More History and Culture, with a tip of the hat to the Marx Brothers.

We left Wittenberg and headed south to our next stop in Bayreuth.  The Stellplatz had a great location, only about 10 minutes away from the old town by bicycle.  

The town was quite small and had a pleasant pedestrian walking street lined with shops and cafes. 

The highlight of the old town, from our point of view, was the Margräfliches Opernhaus. It was built from 1744 to 1748, by Margravine Wilhelmine, wife of the Margrave Friedrich III.  She was a great music lover and a musician herself.  The exterior building was built of stone, but the actual opera house was built of wood and painted canvas, and set inside the outer structure. (And you thought it would be nice to have your own band room!)

It was intended as a temporary structure, built just like a stage set inside the outer building. It looks like an ornate Italian palace, but it is really just painted wood with trompe d’oeil paintings on broad canvases everywhere. The whole effect is stunning.

The stage area consisted of four zones of different sizes which gave the impression of distance from the front of the stage. By placing actors at different distances on the stage, you could create giants and monsters. Again, none of this is real, even the curtains are simply paintings.

We asked an attendant if there was any music planned for the evening and were told that there was a Wagner Opera Gala that very night.  We had to buy tickets before 1:00 PM when the ticket office closed, so at 12:50 PM we went rushing off to the ticket office! Success! We would be back.

Famous prior inhabitants of Bayreuth were Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.  We also went to the Wagner Museum, which we found interesting.  (https://www.wagnermuseum.de/en/) Wagner was married to Liszt’s daughter!

The concert, a series of overtures and arias, sung by soloists from all over the world and by a local men’s choir, was excellent.  The orchestra was from Prague.  We suspected the soloists (eight or so) were there to rehearse for the Wagner Festival which was due to take place a couple of weeks hence.

The performance was excellent, with the singers even better than the orchestra. The acoustics were interesting. The wooden hall did not ring like a stone cathedral, and this made for a rather articulate sound – easy to identify individual instruments. Voices projected very well so somebody knew what they were doing.

Note for Foto Phools: Haven’t got a good way to carry the full frame Nikon on the bike, so all of these pictures are from a one inch sensor in the little Sony, mostly at ISO 64k. A LOT of magic software involved here! Amazing how well some of these cleaned up.

Wagner actually hated this hall and built his own theater to better portray his works, a distance away. One of his innovations was to hide the orchestra under the stage so that the audience could not see the musicians and be distracted from the singers on stage.

While the actual festival is held in Wagner’s theatre, we thoroughly enjoyed our concert in the Opera House. 

And the projected thunderstorm held off until we made it back to the camper just after 10 pm, abandoning the crowds watching Germany play in the EU Soccer Tournament on the big screen down town!

We continued our route south and stopped for the night at the Maxlmuhle Wald Restaurant.  (https://maxlmuehle.de) It was a lovely spot beside a river and we enjoyed dinner there. 

We admired the beautiful flowering window boxes, which we then saw all over Bavaria.  In fact, many of the towns, in which we have stopped, have had the most beautiful flower displays along the roads, in roundabouts, in gardens and in the window boxes of the houses.  It is a pleasure to view them.