House Wahnfried

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House Wahnfried
Rear view
House Wahnfried 1875

The Wahnfried House (also: Villa Wahnfried ) on the edge of the Bayreuth Hofgarten is Richard Wagner's former home from 1874 to 1883.

History and description

The name of the house is made understandable by the saying engraved on its front:

"Here where my imagination found peace - Wahnfried - let me name this house."

- Richard Wagner

According to a diary entry by Cosima Wagner from May 4, 1874, the Hessian town of Wanfried near Eschwege was the inspiration for the name of the house:

“… In Hesse there would be a place Wahnfried, it had touched him (Wagner) so mystically, this combination of the two words, and like the poem by Goethe, what was only spoken to the wise, only the sensible would suspect what we understand by."

- Cosima Wagner in The Diaries

After Wagner had not found a suitable house in Bayreuth, he chose a meadow plot on Rennweg (today Richard-Wagner-Straße ) directly on the Hofgarten as a building site for his future home. On January 6, 1872, the royal court secretary Lorenz von Düfflipp informed Wagner that the king had authorized him to gradually pay Wagner up to 25,000 thalers to help him purchase land and build houses. Wagner acquired the building site on February 1, 1872 for 12,000 guilders.

Richard Wagner in Wahnfried

The building erected by master builder Carl Wölfel based on the ideas of Richard Wagner and modified plans by Berlin architect Wilhelm Neumann was thus largely a gift from King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose youthful bust is placed in front of the house. The construction and furnishing work was much more slow than planned and became a source of constant annoyance for Wagner, which is why he only called the house "annoyance home" at the time. Construction began in 1872 and was completed in 1874. That year Wagner moved in with his wife Cosima and their children Daniela , Blandine , Isolde , Eva and Siegfried on April 28th. In the Wahnfried house, often referred to as "Villa Wahnfried", he completed the opera Götterdämmerung and worked on Parsifal . In the last years of his life, Wagner suffered a lot from the harsh Bayreuth climate, especially in winter, which prompted him to escape it more and more and to spend months in Italy with the whole family. During his last stay (from September 1882 to February 1883) he died on February 13, 1883 in Venice. His body was transferred to Bayreuth, where he was buried in a crypt in the garden of the Wahnfried house on February 18, 1883. His wife Cosima was cremated in Coburg after her death at the age of 93 on April 1, 1930 and her urn was buried in the south side of the burial mound.

In 1894, Siegfried Wagner had the eastern outbuilding converted into his own residential building in the style of a small villa in Italianizing neo-renaissance style, which was extended by Hans Reissinger in 1932 to include a flat building on the north side and connected to Wahnfried by a connecting wing on the south-west side. After Siegfried Wagner's death on August 4, 1930, it served his widow Winifred as a guest house, including for Arturo Toscanini (1931) and Richard Strauss (1933/34).

Siegfried Wagner House

On October 1, 1923, Adolf Hitler entered the property for the first time, Winifred Wagner introduced him to the Wahnfried house and the Wahnfried circle around Houston Stewart Chamberlain . During the festival from 1936 to 1938 he lived in the Siegfried Wagner House, which was soon only called the “Führerbau”. In the music room there, he hosted “artist receptions” after the premieres. At the end of the Second World War , the building was confiscated by the Americans , who first set up an interrogation room and later an officers' club and a brothel . In 1957 Winifred Wagner moved into the Siegfried Wagner House. Today the administration rooms of the Richard Wagner Museum with the National Archives of the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth are located there.

On April 5, 1945, Wahnfried was half destroyed in one of the US air raids on Bayreuth when an aerial bomb hit the hall from the south, and the hall, including the rotunda and the floor above, as well as the southeastern part of the house were blown away. All of the original interior and furniture were destroyed, but not the library, which had just been relocated, and paintings and documents from the Richard Wagner family archive with Wagner's scores. After Bayreuth was occupied by American troops on April 14, 1945, the Siegfried Wagner House, which had been preserved and confiscated, served as the headquarters and officers' mess of the US Army until 1957. In 1949, Wahnfried was restored soberly and incompletely by bricking up the open sides according to a design by Hans Reissinger, in order to make it usable for the family's residential purposes. The undamaged entrance facade and the west side were preserved, while the remaining and destroyed part of the house was modernized and only a few elements of the original room layout were preserved. In this condition, the house was lived in by him and his family for about 20 years until after Wieland Wagner's death in 1966.

The house was owned by the Wagner family until 1973. After the withdrawal of the American troops in 1957, Winifred Wagner received the Siegfried Wagner House back. She returned from her exile in Oberwarmensteinach in the Fichtelgebirge and lived there until her death in 1980. With the establishment of the Richard Wagner Foundation on May 1, 1973, Wahnfried became the property of the City of Bayreuth by means of a deed of gift dated April 24, 1973 which in turn made it available to the Richard Wagner Foundation as a permanent loan for museum use.

From 1972 to 1976 the house and park were restored to their original form. The Richard Wagner Museum has been located in Haus Wahnfried since 1976, with a permanent exhibition on Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival . A national archive and the research facility of the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth are affiliated .

Construction and division

The outer walls of the three-wing building consist of sandstone blocks with brickwork inside, which is typical of the area. What is remarkable in the interior design of the rooms is - contrary to all contemporary allegations of extravagance - Wagner's express rejection of any luxury, especially in the choice of materials. The floor plan of the house with basement, ground floor, upper floor and mezzanine on a floor space of around 21 × 17 meters is reminiscent of the northern Italian Renaissance villas in the style of Andrea Palladio , as is the disposition of the facades and the rotunda apse that surrounds the The living and library room ("hall") closes off on the south side of the garden.

Large hall with library

The ground floor of Wahnfried consists of two large, representative rooms, the hall and the great hall. In the hall, Richard Wagner's original library, consisting of approx. 2500 hand-bindings by the Bayreuth bookbinder Christian Senfft , and the Centennial D concert grand from 1876, a gift from William Steinway to Wagner on the occasion of the opening of the Festival Hall, are on display. This grand piano is kept ready to play for concerts; Despite its age, this is easily possible due to its modern construction. Wagner's father-in-law Franz Liszt liked this grand piano very much - Liszt also got a Centennial D concert grand piano. Smaller ones - adjacent rooms were originally dining rooms, Cosima's salon and guest rooms. The private rooms and the gallery above the hall are accessible and connected via a simple wooden staircase from the foyer: the former children's rooms as well as Richard and Cosima's bedroom and study. Richard Wagner also worked in the large hall on the ground floor, which generally served as a living room.

Between the two floors there is a lower one with bathrooms and dressing rooms. This mezzanine floor covers about a quarter of the floor space (salon and hall are continuous with their greater ceiling height). It is architecturally hidden in that it cannot be accessed from the inside through the above-mentioned main staircase and has no windows to the front and back. It is accessible through the two continuous side stairs as well as from above through individual stairs from the respective bedrooms and children's rooms. All of the windows on the mezzanine are located on the flanks of the house, which have been neglected due to their location.

The utility rooms were all in the basement.

Richard Wagner Museum

The Wahnfried House has housed the Richard Wagner Museum since 1976. Sven Friedrich has been the museum director since 1993.

prehistory

The forerunner of the Richard Wagner Museum was the Richard Wagner Memorial in the north wing ("Damenflügel") of the New Bayreuth Palace with the estate of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp , author of the first and most extensive Wagner biography. His foster daughter, the “ardent National Socialist ” Helena Wallem, had set up a Glasenapp memorial room and a biographical Richard Wagner room for the reopening of the festival after the First World War in 1924, initially in her private apartment.

Richard Wagner Memorial in the New Palace

In 1927 Wallem's collection was acquired by the city of Bayreuth. On the orders of Adolf Hitler , the Richard Wagner memorial was set up under her direction in the 1930s in the ladies wing of the New Palace (later on Glasenappweg). Pictures and documents on Wagner's life and work were shown in three halls, an extensive library and a record collection as well as several thousand letters and other documents from and to Wagner's family and their surroundings were added later. After the Second World War , Joachim Bergfeld, a former employee of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, took over management.

With the establishment of the Richard Wagner Foundation in 1973, the holdings of the memorial and the holdings of the Richard Wagner family archive (Wahnfried archive), which is managed by Otto and Gertrud Strobel, were merged. The Richard Wagner family archive contained the entire estate of Richard and Cosima Wagner and the artistic estate of Siegfried Wagner. In 1973 Manfred Eger became head of the Richard Wagner Memorial, who transferred its holdings to the Richard Wagner Museum in the Wahnfried House and was in charge of it until 1993.

Richard Wagner Museum in the Wahnfried House

Rear view during the renovation work in 2014

On the occasion of Richard Wagner's 200th birthday in 2013, the museum was structurally renovated, expanded and redesigned. An additional building on the property was built according to a design by the architect Volker Staab . During the renovation, between 2012 and 2015, there was the opportunity to find out about the status of the construction project at the opposite info point "bau.schau.stelle". According to the cost plan from December 2011, the start of the construction work was delayed, so that the renovation did not begin until 2013. At the beginning of March 2012, several trees in the Wahnfriedpark were felled as preliminary construction work, although the financing of the construction work was not yet secured at that time. For this, the city disregarded the tree protection ordinance and the bird protection regulations or abolished them without further ado.

Iris Wagner , a great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, applied for an injunction against the extension in June 2012. She argued that a planned “outdoor café” next to the crypt would be “a severe violation of Wagner's will and an aesthetic imposition”. The construction project decided by the city council was also controversial among the local population. At the end of June 2012, a majority of the city council approved a compromise solution, which provided for a relocation of the café, but not, as suggested by the building committee, foregoing an underground connecting tract between the buildings and an elevator.

In July 2015, the museum reopened after a three-year closure. It includes the Wahnfried House, the Siegfried Wagner House and a new building built according to plans by the Berlin architects Volker Staab.

gallery

  • Showroom in the upper building

  • Balustrade with adjoining exhibition rooms

  • Entrée from above

  • Multimedia, interactive book for museum visitors

See also

Web links

Commons : Haus Wahnfried  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Heinrich Habel: Festspielhaus and Wahnfried. Prestel, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-7913-0386-4 .
  • Manfred Eger: The libraries of the Richard Wagner Museum and the Richard Wagner Memorial. In: Bibliotheksforum Bayern, 15 (1987), pp. 227-235.
  • Manfred Eger, Sven Friedrich: Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth. 15th edition. Westermann, Braunschweig 2008.
  • Sven Friedrich: The book of a noble spirit is the most precious friend: Richard Wagner and his libraries. In: Klaus Döge (Hrsg.): “Don't use the power of reflection too low.” Contributions to Richard Wagner's thought, work and activity. Schott, Mainz a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-7957-0463-4 , pp. 11-20.
  • Angelika Pabel, Reinhard Feldmann: "Wasn't that kind of luxury in book covers in Bayreuth before?" Richard Wagner's libraries: an introduction. In: Einbandforschung, 26 (2010), pp. 51–58.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cosima Wagner: The diaries. Volume 2: 1873-1877. Edited and commented by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack . Piper, Munich / Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-492-00552-7 , pp. 814f., On this p. 1206
  2. ^ W. Bronnenmeyer: Richard Wagner. Citizens in Bayreuth . Ellwanger, Bayreuth 1983, p. 47 .
  3. ↑ Hitler in Bayreuth: The mood is brilliant at Zeit Online, accessed on August 2, 2016
  4. ^ Clear Warnecke: Walks through Richard Wagner's Bayreuth . Arche, Zurich-Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7160-2283-7 , p. 33 f .
  5. ↑ Bernd Mayer: Bayreuth April 1945 . 1st edition. Wartberg, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2004, ISBN 3-8313-1463-2 , p. 28 f .
  6. ↑ a b c d Where his Wähnen found peace in: Nordbayerischer Kurier of March 7, 2016, p. 13
  7. ↑ http://www.friedrich-bayreuth.info/page8.php queried on June 17, 2012
  8. ↑ Bayreuth City Guide. In: world-qr.com. thinking portale gmbh, accessed on January 18, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Wahnfried Museum costs 14.95 million euros. Nordbayerischer Kurier, December 20, 2011, accessed October 10, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Wahnfried Park: The trees are gone. Nordbayerischer Kurier, March 13, 2012, accessed October 10, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Tree protection - felling trees and removing hedges, living fences, bushes and other woody areas in the urban area: rules of the Tree Protection Ordinance ( Memento of December 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Tree Protection Ordinance Bayreuth and Federal Nature Conservation Act
  12. ↑ Destruction of the Wahnfried Park
  13. ↑ There is a fire everywhere in Bayreuth , infranken.de, June 16, 2012 (updated: October 23, 2012), accessed on July 25, 2017.
  14. ^ Zoff about the Wagner villa: "Grober Inank" , Focus Online , March 24, 2012.
  15. ↑ Wagner Museum: City councils react angrily ( Memento from April 22, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ WDR 3 TonArt, July 24, 2015

Coordinates: 49 ° 56 ′ 28 "  N , 11 ° 34 ′ 56"  E