Bayreuth Festival 2011

The opera festival of annual Richard Wagner festival held in Bayreuth on July 25^th every year, it begins with the performance of the romance Lohengrin. The festival will lasts till August 28^th and will be broadcasted online for the first time this year, 2011.  European cultural festival channel ARTE will put one show every year from the traditional opera music festival.

The Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth is ranked to be at the top as compared to all other opera festivals till date. First show that transmitted online will be Wagner’s Lohengrin directed by Hans Neuenfels on Aug 14, 2011.The composer Wagner (1813-1883) himself put together the idea of this musical opera festival after the 1848 revolution in the German states as a figure of dissent against the opera of the time.

Initially, the festival was launched in 1876, which has grown to 135 years old this year in 2011. Nonetheless the festival is going to hit the total 100 reasons, it seems like it was pretty disturbed  due to the time of recession.

2011 has been a great year for the festival and more is expected in 2012, a total of 320,000 registered tickets requests were made for a total of 53900 available tickets. These requests are increasing in number every year. To overcome this problem for the people from other countries in 2010 everyone can order tickets online and pay by credit card. Tickets sales will start shortly after the 2011 Festival is finished.

Wagner’s revolutionary theatre was specifically built for his monumental music-dramas, which are certainly more than just a normal opera. Wagner had his own term for these he calls them (Gesamthkunstwerk) which means “unified work of art”.

It started on 13 August 1876 with Das Rheingold, as the prelude to the Ring, which followed over the next few days. It was famous, most happening and most talked about thing of the music world then, with Grieg Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler and Saint-Saens in attendance, along with Kaiser Wilhelm I and Ludwig II (Wagner’s long-time patron).

It won’t surprise you that tickets are really scarce and the Bayreuth Festival 2011 could sell out many times over. The interesting part is that applications are in writing and one needs to be on the festival’s mailing least for a number of years and has to keep applying every year to secure tickets some time in future, which is definitely not near future. The festival websites has the details of how to apply for the festival and what are the requirements. It will also give an idea that how long previous applicants have been applying to get their share of tickets.