FKK Artes Lounge Bayreuth (D)

Bayreuth

Name origin

Baierrute (Middle High German, = clearing/deforestation of the Baiern) --> Beiierriud, Beyerreut, Bayreut

First documented mention

1194 AD

Population

74,000

Area

66.89 km²

Federal state

Bayern

Administrative region

Oberfranken

District

/

Vehicle registration

BT

River

Roter Main

The club FKK Artes is located in Bayreuth-Industriegebiet St. Georgen.

Bayreuth is known worldwide for its marionette theatre Operla, founded in 2008, its tradition as a brewery town, and its scenically charming location between the Fichtelgebirge and the Fränkische Schweiz, close to the Czech border.

And then there's Richard Wagner, the composer-genius who reinvented music entirely in his day and whose massive operatic works amount to the musical equivalent of sexual hysteria. Wagner landed in Bayreuth in 1870; he was toying with the idea of having a festival theatre built here for his works. The city of Bayreuth backed him in this venture and made available to him, outside the city, the undeveloped plot on the Grüner Hügel. At the same time, Wagner acquired a plot at the Hofgarten to build his residence, which he named "Haus Wahnfried" after the Hessian town of Wanfried near Eschwege.

On 13 August 1876, the new opera house saw the world premiere of the complete Ring des Nibelungen, performed over three days plus a preliminary evening. Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Karl Klindworth, Camille Saint-Saëns, Peter Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Lindau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gottfried Semper, as well as Kaiser Wilhelm I, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, and King Karl of Württemberg. King Ludwig II had attended the dress rehearsals from 6 to 9 August and returned to Bayreuth for the third and final performance cycle. Since then — initially with interruptions, and every year without fail since 1951, generally from 25 July to 28 August — the Richard-Wagner-Festspiele take place, dedicated to the master's last ten operas. They are a cultural event of the very highest rank in the music world.

Haus Wahnfried remained in the possession of the Wagner family until 1973. The Wagner clan had resided there for decades, directing the Wagner cult. Since 1976, Haus Wahnfried has housed the Richard-Wagner-Museum.

Richard Wagner's music and the Wagner clan have always been received in highly contradictory ways, both in the music world and in society at large. Even though Wagner's musical genius is beyond dispute, his grandiose works have by no means always been appreciated even by music experts. This is partly due to their theatricality, which — even more than with other operatic works — often borders on the ridiculous, and partly due to their explicit, no less theatrical cult of Germanic mythology and the implicit antisemitism that Richard Wagner, at the very least, harboured. Consequently, Adolf Hitler himself was one of Wagner's most fervent admirers and, from the 1920s onward, was a regular guest at Haus Wahnfried as an intimate of the Wagner clan. While Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1873: "I still think that at some point we shall all sit together in Bayreuth and no longer be able to comprehend how one could bear it anywhere else," Thomas Mann called the town a "place of suggestive delusion," Alban Berg called it "empty madness," and for George Bernhard Shaw, Bayreuth was a "dreadfully dull small town."

Worth seeing in Bayreuth, apart from the Wagner context and the numerous museums, are the Markgräfliches Opernhaus, the Neues Schloss with its Hofgarten, as well as the restored façade of the destroyed Altes Schloss, the Eremitage, the Ordensschloss St. Georgen, the Schloss Colmdorf, the Jagdschloss Thiergarten, the Schloss Birken, the Siegesturm, and the Rollwenzelei with its writer's parlour, as well as the manor estates of the city of Bayreuth. They all bear witness to the rich past of what was once a Franconian county and is today a university town, which received its municipal charter at the beginning of the 13th century and — despite its name sounding so perfectly Bavarian — did not become part of Bayern until 1810.