Travel tips for Bayreuth – Wagner, Wilhelmine, and wheat beer

Small, picturesque, sleepy — for Richard Wagner, Bayreuth was the ideal spot, with nothing to distract him from his music. This is where he wanted to realize his dream of having his own festival theatre. Visiting Bayreuth nowadays, you'll be surprised how much there is to discover, in addition to the composer and his legacy.

There are only five weeks of performances a year in the Festspielhaus, or Festival Theatre — ten Wagner operas authorized by the master himself in repertory. The rest of the time the theatre is vacant. What a luxury! If you can't get a ticket for the festival, you can at least take a guided tour of the theatre. They take place all year long, except during the festival season.

During the guided tour you'll find out all about the theatre's unique acoustics. Wagner himself designed the special shape of the tiered orchestra pit. He also used only wood, which resonates with the sound, for the stage and the auditorium. Audiences sit for hours on hard wooden seats, but they're rewarded with extraordinary acoustical quality.

A tour of Bayreuth's second music theatre, the Margravial Opera House, is also fascinating. This magnificent Baroque theatre has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2012. Wagner originally came to Bayreuth because of this opera house. At the time it had the biggest stage in Europe. However, he decided to build a new one, as the auditorium was too small for his mammoth projects.

The New Palace bears the same imprint as the Margravial Opera House, that of the Margravine Wilhelmine. The sister of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, she married Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Here she had the existing structures redesigned or rebuilt in her own elegant style, now known as Bayreuth Rococo.

Wilhemine also had this summer palace altered to fit the latest fashion, with a Japanese cabinet, music room and many water features in the garden. Every year the Hermitage, brilliantly illuminated, hosts Bayreuth's summer festival, one of the most romantic in Bavaria.

Straight avenues, waterways and fountains along the way - aha, a French garden, connoisseurs might say. But then they would stroll along curved paths, past groves of trees that look as if they stood haphazardly in their surroundings. In the late 18th century, Margrave Alexander turned parts of the French garden into an English-style landscape garden.

At the edge of the Court Garden stands Richard Wagner's first permanent home: he was already over 60 when he moved into Villa Wahnfried with his family in 1874. Now the house is a museum. It exhibits items that bear testimony to the life and works of the composer, who is, by the way, buried in the garden next to his wife Cosima.

No trip to Bayreuth would be complete without a visit to a beer garden. Take Wagner as a role model: he preferred to drink freshly-tapped Weihenstephan wheat beer. His wife Cosima said he overdid it, calling it a “dietary error.” Bayreuth offers you several opportunities to make the same error. Its largest beer garden is the Herzogkeller, which seats 1000 (pictured).

In 2013, to mark the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner's birth, the town of Bayreuth donated this statue of its most famous resident: Wagner, informal and at ease, on a park bench. Passers-by can sit next to him and take a picture. A selfie with Wagner is a great souvenir of Bayreuth and an incentive to come again some day — the next time, with a ticket to the Wagner Festival!