First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

This chapter explores the tension between mobility and immobility in the performance of Wagner’s works in the late nineteenth century, highlighting how their production beyond Europe (often by touring companies) and the growth of global Wagnerism took place alongside the growth of the Bayreuth enterprise, which increasingly fixed them in place, at least on an imaginative level. The chapter touches on key premiere dates for Wagner’s works beyond Europe, as well as Wagner’s own engagement with projects to present his works globally. It then turns to the touring opera companies that took Wagnerian music drama on the road (or rail, or wave), examining the challenges they faced in doing so.

This chapter is the second of three to consider Puccini’s travels, both for work and leisure. It covers his extensive travels throughout central Europe, primarily throughout Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The author notes that Puccini did not visit Russia, which had been a vital destination for many of his predecessors and indeed some contemporaries. Vienna and Munich were preferred destinations for Puccini, both for business and pleasure, though his reception in the Austrian capital was ambivalent. Budapest gave the composer a warmer welcome. Puccini visited locations around central Europe in order to supervise the performance of his own works (particularly La bohème), or to listen to the works of others – his first trip to Germany was to attend the Bayreuth Festival and hear the works of Wagner. He also keenly followed the career of his contemporary Richard Strauss, attending the premieres of his works in cities around the region. In Vienna, meanwhile, he became friendly with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his father Julius. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Puccini’s travels for health and leisure, and his interest in the technology of travel.

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, the name Bayreuth has stood for the realization of a new kind of musical theater developed by Richard Wagner, which ever since has been recognized as a major contribution to the world’s cultural heritage. For Strauss, both Wagner and Bayreuth were profoundly influential. In his early years, he believed he could see in it the fulfilment of his aesthetic ideals, and accordingly, he sought closeness to the milieu of the idolized “Master.” With increasing maturity, however, it became clear to him that although Wagner was one of the fixed stars in his musical and dramatic thinking, the “Wahnfried ideology” would remain foreign to his nature. As early as his time in Weimar, the “cult of Wagner” seemed to be something alien to Strauss, something he would overcome. In juxtaposition to the formative Bayreuth episode in Strauss’s early years, his two short engagements in 1933–34 take on the dubious appearance of a moral lapse.

This chapter traces the history of European festivals from Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth (with its professed inspiration in the Festival of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens) through the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Avignon, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Festival of Athens and Epidaurus, to the Théâtre des Nations and its successor, Germany’s Theatre der Welt. Examining festival repertoires, it traces an evolution of the representation of difference and the relationship between the international repertoire and the local, settling finally on the 2017 Hamburg edition of Theater der Welt and asking: can an international theatre festival still be a place and a site for community-building and transformation? Examining the supposed ‘global aesthetics’ in evidence in Hamburg’s rigorous deployment of the local, it argues that the political and the aesthetic at festivals necessarily become inextricably entangled.