irony, noted that the inhabitants of Bayreuth seemed to have stopped taking an interest in everything that was happening beyond the town:

"All of Bayreuth is now interested only and exclusively in the "Nibelungs"; there is no talk of anything else. No one concerns themselves with politics. No one is interested in Eastern affairs, no one reads the newspapers. For me, arriving here directly from St. Petersburg, this made the strangest impression. There I constantly heard — Murad, Chernyayev, Serbs, Turks, and here — Fafner, Mime, Sieglinde, Wagner, Hunding. God knows what a place!"

This is perhaps one of the most vivid documents about the festival. In St. Petersburg, people were discussing the Russo-Turkish War and international politics. In Bayreuth, there was only one reality — the reality of Wagner.

August 12: Tchaikovsky Arrives in Bayreuth

Tchaikovsky arrived in Bayreuth on August 12, 1876, one day before the opening of the festival. He was much more serious about what was happening than Cui. He was interested not only in the Ring itself, but also in Wagner’s entire experiment: the new theatre, the hidden orchestra, the darkened auditorium, and the idea of completely immersing the spectator in the stage action.

On the eve of the first performance, Tchaikovsky watched the arrival of distinguished guests and Wagner himself:

"Before my eyes flashed several brilliant uniforms, then came the procession of the musicians of Wagner’s theatre, then the tall, slender figure of Abbot Liszt with his beautiful, characteristically grey head, then, in an elegant carriage, sat a lively little old man with an aquiline nose and thin, mocking lips, which constituted the characteristic feature of the man responsible for this entire cosmopolitan artistic celebration — Richard Wagner."

In this description, Tchaikovsky seems to capture the appearance of the man around whom an entire artistic world had arisen. But very soon this world began to tire him.

Bayreuth, Which Could Not Feed Its Guests

The festival attracted thousands of people to the small town, and Bayreuth proved completely unprepared for such an influx.

Tchaikovsky wrote:

"Every piece of bread, every mug of beer has to be fought for. During the entire period occupied by the first series of performances of Wagner’s tetralogy, food was the principal general interest. People talked much more about steaks, cutlets and potatoes than about Wagner’s music."

But in another letter Tchaikovsky described the situation in even greater detail — and here one can particularly feel how difficult his stay in Bayreuth had become:

"Bayreuth is a tiny little town into which several thousand people have now crowded, cramped for space and inadequately provided for in terms of satisfying their hunger. We rented our apartment long ago and it is very good; as for food, on the first day I barely managed to get dinner in the evening, and yesterday I got lunch only through a fortunate combination of circumstances. In any case, I am not bored, but it can hardly be said that I am enjoying myself, for all my thoughts are directed toward getting away through Vienna to Russia as quickly as possible, which I shall probably do on Thursday."

This letter is especially valuable precisely because of its immediacy.

August 13: Das Rheingold

On August 13, 1876, the first performance of Das Rheingold took place. For Wagner, this was a historic moment: for the first time, his tetralogy received its complete stage realisation in a theatre created specifically for it.

But Tchaikovsky was not dazzled by what was happening. In a private letter, he acknowledged the power of the theatrical experiment, but perceived the musical result much more critically:

"As a theatrical production, this work captivated me through its remarkable stage technique; as music, it is an incredible chaos, in which exceptionally beautiful and striking details occasionally flash forth."

The Theatre That Had Never Existed Before

The Festspielhaus was part of the artistic concept itself. The orchestra was placed in a specially recessed pit and hidden from the audience. There were no traditional boxes dividing the public. The lights were extinguished during the performance, and the spectator was meant to forget the theatre itself and concentrate exclusively on the stage.

Wagner wanted to destroy the conventional model of an operatic evening. The spectator was not meant to watch famous singers or demonstrate their own presence in the theatre, but to become completely immersed in the drama.

This experiment particularly interested Tchaikovsky.

August 17: Götterdämmerung

On August 17, 1876, Thursday, the first performance of Götterdämmerung took place.

It was the final performance of the first cycle. And it was precisely after it that Tchaikovsky felt relief. Having left Bayreuth, he arrived in Vienna and on August 8/20, 1876, wrote to Modest Tchaikovsky, in which he could now speak completely frankly.

His words are one of the most vivid documents about the first Bayreuth Festival:

"Bayreuth has left me with a painful memory, although for my artistic pride many things happened there that were flattering to me. It turned out that I am not nearly as little known in Germany and abroad as I had thought."

This is an important detail: despite all his irritation, Bayreuth also brought Tchaikovsky personal satisfaction. He discovered that he was already well known beyond Russia.

But then the tone of the letter changes sharply:

"The memory is painful because there was indescribable bustle there all the time. Finally, on Thursday, everything was over, and with the last chords of "Götterdämmerung" I felt as though I had been released from captivity."

And then comes one of the most merciless assessments of the Ring ever made by one of Wagner’s contemporaries:

"The "Nibelungs" may be a very great work, but I know one thing for certain: never has anything been as boring and tedious as this drawn-out yarn."

Tchaikovsky continues to list what particularly irritated him:

"The accumulation of the most complex and refined harmonies, the colourlessness of everything sung on stage, the endlessly long dialogues, the pitch darkness in the theatre, the lack of interest and poetry in the plot — all this exhausts the nerves to the utmost degree."

And then he formulates the central question:

"So this is what Wagner’s reform seeks to achieve? Formerly, people tried to delight audiences with music — now they torment and exhaust them."

But even after this he admits:

"Of course, there are wonderful details — but taken as a whole, it is murderously boring!!!"

This is already a completely different Tchaikovsky from the one we hear in his newspaper articles. The public correspondent tries to analyse. The private Tchaikovsky, after four days of Wagner, simply wants to go home.

But the historical significance of Bayreuth was obvious to him:

"The Bayreuth celebration is a lesson for those hardened enemies of art who regard it with arrogant contempt, believing that civilised people should concern themselves with nothing except what brings immediate practical benefit."

And then — words that today sound almost prophetic:

"Whether Wagner is right, having carried devotion to his idea to the utmost extreme, or whether he has gone beyond the limits of the aesthetic balance capable of ensuring the durability of a work of art, whether art will proceed from Wagner’s point of departure still further along the same path, or whether the "Ring of the Nibelung" will mark the point from which a reaction will begin — in any case, something happened at Bayreuth that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will remember well."

Edvard Grieg: Enthusiasm and Doubt

Another view belonged to Edvard Grieg. Grieg came to Bayreuth not simply as a casual guest. He was genuinely fascinated by Wagner and even attended rehearsals, taking such an active interest in the new theatre that he observed the work of the orchestra from the orchestra pit.

His reaction was almost the opposite of Tchaikovsky’s.

Grieg admired the invisible orchestra and the magic of the stage. In materials devoted to his impressions of Bayreuth, his words about:

"the magic of the invisible orchestra and the magnificent scenery."

are quoted.

But at the same time, he experienced a very curious feeling — almost shame. The Norwegian composer saw how the German Wagner was creating a musical world of Scandinavian myths with enormous conviction, and wondered why northern composers themselves had not done the same.

Camille Saint-Saëns: "Chaos"

The French composer attended the second cycle of the Ring and wrote a series of articles from Bayreuth for the French newspaper L’Estafette. In total, he sent seven articles from there between August 19 and 28. And his position was more complex than simply being "for" or "against" Wagner.

Saint-Saëns wrote that he had studied Wagner’s works for many years and that the performances had made a profound impression on him. But he emphasised:

"I was accused of being a Wagnerian. Indeed, for a time I considered myself one. What a mistake…"

And then he essentially explains that studying Wagner and being a Wagnerian are not at all the same thing. It is a very modern idea: one can be deeply impressed by an artist without accepting their entire aesthetic system.

Moreover, before the very first premiere, Saint-Saëns described the situation in the theatre as "chaos". This is especially interesting because today the first Bayreuth Festival is perceived as an almost mythologically perfect act of artistic will, whereas the people inside the project saw a huge number of technical, organisational and performance problems.

Friedrich Nietzsche Was Disappointed

Although Friedrich Nietzsche was not a composer, he cannot be omitted, because he came to Bayreuth as one of Wagner’s most prominent intellectual allies. Before the festival, he had written the enthusiastic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth."

But the real Bayreuth proved disappointing to him.

Nietzsche arrived in Bayreuth as early as July 23, 1876, almost three weeks before the first public performance, in order to attend rehearsals. And even then his impressions were far from enthusiastic.

On July 25, 1876, he wrote to his sister Elisabeth:

"I almost regret having come! For so far everything has been miserable. From Sunday to Monday — a headache; today — exhaustion; I cannot even hold a pen. On Monday I attended the rehearsal, I did not like it at all, and I had to leave."

Later, looking back on the events of 1876, Nietzsche expressed the reason for his disappointment very directly:

"I made a mistake: I came to Bayreuth with an ideal in my soul and was therefore doomed to experience the bitterest disappointment."

And further:

"The predominance of the ugly, the grotesque and the pungently bizarre repelled me."

It was precisely after the festival that his gradual estrangement from Wagner began, which later turned into an open break. He became increasingly irritated by nationalism, the mass cult of Wagner, and what his art was becoming.

Wagner’s Own View

In retrospect, Wagner himself was far from satisfied with the result. The rehearsals were accompanied by conflicts, technical problems and mistakes. At the first production of Rheingold, for example, a whole series of stage mishaps occurred: a singer lost the ring, a stagehand was accidentally visible to the audience together with the scenery, and so on.

Financially, the undertaking proved catastrophic: the first festival ended with an enormous deficit, and the theatre effectively remained dormant for several years afterwards. The official history of the Bayreuth Festival directly calls the first festival a financial disaster.