The festival city of Bayreuth in Upper Franconia (Oberfranken) is relatively quiet most of the year until the Richard Wagner Festival settles in for 30 days every summer. Bayreuth features a wealth of impressive baroque and rococo architecture. Though he only lived in the town for a relatively short period towards the end of his life, Richard Wagner casts a long shadow over BAYREUTH. For most of the world Bayreuth and Wagner are simply synonymous, as though outside the extraordinary annual social and musical spectacle known as the Festspiele, no other Bayreuth existed. The peaceful life of the small Franconian town ended in 1876, when the Richard Wagner Festival began. By 1873 Wagner had already moved into his home, which he called "Wahnfried". The town councilors rightly expected the Festival to stimulate and develop the town. After the death of Wagner, the Festival continued under the direction of his widow, Cosima. High-ranking musicians and writers, but also more and more prominent people from business and politics among the visitors, were the reason that the Bayreuth festival was firmly established in the cultural and social calendar of Europe from 1888 onwards.
Yet the town you actually see owes to the passions of another remarkable individual, the Markgräfin Wilhelmine (1709–58). The eldest daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and the sister of Frederick the Great, Wilhelmine was groomed by her Hanoverian mother for marriage into the British royal family. But the plans were thwarted by her father, who – partly for political reasons, partly out of loathing for his wife's British relatives – married her off instead to a minor royal and distant relative, Friedrich von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, the future margrave of the insignificant Franconian micro-state of the same name. Despite its unpromising start, the marriage was a happy one, and with her aspirations to enter the glittering world of the London court thwarted, the intelligent and educated Wilhelmine decided instead to bring worldly sophistication to Bayreuth, embarking on an extravagant building program whose fruits still grace the town today. Wagner's Festspielhaus may have a superb acoustic, but it's notoriously spartan; Wilhelmine's opera house, on the other hand, is a Baroque gem. Her Baroque quarter of town wraps itself around the eastern and southern sides of the diminutive Altstadt all small and compact enough to be explored easily on foot. The extensive Hofgarten stretches east from the center to Wagner's Villa Wahnfried, while his Festspielhaus is on high ground north of the center. It's also worth venturing out of town to see Wilhelmine's summer pleasure palace, Eremitage.
Bayreuth is quite the paparazzi hotspot during the Festspiele in late July and August, when the most surprising celebrities can be seen affecting an interest in the Ring. For the rest of the year, it is a quiet and stolidly respectable sort of place, but Wilhelmine's magic ensures it's worth a stay of a day or two.
