We Come to a Sacred Place «

We Come to a Sacred Place

Thursday 30th July 2015

I’ve been here since Saturday in fact, with Prince Dmitri who got tickets after 10 years of trying. We’re at one of the rarest places in the world. At last, at last to enter that priceless house. Reggie Cresswell told me he had been here years ago but I never could believe it. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who’s been, apart from Bernard Levin but I never met him. Now we’re here all week. Three operas we’ve seen and three more from tonight. On Sunday we drove up in evening dress for the first one, which was Lohengrin. The gable of the fly tower looms over the trees as you approach from the town below. It’s no beauty. Fairly grim red brick with some stone relief it sits half way up a hill with a public park on the slope below. In front of us was a huge gleaming Royce which came to a halt at the side of the building. An enlarged German Greatness emerged in floor length Valkyrie draperies in moss green. We followed the Royce into the car park which in fact was husband-driven not chauffed. Then we were there – at the Festspielehaus itself, at Bayreuth, at Wagner’s special theatre, built to his requirements for the performance of his works alone. Before the performance the Greatnesses gather outside in the open air. There’s no foyer space inside. The second day, before Rheingold, there was a sudden shower and you’ve never seen such a rush for cover of priceless frockage. The German women have a certain look: there’s a hint of a shield and burnished helmet whether or not that they actually bear these items. Much shot silk in metallic shades, black greatly favoured for Wagner with the occasional ancient Heidi in yellow flounces. The minute they opened the doors to the theatre we raced in. To get that first glimpse of this place so much heard of and never seen even in picture. The stage area, with the curtain down, is the first thing to strike – ghostly, grey green almost disappearing, somehow a no-go area into which no audience member may wander with this strange great grey roll before it, which is the famous shield, on which so much depends. Then the auditorium itself, with some classical grandeur up high but the floor just bare scuffed boards and the famous hard-backed seats with minimal upholstery for the bum. Everyone stands until the last possible moment and people have to squeeze by to their seats because there are no aisles, you just load in from either side and soon the amphitheatre, for that is what it is, is just packed, a seething mass, there in all that finery, not to endure but to be demanded of, to bend with every fibre of the being, and among them, arriving for Lohengrin, sidling into her seat right in the middle directly in front of us was Mrs Merkel herself, head to toe in silver and attending to her Blackberry at the last minute before Lohengrin was underway.