Kirsten Paige, Fossils, Fingerprints and the ‘Provisional’ Festspielhaus: Towards a Material History of the Bayreuth Festival

November 2026, Volume 20, Number 3, 48–60.

In the 1870s, as Richard Wagner prepared for the inauguration of his Festspiele in Bayreuth, a small town in rural Franconia, the composer selected the materials required to build his theatre and identified their sources. Some came from local stone quarries, bricks were cast by Bayreuth claymakers, and timber was extracted from the Fichtelgebirge, a Franconian mountain range lying about 28 miles to the east of Bayreuth, famous for its stands of pine and oak. While he probably selected these materials and their easily accessible points of origin to save money (‘the material [must] be reduced to a minimum’, he wrote to Friedrich Feustel in 1872, wary of rising costs and dwindling funds), their local sources nonetheless correlate the theatre’s material properties with the composer’s tendency to dwell on historical features of Bayreuth and the surrounding landscape as essential to his festival’s socio-political ethos, a perspective articulated in his 1873 address marking the laying of the theatre’s foundation stone.