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Von Bayreuth bis zu Nürnberg

Von Bayreuth bis zu Nürnberg

Last updated on: June 2, 2015 at 1:22 pm by Dan Peterson

Von Bayreuth bis zu Nürnberg 2015-06-02T13:22:07-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Richard Wagner’s “Festival Playhouse” in Bayreuth
(Click to enlarge.)

We spent the morning strolling around Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the place that he designed and built as a permanent venue for the performance of his works and for which he wrote Parzifal as a pseudo-religious consecratory offering.

The Festspielhaus — Mecca for true-believing Wagnerians worldwide, of whom I’ve met a curious handful — sits in a beautiful park, but it’s entirely closed for renovation at the moment.

On the grounds, though, perhaps by way of an attempt at atonement, there is an open-air exhibit on the festival’s and the Wagner family’s legacy of appalling anti-Semitism. And I mean appalling. Jewish musicians were barred from performing there, Jewish singers were ostracized, and many of them either went into exile, disappeared, or were murdered in the concentration camps. Yet, as late as 1975, the English-born Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the composer and, for fifteen years after the death of her husband, director of the festival, professed herself an admirer of Hitler. (She went to her judgment in 1980.)

Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite and a man of low character, but his wife and widow Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt, was even worse. Together, a very distasteful couple. And their children maintained the tradition. At least for the first generation.

I have to admit that I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for someday taking in a performance of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth. I’ve managed to attend the Passionsspiele in Oberammergau three different times, and thought it would be fun to add Bayreuth. (I love Wagner’s music. And the stories.) But maybe not. He’s a loathsome person. And my wife was thoroughly turned off. So I don’t think she’d ever come with me.

Die fränkische Schweiz, or Franconian “Switzerland”
(Click to enlarge. Click again to enlarge further.)

Thus it was that we didn’t listen to Wagnerian music as we drove from Bayreuth through the beautiful “Franconian Switzerland” (as the area has been called since the Romantics named it that in the nineteenth century) — which is beautiful but, well, not really Switzerland.

We just weren’t in the mood.

In Frankish or Franconian “Switzerland”
(Photo by Daniel Arnold)
Click to enlarge. Click again to enlarge further.

And, here in Nuremberg (Nürnberg), we drove directly to the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände — the museum on the grounds where the Nazi Party held its (in)famous rallies, immortalized in Leni Reifenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens. We spent several hours there working our way through a superb exhibit on the rise of the Nazis, the establishment of the Third Reich, the creation of the monumental and grandiose Nazi rally site, and the enormous rallies themselves.

At the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg

Fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

Hitler personally chose the title, “Triumph of the Will.”
A poster for the 1935 film by Leni Riefenstahl

How an entire country could have fallen to such a low level continues to astonish and, frankly, to worry me.

Now, though, having had an exceptionally good meal at a little pizza place nearby, we’re comfortably ensconced in a nice bed and breakfast just outside old city of Nürnberg.

Hitler’s been dead and gone for seventy years.

May we never forget the lessons that he and his monstrous associates represent.

Posted from Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Germany

P.S. It was fun, while at the museum on the rally grounds, to run into President and Sister Stoddard, of the Germany Frankfurt Mission, who were there with some family members visiting from their home in Utah.

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