Barbara Eichner and Guy Houghton, Rose Oil and Pineapples: Julius Cyriax’s Friendship with Wagner and the Early Years of the London Wagner Society

Ever since the inauguration of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, English visitors have been a common sight on the Green Hill. Some patriotic Wagnerians took exception to the growing influx of foreigners to their new national shrine, but Hans von Wolzogen took it upon himself to defend the ‘Anglo-Saxon brothers’ in the Bayreuther Blätter:

Last summer one could see many Anglo-Saxons on the festival hill. Don’t know why the outsiders think they all have to be figures out of cartoons and comic ballets. [...] Admittedly they spoke English, which is an inborn fault, but apart from that they generally behaved like cultivated people who had come from afar to the Bayreuth Festival.

However, in his eagerness to forge an international league of Wagnerians, Wolzogen overlooked the fact that many of the ‘foreign’ visitors were speaking fluent, if slightly rusty, German with Bavarian, Silesian or Saxonian accents. They were part of the sizeable German community in England for whom the pilgrimage to Bayreuth was a key ingredient of their cultural identity.