BAYREUTH: SUMMER PILGRIMAGE.(Bayreuth Festival, Germany)

Wagner was a young man when he saw Bayreuth for the first time. Passing through on a journey from Prague to Nuremberg, he was struck by the small city "pleasantly illuminated in the evening sun." For decades, he remembered this moment. The first-time visitor today may not find the view so serene. Arriving from the north, one is greeted by a valley full of small industry and high-tech plants; coming from the south, one sees the ultra-modern glass and steel structures of the University of Bayreuth, noted for its scientific and technological research. Even train passengers may be surprised by the utilitarian ambience of the place, especially when, upon leaving the station, they look to the right and see the Festspielhaus on the hill.

One would be forgiven for concluding from its unadorned, functional exterior that it is perhaps a large shed in the station's marshaling yards.

At first glance, Bayreuth may not be the withdrawn rural retreat you expected. Yet the city grows on you. Chances are you will visit Bayreuth in late July or August to attend the Festival, so why not begin with the Festspielhaus itself?. Unlike an urban theater, where it is common to rush in at the last moment to claim your seat and dash away as soon as the performance ends in order to avoid traffic jams, the Festspielhaus becomes something like a home away from home. Festivalgoers begin to look with fondness on its stark lines and redbrick fronting, which are far easier to live with than the pompous neoclassicism of so many European opera-house facades. You might arrive for the performance any time up to two hours before it begins at 4 P.M. Take the time to enjoy the view of the rolling countryside from the parking lot, to walk in the shady park between the theater and the town, or to sit on the surprisingly elegant terrace in front of the entrance to the King's loge. As it is still mid-afternoon, you might have a late lunch at one of the theater's restaurants. Fifteen minutes before the performance, you, along with the crowds now thronging the terraces, will be summoned to take your seats by a brass ensemble that appears on the balcony above the King's entrance to play a leitmotif from the act about to be performed.

Once inside, you are in for quite a surprise. The auditorium is spectacular, quite simply one of the finest spaces ever built for opera. The seating is arranged in a single massive wedge, steeply raked and unbroken by aisles. Everything is designed to exercise an unbroken hold on your attention. As the orchestra pit is sunken, you feel closer to the stage than in a normal opera house, and the double frame that surrounds the proscenium creates a perspective that makes the characters onstage appear larger than life. The frame of the proscenium is repeated on the side walls of the auditorium, so that stage and audience seem to occupy the same space, which gives the unusual sensation of being very closely connected to the action. I have never felt, as some do, that the sound of the orchestra from the sunken pit is more muffled than it would be in a conventional theater, but the music does emerge more blended and, as it rebounds off the wooden walls of the auditorium, sounds as if it emanates from the whole space, rather than from a particular spot in the theater. People are constantly inveighing against the hardbacked chairs, but if you do not have a back problem, you should find them comfortable enough.

Few theaters generate as strong a sense of community among the audience as the Festspielhaus. Although evening gowns and black tie are still worn by a good three-quarters of the audience, the prevailing atmosphere is far from being stuffy and formal. The haut monde does not come to Bayreuth to display its wealth. Henry James once wrote, with affectionate irony, of the London theater audience: "It is well dressed, tranquil, motionless; it suggests domestic virtue and comfortable homes." The same might be said about the Bayreuth audience today, though it takes its theater more seriously than James thought the Londoners did. At the first intermission, when one still feels the heat of the day, there is a restrained though bucolic air among those eating and drinking on the terraces; at the second, the sun is usually setting, which casts a touch of melancholy poetry over those gathered to hear the final fanfare. If you stay for all seven operas, you will begin to find once-strange faces familiar, so much so that as your visit progresses you come to feel the auditorium is full of friends -- a community, as Wagner intended.

What you see onstage may not be so mellow as the theatergoing itself. The Bayreuth Festival, oddly, has the reputation of being conservative, but it never really has been. Even under the directorships of Cosima Wagner and her son Siegfried, supposedly the preservers of the unaltered Wagner legacy, more experimentation in the design and stage direction of the music dramas took place than is commonly admitted. When the composer's grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang reopened the Festival in 1951, after World War II, they initiated a series of productions that revolutionized the staging not only of Wagner but of opera as a whole. The Festival is still directed by Wolfgang Wagner, whose fifty years at the helm must surely be a record for any artistic director in the German theater, or anywhere else. Despite the controversies that have marked his directorship, he has been a fine steward of both the Festspielhaus and the Festival. He has restored the theater, kept the stage technologically up-to-date, and ensured that his grandfather's works still speak to audiences of our own day. For the past three decades he has invited stage directors whose experimental approaches treat the music dramas as polemical works with a broad range of social, political and philosophical ramifications. Not infrequently, a new, unorthodox approach will meet with public disapproval, and suddenly the genteel atmosphere of the Festival will be shattered by heated controversy. Fights have even been known to break out in the streets surrounding the Festspielhaus.

The unusual commitment of audiences to the Festival arises from the special status its productions still possess. The intense care and efficiency with which they are rehearsed and re-rehearsed for each revival is still a model for the opera world. At present, the Festival has no epoch-making productions in its repertoire such as Wieland's great Tristan und Isolde in the 1960s, the celebrated Ring, directed by Patrice Chereau in the late 1970s, or Harry Kupfer's stunningly original Fliegende Hollander in the 1980s, but the quality of much of its work is still exemplary. The current Lohengrin, directed by Keith Warner, is a dark but compelling allegory on no less a topic than the extinction of the human race, and while Wolfgang Wagner's two present productions may be conceptually unremarkable, the closing scene of his Meistersinger and the temple scenes of his Parsifal, with the unparalleled Festival chorus, are among the most exhilarating and moving spectacles to be found anywhere on the contemporary opera stage.