There are still cards. That one would ever be able to pronounce this sentence, three days before the start of the Festival on the Green Hill, seemed just as likely two years ago as Hubert Aiwanger, who, curled up blond, moves into Valhalla as Siegfried. Seven years of waiting for a card was common for mere mortals. And even when advance sales were switched to the world of online trading with strict personalization of the individual tickets, the situation hardly improved. Anyone who did not wait a year in advance at a certain time with the patience of an angel for the right click moment on turbo-fast WiFi was left with nothing. Every ticket sold was a guarantee of prosperity for the city of Bayreuth. Hunger, the need for a nice place to sleep and a little time for the other attractions of Upper Franconia moved in with Wagner fans from all over the world.
In addition to the card miracle, many things are different in the year one after the “big shock”, as cultural advisor Benedikt Stegmayer calls the cancellation of the 2020 Festival. When Germany went into the first lockdown in March, it was immediately clear that there would be no Wagner Festival in the summer. For the first time since 1951. “We should have started rehearsing in April. With people from all over the world. That was unthinkable,” he says.
Behind the Festspielhaus people work in a tent city – it would be too tight inside.
(Photo: Olaf Przybilla)
For his boss Thomas Ebersberger it should have been the first festival as Lord Mayor. As a boy from Bayreuth, born in 1957, he grew up with the festival like a law of nature. Like so many Bayreuthers, his parents had built their house, which is close to “Hüchel”, as the Franconian says, with an extra holiday apartment. Prominent festival guests – and musicians – lived there. The great mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, for example, who died this spring. Also the conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli. This year it is one of the choir singers.
Ebersberger worked in the festival restaurant for twelve years. So in every respect he knows about all the dependencies of his city on what is going on on the hill. In order to save what could be saved, he and others stamped “Bayreuth Summertime” out of the ground in 2020. A cultural program aimed at people from their own region: colorful, low-threshold, cheerful, with music from classical to pop, as well as theater and readings. It will take place again this summer – parallel to the festival.
So they’re back now, but different. Historically different. Less than half of the spectators are allowed into the Festspielhaus, only 911. There won’t be a red carpet at the opening, in the past one would have said: horribile dictu. And the festival choir? Will be transmitted from the rehearsal hall to the Festspielhaus. In the hall outside the house, singers with headphones stand in front of microphones.
Georg Zeppenfeld is someone who knows the difference in hills between the times before and during Corona like no other. He has been heard at the Festival for eleven years, in 2015 as König Marke in Katharina Wagner’s “Tristan”, sometimes in three different roles and productions per season. In the Wagnerian community, he is now considered by many to be the secret favorite actor on the hill. Anyone who wants to know synonyms for “outstanding” can ask the republic’s feature pages in the archive for entries on “Zeppenfeld”. So much unanimity that someone is extraordinary is seldom read.
So meet with Zeppenfeld am Hügel, just behind the new low-rise building, which one would have to describe as a hybrid bookshop toilet kiosk. Well done, but sinfully expensive, so it was a local topic of excitement beforehand, so there was a lot of the old in Bayreuth. So what is singing like in times of Corona? If you crouch on a tree-shaded park bench two meters away from Zeppenfeld, the first answer in the middle of the Bayreuth summer will give you goose bumps. What a bass. Yes, says Zeppenfeld, the Daland in the premiere of the Flying Dutchman, there is already “powdery mildew” on this season, no question about it.
What few on the other side of the hill might believe: In fact, Bayreuth is also seen by artists as a summer holiday camp. It was always like that for Zeppenfeld. You meet, have time for each other, find shelter somewhere in lovely surroundings. Zeppenfeld, which is like last time, currently lives in a holiday home over a double garage in the Bayreuth region and can sing as loud as he wants. “If I step outside the door, I’ll be in the forest in three minutes, where I only meet deer, deer, hopefully no wild boars.” A dream in Franconia.
Bass Georg Zeppenfeld (here as König Marke in Tristan 2015) speaks of the “mildew” that is over this season.
(Photo: Enrico Nawrath / Bayreuth Festival)
But on the hill everything is different this time. On the pilgrimage up, everything seems to be more or less the same, except for a few special structures. Behind the Festspielhaus, however, the area is currently unrecognizable. A tent city has landed there, from a distance it looks as if a wrapping artist has just let off steam in Bayreuth. Administration and operations office and all sorts of other trades work in containers, at least that’s how it can be heard outside, there are strict access restrictions there, of course. The individual productions each form their own bubble, so you can’t “just go over to a colleague and hug him,” says Zeppenfeld. Hence the powdery mildew. The feeling on stage is also different, says Zeppenfeld. When the choir is on stage, it “exerts an unbelievable pull”. And Zeppenfeld would even pay for the orchestra’s seat rehearsals in the restaurant, “phenomenal,” he says. Doesn’t all work this time.
On the other hand: What is it all when you consider that a virus had threatened Zeppenfeld’s profession for months – and Katharina Wagner, the hill boss, was fighting for her life just a few months ago because of a serious illness? Zeppenfeld comes from the south of the Sauerland, which is not a region for operetta-like characters. Zeppenfeld can even hear slight pathos about Wagner: “Katharina has incredible energy, she does it pretty well, I’m somewhat enthusiastic about it.”
So Bayreuth is a sign of hope. The mayor and the tourist office are also satisfied with the emergency program that they have set up. In August 2020 they recorded more German overnight stays than in previous years. Even if the occupancy rate of the beds fell by 15 percent and the festival prices could not be maintained, they resisted, against the catastrophe.
For everyone who wants to benefit from luck in bad luck this year, they have a tip in Bayreuth: It is expected that tickets will always be available for the entire festival. Because there are many international Wagner friends who cannot travel at the last moment because of the pandemic. Their cards are then put back on sale. Whoever buys one, at the end hears, who knows, maybe even Georg Zeppenfeld, how he sings: “What does it help? Patience! The storm is easing; if it raged like this, it won’t last long.”