Required Reading in Riesenheim: Evan Baker hails a monumental new history of the Bayreuth Festival

Review of Oswald Georg Bauer, Die Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele, 2 vols (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2016).

March 2019, Volume 13, Number 1, 86–91.

‘Vollendet das ewige Werk.’ Wotan’s greeting of Valhalla in Das Rheingold is an apt proclamation for this book. The publication of Die Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele is not just a Wagnerian-sized undertaking, but gargantuan in scope, an outstanding achievement in Wagner studies by Oswald Georg Bauer. This comprehensive and scholarly study of the history of the Bayreuth Festival was a huge task, spanning as it does from Richard Wagner’s first ideas of the festival in 1850 up to shortly after Wolfgang Wagner’s retirement in 2008, when he handed over the direction to his daughters Eva and Katharina.