‘This is asking a lot of the buttocks’: my 23-hour Wagner marathon on a rock hard seat in a heatwave

How does it feel to be locked into a venue notorious for its unpadded seating to experience a full-throttle Ring cycle and more? Our critic found out at the 150th anniversary of the mighty Bayreuth festival

Liszt and Bruckner were there from the start. Debussy, Mahler and Puccini all subsequently made the journey. So did writers from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to WEB Du Bois, not to mention choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, anarchist Emma Goldman, British fascist Diana Mosley (wife of Oswald) and – most notoriously and fanatically – Adolf Hitler.

Culturally and politically, Germany’s Bayreuth festival doesn’t so much have baggage as its own industrial-scale luggage hangar. But it’s also prized as the ultimate place to hear Richard Wagner’s operas. One hundred and fifty years after the composer launched the festival with the premiere of his epic Ring cycle, tickets for this summer’s edition sold out within 90 minutes. No mean feat for a theatre with famously uncomfortable seats, no air conditioning and only one man’s music on the menu. The shortest work lasts two-and-a-half hours without a break.

So perhaps it was inevitable that I had mixed feelings about my own first trip. Admittedly, I’ve taught generations of students about Wagner and Bayreuth and have been aware of the theatre’s acoustic – revered among opera-lovers – since I was myself an undergraduate. Of course I seized the opportunity to experience it in situ. The brief was to review six operas across seven days: intensive, but not off the scale for a critic covering a festival. Then I did the maths. That’s almost 23 hours of Wagner, not including intervals, in a single week. During a heatwave.

“They lock you in, you know,” a friend tells me when I mention that I’ll be reviewing there this year. “And it’s done with a real theatrical flourish!” I block out a terrifying image of being imprisoned by an opera cult and focus instead on remembering his tip: borrowing a cushion is vital. Wagner and his architects modelled the auditorium on the ancient Greek amphitheatre, after all. The idea was to promote a communal artistic experience through unbroken rows of seats stretching in a wide arc from one side of the theatre to the other. There are no private boxes, no restricted-view tickets and minimal padding. This fantasy of democratic opera-going asks a lot of the buttocks.

That’s no excuse for wriggling, it seems. “You mustn’t move in the auditorium,” warns one Bayreuth old hand when we get chatting at Nuremberg airport. “I got told off once when I uncrossed my legs.” My heart sinks. Sure enough, I witness a set-to about someone twitching their walking stick. Rustling attracts pointed stares and jabbing fingers. But even an audience this committed to self-policing can’t hold the modern world entirely at bay. Every evening features the clatter of phones falling from laps on to the wooden floor. Several text messages arrive with a ping. There are even a couple of incoming calls.

So much for Wagner’s struggle to create the ideal conditions for music drama. But there’s much at Bayreuth that hasn’t changed. The original orchestra pit, for instance, which is exceptionally deep and almost entirely covered, descending in steps beneath the stage. Wagner and his collaborators intended the design to create what they grandly called a “mystic gulf”: a seamless, uncluttered view of the stage that would draw the audience fully into the action.

One happy by-product is Bayreuth’s unique acoustic, which gives the orchestral sound both a luminous sheen and a beguiling sense of perspective as the low brass and percussion filter through the strings sitting metres above them. Less welcome is the pit’s oppressive heat. When I’m ushered in ahead of a performance one afternoon, the musicians already in their seats are wearing T-shirts and shorts. It’s the only feasible concert attire, I’m told. In one of the few modifications made since Wagner’s time, a tiny air-con unit has been fitted. But the contraption looks like spare parts for a vacuum cleaner and apparently helps only the conductor.

It says something about the opera world that such discomfort is considered worth enduring for the sake of Bayreuth’s sound. Another legacy of Wagner’s desire for an ultra-immersive operatic experience has more doubtful value: unlike most major opera houses in the world today, Bayreuth has no surtitles. Your grasp of poetic 19th-century German isn’t what it could be? You struggle to pick out the words from the average Wagnerian’s full-throttle delivery? You’re even – horror of horrors – new to opera? Tough. You’ll have to work out what’s going on from the staging.

Good luck with that this year. The new “AI Ring” involves a set of constantly shifting projections, behind which the singers stand – sometimes invisible and all wearing the same costume. I spot people wisely reading the libretto before curtain-up. “Did you know there wouldn’t be surtitles?” one despairing American visitor asks me during an interval partway through the second opera. He has seen the Ring before but is totally, furiously lost here. “I’m off to Munich tomorrow,” he fumes. “There’s no point staying to see the rest of this.”

Needless to say, I stay put. Bolt upright, in fact, which seems to be the only way to survive the Ring’s almost 15-hour span in these seats (slumping is fatal), at least if you want to reach Götterdämmerung’s apocalypse with any sensation left in your lower body. It helps that I am as swept up as ever in Wagner’s mad, miraculous marathon of a score, which yes, sounds even more spectacular in this acoustic. There are moments when the orchestral sound glows, and others when it rises from the pit – thrilling in its power – to break over us like a slow-motion wave. But I’m left dry-eyed through the drama’s betrayals and its meet-cutes, the hope, the fury, the usually heartbreaking self-sacrifice of its heroine. Not even this lineup of world-class singers can persuade me to invest in their characters when they’re hidden behind an avalanche of visual dross. There’s no storytelling here, just an extended spot-the-past-production game for Wagner nerds.

At a time when many opera companies are trying to make the art form more broadly inviting, Bayreuth’s determination to cater purely to insiders stands out. Particularly given that the town’s other theatre – the exquisitely preserved 18th-century Margravial Opera House, now a Unesco world heritage site – boasts an interactive museum that has “accessibility” written all over it. When I pop in, I find a crowd enthralled by a scale model of the theatre’s machinery that allows visitors to move scenery and create waves, wind and thunder.

Yet no other opera house besides Wagner’s has such a dependably loyal audience or such a restricted repertory – just 10 of his mature operas. (Perhaps that’s just as well: this year’s exceptional anniversary-year production of the composer’s sprawling earlier opera Rienzi – Hitler’s favourite, no less – attempts to recast it as a contemporary political thriller. Let’s just say my review isn’t wholly positive.) But no wonder, given the tiny number of works on the roster, that most Bayreuth productions since the 1950s have involved the flamboyant re-imaginings and conceptual gambits of Regietheater (allowing a director free rein). And no wonder complaining about stagings is a major festival pastime.

“I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would,” one woman ventures of Jay Scheib’s staging of Parsifal. She has come with a group of friends, she explains, after one of them “found a cheap schloss”. Perhaps staying in a castle would’ve improved matters for me, too. I dislike the production far more than I had expected and come dangerously close to needing to leave the theatre to escape the stomach-turning gore-fest – filmed in closeup – that dominates its two-hour first act. Another day, when I pass Wagner’s grave en route to the theatre, I find two men in their 50s comparing stories about the worst Wagner stagings they’ve seen. “What the hell?” explodes one in accented English, outraged by the other’s report of inappropriate animatronics, before returning to German. “What does that have to do with Wagner?”

You could ask the same thing of Bayreuth’s tackier side. Interval drinks are available from “Richard’s Spritz Bar”. A balloon labelled “Wagner Mania” flies over the box office and a lifesize cutout of the composer – smiling, improbably – is available for red-carpet photos. Elsewhere, there are statues, a walking trail of mini-Wagners on plinths and gold figurines in shop windows. It takes me several days of waiting at traffic lights near the theatre to notice that the green man holds a baton and wears the composer’s floppy hat.

Call it theme-parkification, call it kitsch. Either way, such homegrown attempts to cash in on or send up Wagner’s image make for a surreal contrast to the earnest aesthetic debates on and off stage at Bayreuth. But both ultimately betray the same preoccupation with itself that characterises the festival today: the ongoing internal tussle over what it is, who it’s for – and how to come to terms with its deeply troubled past.

• The Bayreuth festival continues until 26 August