Richard- Wagner- Strasse 48
Tel. (0921) 75 72 816
Open: Apr- Sep: 9am- 5pm daily, 9am- 8pm Tue
Oct- Mar: 10am- 5pm daily
Closed: Easter Sunday
Villa Wahnfried is commonly known as a Richard Wagner Museum. It was constructed as a summer residence for the famous German composer by Bavarian king Ludwig II of Bavaria. The original structure was destroyed during World War II and it was restored to its original condition in 1970's. Wagner was buried here along with this wife Cosima, daughter of another famous Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.
After Wagner had not found a suitable house in Bayreuth, he chose a
meadow plot on Rennweg (today Richard-Wagner-Straße) directly at the
Hofgarten as the building site for his future house. On January 6, 1872,
the royal court secretary, Lorenz von Düfflipp, informed Wagner that the
king had authorized him to successively pay Wagner up to 25,000 thalers
to help him buy land and build a house. Wagner acquired the building
site on February 1, 1872 for 12,000 guilders.
The building,
constructed by master builder Carl Wölfel according to the ideas of
Richard Wagner and modified plans by the Berlin architect Wilhelm
Neumann, was largely a gift from King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose
youthful bust is placed in front of the house. The construction and
furnishing work turned out to be much more sluggish than planned and
became a source of constant annoyance for Wagner, which is why he only
called the house "Angersheim" at that time. Construction began in 1872
and was completed in 1874. That year, on April 28, Wagner moved in with
his wife Cosima and their children Daniela, Blandine, Isolde, Eva and
Siegfried. In Haus Wahnfried, often referred to as "Villa Wahnfried", he
completed the opera Götterdämmerung and worked on Parsifal. In the last
years of his life, Wagner suffered greatly from the harsh Bayreuth
climate, especially in winter, which prompted him to flee more and more
and spend months in Italy with the whole family. During his last stay
(from September 1882 to February 1883) he died in Venice on February 13,
1883. His body was transported to Bayreuth, where he was buried in a
crypt in the garden of the Wahnfried house on February 18, 1883. After
her death at the age of 93, his wife Cosima was cremated on April 1,
1930 in Coburg and her urn was buried on the south side of the burial
mound. Her father Franz Liszt, who died in 1886 in a house opposite
(today: Wahnfriedstraße 9), was laid out in Wahnfried after his death.
In 1894 Siegfried Wagner had the eastern outbuilding, which Richard
Wagner had already wanted to expand in 1879, converted into a small
villa in the Italianate neo-Renaissance style and had a second floor
added. In 1932, Hans Reissinger added a low-rise building on the north
side and connected it to Wahnfried by means of a connecting wing on the
south-west side. After Siegfried Wagner's death on August 4, 1930, it
served as a guest house for his widow Winifred, including Arturo
Toscanini (1931) and Richard Strauss (1933/34).
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 just called
the "Führerbau". After the premieres, Hitler hosted artist receptions in
his music room. On July 25, 1936, three emissaries of the Spanish coup
general Francisco Franco visited him, and shortly before midnight he
approved help in the form of twenty transport planes. At the end of the
Second World War, the building was confiscated by the Americans, who
first set up an interrogation room there, later an officers' club and a
brothel. In 1957 Winifred Wagner moved into the Siegfried Wagner House.
Today there are the administrative offices of the Richard Wagner Museum
with the national archive of the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth.
On April 5, 1945, during a US air raid on Bayreuth, Wahnfried was
half destroyed by an incendiary bomb hitting the hall from the south.
All of the original interior and furniture were destroyed, but not the
library, which had just been evacuated, nor the 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 US Army's headquarters and officers' mess until 1957. In 1949,
Wahnfried was temporarily and incompletely restored by walling off the
open sides according to a design by Hans Reissinger, in order to make it
usable for the family's living quarters. 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 occupied by
Wieland Wagner 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 American troops withdrew in 1957, Winifred Wagner
was given back the Siegfried Wagner House. She returned there from her
exile in Oberwarmensteinach in the Fichtel Mountains and lived there
until her death in 1980. With the founding of the Richard Wagner
Foundation on May 1, 1973, Wahnfried became the property of the city of
Bayreuth by deed of donation 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 housed in the
Wahnfried House since 1976 with a permanent exhibition on Richard Wagner
and the Bayreuth Festival. A national archive and the research center of
the Richard-Wagner-Foundation Bayreuth are attached.
The outer walls of the three-winged building consist of sandstone
blocks with brick masonry on the inside, which is typical for the
area. Remarkable in the interior design of the rooms - contrary to
all contemporary accusations of extravagance - Wagner's explicit
rejection of all luxury, especially in the choice of materials. The
floor plan of the house with basement, ground floor, upper floor and
mezzanine on a floor area 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,
which living and library room (“Saal”) on the southern side of the
garden.
The ground floor of Wahnfried consists of two large,
representative rooms, the hall and the large hall. In the hall are
Richard Wagner's original library, consisting of around 2,500
bindings by the Bayreuth bookbinder Christian Senfft in
reconstructed shelves, and the Centennial D concert grand piano from
1876, a gift from William Steinway to Wagner on the occasion of the
opening of the Festspielhaus. 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 was
extremely fond of this grand piano - Liszt also got a Centennial D
concert grand. A simple wooden staircase from the foyer gives access
to and connects the private rooms and the gallery above the hall:
the former children's rooms and 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 is a lower one with bathrooms and dressing rooms. This
mezzanine covers about a quarter of the floor space (the salon and
hall are continuous with their greater ceiling height). It is
architecturally hidden in that it is not accessed from the inside by
the main staircase mentioned above and has no windows to the front
or back. It is accessible through the two continuous side stairs and
from above through individual stairs from the respective bedrooms
and children's rooms. All the windows on the mezzanine are on the
flanks of the house, which are less noticed due to their location.
The utility rooms were all in the basement.
The Wahnfried House has housed the Richard Wagner Museum since 1976.
Sven Friedrich has been the director of the museum since 1993.
The forerunner of the Richard Wagner Museum was the Richard Wagner
memorial in the north wing ("Ladies Wing") of the New Bayreuth Palace
with the estate of Carl Friedrich Glasenapps, author of the first and
most extensive Wagner biography. His foster daughter, the “ardent
National Socialist” Helena Wallem, set up a Glasenapp memorial room and
a biographical Richard Wagner room – initially in her private apartment
– for the reopening of the festival after the First World War in 1924.
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 leadership 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 collection of records as well as
several thousand letters and other documents from and to Wagner's family
and those around them were added later. After the Second World War,
Joachim Bergfeld, a former employee of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda,
took over the management.
With the founding of the Richard Wagner
Foundation in 1973, the holdings of the memorial and the holdings of the
Richard Wagner Family Archive (Wahnfried Archive) managed by Otto and
Gertrud Strobel were brought together. The Richard Wagner family archive
included the entire estate of Richard and Cosima Wagner and the artistic
estate of Siegfried Wagner. In 1973 Manfred Eger became director of the
Richard Wagner Memorial, who transferred its holdings to the Richard
Wagner Museum in Haus Wahnfried and was its director until 1993.
Richard Wagner Museum in Wahnfried House
On the occasion of Richard
Wagner's 200th birthday in 2013, the museum was renovated, expanded and
redesigned. An additional building on the property was erected according
to the design of the architect Volker Staab. Between 2012 and 2015,
during the conversion, there was the opportunity to find out about the
status of the construction project at the “bau.schau.stelle” information
point opposite. According to the cost plan from December 2011, the start
of the construction work was delayed, so that the conversion did not
start until 2013. At the beginning of March 2012, several trees in the
Wahnfried Park were felled as a preliminary construction work, although
the financing of the construction measures had not yet been secured at
that time. For this purpose, the city disregarded the tree protection
ordinance and the bird protection regulations or summarily overruled
them.
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 was a "strong violation
of Wagner's will and an aesthetic impertinence". The construction
measures decided by the city council were also not without controversy
among the local population. At the end of June 2012, the majority of the
city council approved a compromise solution that provided for the café
to be relocated, but not, as suggested by the building committee, the
abandonment of an underground connecting wing 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 designed by the Berlin architects Volker Staab.