She is Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, and her life has been
dominated by the light and shade of his genius. But as a teenager
growing up in Bavaria in the 1950s and ’60s, Eva Wagner-Pasquier went
googly-eyed for an altogether different musical icon: Elvis Presley. She
remembers the excitement he stirred up more than half a century ago
merely by passing through a neighboring town on maneuvers with the U.S.
Army. So last year, joined by her American-born son Antoine, Eva finally
trekked off to Graceland to pay homage to the King. “I’ve always wanted
to go there,” she said, flipping open her cellphone to display the
idealized image of Elvis she uses as wallpaper. “It was superb! We
stayed at the Heartbreak Hotel, of course.”
The trip to Memphis was a lighthearted escape from the burdens of
running a family business like no other. Since 2008, when Eva and her
half-sister Katharina succeeded their father Wolfgang Wagner, they have
directed the famed summer opera festival founded in 1876 by Richard
Wagner and managed by his heirs ever since. In this bicentennial year of
the composer’s birth, Wagner devotees are now setting forth on their
annual pilgrimage to the seat of his still-powerful cultural domain: the
charming city of Bayreuth (pronounced BY-royt), nestled far
from Germany’s urban centers, in the rolling hills of Upper Franconia.
“Wagner without Bayreuth,” observes the cultural historian Frederic
Spotts, “would have been like a country without a capital, a religion
without a church.”
From July 25 through August 28, the faithful will ascend the city’s
famed Green Hill to the orange brick–clad Bayreuth Festival
Theater—known globally as the Festspielhaus. It was built by Wagner himself to present his revolutionary works—among them his four-part Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal—in
the innovative architecture and stagings he felt they required. The
Bayreuth Festival became the first full-fledged music festival of modern
times, the granddaddy of everything from Salzburg and Spoleto to
Bonnaroo, Burning Man and the Newport Jazz Festival. At Bayreuth,
however, only Wagner’s works are presented. After his death in 1883, the
festival and the theater became a hallowed shrine for his followers,
many of whom embraced his ideology of fierce German nationalism, racial
superiority and anti-Semitism. He was idolized by Adolf Hitler, whose
rise was abetted by the Wagner family’s support in the early 1920s.