Wahnfried

Listen first to the gravel under your feet. It crunches softly as you walk up the short drive. Ahead stands a calm, pale house with tall windows. Behind you, the traffic of Bayreuth fades into the trees. This is Wahnfried, the home of the composer Richard Wagner. For a building linked to so much noise, so much drama and argument, it feels quiet here.

Wagner came to Bayreuth in the early 1870s with one large idea. He wanted a theatre built only for his own operas, in a small town far from the big capitals. He found that town here in northern Bavaria. While the festival theatre rose on the hill outside town, he also needed a home. Wahnfried was that home. The family moved in during 1874.

The money did not come only from Wagner. His great patron was King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, the young romantic king who later built the fairy-tale castles in the Alps. Ludwig admired Wagner deeply and supported him with royal funds. Look at the bust in front of the house. It shows the king. Wagner placed his patron at the front door, so that every visitor had to pass him first.

Now look up at the facade above the entrance. You will see a line of German text. It explains the strange name of the house. Roughly translated, it says: here, where my wandering thoughts found peace, I name this house Wahnfried. The word joins two ideas. "Wahn" means delusion, illusion, or restless striving. "Fried" comes from the word for peace. So the name means something like peace from illusion. It is an odd and very personal name for a house.

Above the inscription is a large picture made in sgraffito. This is a technique where layers of plaster are scratched away to make an image. The scene shows figures from Germanic myth, the world of Wagner's own operas. It works almost like a manifesto on the wall. Wagner wanted his art to join music, poetry, myth and theatre into one complete experience. Even his front wall says this.

Inside, the heart of the house is the large hall and the salon behind it. Here Wagner played, read aloud, and tried out his music for friends. Musicians, writers and wealthy supporters came to these rooms. Wagner worked on parts of his final opera, Parsifal, while living here. In many ways, this house was the engine room of the Bayreuth Festival. Plans, quarrels and rehearsals all began in these rooms.

Wagner did not die in Bayreuth. He died in Venice in 1883. His body came back to this town by train, and the whole town turned out for the funeral. After his death, his wife Cosima took control. She was the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt. She ran the festival with a firm hand for decades and kept Wahnfried as the centre of the Wagner world. Liszt himself died in Bayreuth, and a small museum in his honour stands close by.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Walk around to the garden behind the house. At the end of the garden you will find the grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner. It is a heavy, flat slab of stone under the trees. There is no name on it. The most famous person in this town lies under a stone with no inscription. Wagner believed everyone already knew who rested here.

And nearby there is a second, much smaller grave. It belongs to Wagner's dog, Russ. Wagner loved his dogs, and he wanted Russ close to him. The little stone carries a short line in German saying that Russ rests and keeps watch here. Many people stand at the great slab and never notice the dog. Children usually find it first.

The story of Wahnfried also has a dark chapter, and the museum does not hide it. In the twentieth century, the house passed to Wagner's son Siegfried and then to Siegfried's widow, Winifred. Winifred was a close friend and supporter of Adolf Hitler. Hitler visited the family often during the festival seasons. The building beside Wahnfried, called the Siegfried Wagner House, was where he stayed. Today that building also tells this part of the story, openly and with care.

Near the end of the Second World War, in April 1945, bombs struck Wahnfried. A large part of the house was destroyed. After the war, American soldiers used the building for some time. The family later rebuilt it, and in the 1970s Wahnfried opened as a museum. As you walk around, you can sometimes sense the difference between the older walls and the rebuilt parts.

The museum later went through a long renovation and expansion, and it reopened in 2015. A new, low modern building now stands in the garden. Its clean glass and simple lines form a clear contrast with the nineteenth-century villa. Inside it, exhibitions cover the history of the festival, its stagings, and its politics. This new building does not try to compete with the old house. It sits quietly to one side.

Beyond the garden wall lies the Hofgarten, the old court garden of the town. It is a wide green park with long paths and old trees. It makes a fine place to sit after the museum. From here, the festival theatre is a walk of a little more than a kilometre to the north, up on the Green Hill. Every summer, people from around the world travel to that hill for the operas Wagner planned in this house.

Before you leave, stand once more on the gravel in front of the villa. Look at the king's bust, then the inscription, then the pale windows. This was a family home, a business office, and a stage for one man's enormous ambition. It also carries a heavy history. As you walk back toward the town, listen. On a summer evening, you may even hear music drifting from an open window somewhere nearby.