BAYREUTH: WINTER RETREAT.(city in Germany where a major Wagnerian opera festival is held every year)

When I flew into Bayreuth on a wintry February evening, five months before the Wagner festival season, I tried to pretend to myself that I had never been there before, that I knew nothing whatever about the place -- that it was just another smallish German city of northern Bavaria. I would not let Richard Wagner or his operas cross my mind.

At first this was not difficult. Only a motley handful of passengers disembarked with me from the Frankfurt feeder flight, and in no time they had scuttled rather mysteriously into the snowy night, leaving me all alone hoping for a taxi. The snow fell. The wind whistled. The little airport, sans rental desks, sans buses, seemed to be abandoned, and when long afterwards a taxi did turn up, its convivial driver was God's own generic German.

Through the dark we slithered into town. A few lights shone through the murk. "Industry," observed the driver. Big industry? "Very, very big." Making what? "Making cigarettes" -- but before he had time to explain the importance to the town of the British American Tobacco Company, we had reached the city center and my hotel. "In this hotel," announced the driver, as he courteously removed my bags from the trunk, "all the Big People have stayed. All the Big People come to our city."

Across the street from the hotel a series of brightly-colored plastic figures -- I took them to be frogs -- clambered up the wall of an office block. The driver corrected me: they were not frogs. They were citizens of Bayreuth ascending the rungs of a career toward rooftop or perhaps penthouse success. "Top of the heap," he said.

I woke up next morning to see outside my window a sufficiently confident-looking citizenry hurrying through the snow to work. Like many another German town, Bayreuth suffered greatly in the later twentieth century. The Nazis had drawn up megalomaniacal plans for its aggrandizement, the Western allies had bombed it, the Russians had threatened it, the Americans had stormed and occupied it. But the little city survived to remain a quintessentially German community of the twenty-first century, with a population of some 74,000, a university and a municipal golf course.

Out there that morning, mellow church bells rang, clocks chimed, and only a few high-rise buildings disturbed the familiar German skyline of steeple, tower and gabled roof. When I began my perambulation of the place, it seemed to me if anything rather more German than when I was last here. Shops sold pipes and beer mugs. There was a plethora of apothecaries. Medieval-looking taverns abounded in back-alleys, with gilded signs and bottle-glass windows. The effect of the long American occupation had faded into nostalgia, and in the Weihenstephan restaurant, where they serve beer from the oldest brewery in the world (founded in 1040), I was not surprised when the Muzak played "Puttin' on the Ritz" and "Moon River."

I asked at City Hall about that very, very big industry, and I was told the British American Tobacco Company maintained an interesting museum about it, in the Cultural Center of the Old City Hall -- one of twenty museums in the city, including a Freemasons' museum, a museum of fire engines and a very complete collection of typewriters. Oh, they cried, warming to their theme, there were all kinds of things to see and do in this city, at any time of the year. Hardly a month went by without a celebration of some sort, of film or folklore or ice-hockey! I must be sure to visit the piano factory where the Steingraeber family had been making pianos since 1852! I musn't miss the Maisel Brewery Museum, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest brewery museum in the world!