[edit]
Middle Ages and Early Modern Period[edit]
Bayreuth around 1900
The town is believed to have been founded by the counts of Andechs probably around the mid-12th century, but was first mentioned in 1194 as Baierrute in a document by Bishop Otto II of Bamberg. The syllable -rute may mean Rodung or "clearing", whilst Baier- indicates immigrants from the Bavarian region.
Already documented earlier, were villages later merged into Bayreuth: Seulbitz (in 1035 as the royal Salian estate of Silewize in a document by Emperor Conrad II) and St. Johannis (possibly 1149 as Altentrebgast). Even the district of Altstadt (formerly Altenstadt) west of the town centre must be older than the town of Bayreuth itself. Even older traces of human presence were found in the hamlets of Meyernberg: pieces of pottery and wooden crockery were dated to the 9th century based on their decoration.
While Bayreuth was previously (1199) referred to as a villa ("village"), the term civitas ("town") appeared for the first time in a document published in 1231. One can therefore assume that Bayreuth was awarded its town charter between 1200 and 1230. The town was ruled until 1248 by the counts of Andechs-Merania. After they died out in 1260 the burgraves of Nuremberg from the House of Hohenzollern took over the inheritance.
As early as 1361 Emperor Charles IV conferred on Burgrave Frederick V the right to mint coins for the towns of Bayreuth and Kulmbach.
In 1398 Bayreuth was partitioned from Nuremberg, becoming the Principality of Bayreuth (German: Fürstentum Bayreuth). Until 1604, however, the princely residence and the centre of the territory was the castle of Plassenburg in Kulmbach and as such the territory was officially known as the Principality of Kulmbach. The town of Bayreuth developed slowly and was affected time and again by disasters.
Bayreuth was first published on a map in 1421.
In February 1430, the Hussites devastated Bayreuth and the town hall and churches were razed. Matthäus Merian described this event in 1642 as follows: "In 1430 the Hussites from Bohemia attacked / Culmbach and Barreut / and committed great acts of cruelty / like wild animals / against the common people / and certain individuals. / The priests / monks and nuns they either burnt at the stake / or took them onto the ice of lakes and rivers / (in Franconia and Bavaria) and doused them with cold water / and killed them in a deplorable way / as Boreck reported in the Bohemian Chronicle, page 450".
By 1528, less than ten years after the start of the Reformation, the lords of the Frankish margrave territories switched to the Lutheran faith.
In 1605 a great fire, caused by negligence, destroyed 137 of the town's 251 houses. In 1620 plague broke out and, in 1621, there was another big fire in the town. The town also suffered during the Thirty Years' War.
The Old Castle
A turning point in the town's history came in 1603 when Margrave Christian, the son of the elector, John George of Brandenburg, moved the aristocratic residence from the castle of Plassenburg above Kulmbach to Bayreuth. The first Hohenzollern palace was built in 1440–1457 under Margrave John the Alchemist. It was the forerunner of today's Old Palace (Altes Schloss) and was expanded and renovated many times. The development of the new capital stagnated due to the Thirty Years' War, but afterwards many baroque buildings were added to the town. After Christian's death in 1655 his grandson, Christian Ernest, followed him, ruling from 1661 until 1712. He was an educated and well-travelled man, whose tutor had been the statesman Joachim Friedrich von Blumenthal. He founded the Christian-Ernestinum Grammar School and, in 1683, participated in the liberation of Vienna which had been besieged by the Turks. To commemorate this feat, he had the Margrave Fountain built as a monument on which he is depicted as the victor of the Turks; it now stands outside the New Palace (Neues Schloss). During this time, the outer ring of the town wall and the castle chapel (Schlosskirche) were built.
18th century[edit]
The New Castle
The Margravial Opera House (UNESCO World Heritage Site)
Margravial Opera House, interior
Christian Ernest's successor, the Crown Prince and later Margrave, George William, began in 1701 to establish the then independent town of St Georgen am See (today, the district of St Georgen) with its castle, the so-called Ordensschloss, a town hall, a prison and a small barracks. In 1705 he founded the Order of Sincerity (Ordre de la Sincérité), which was renamed in 1734 to the Order of the Red Eagle and had the monastery church built, which was completed in 1711. In 1716 a princely porcelain factory was established in St. Georgen.
The first 'castle' in the park of the Hermitage was built at this time by Margrave George William (1715–1719).
In 1721, the town council acquired the palace of Baroness Sponheim (today's Old Town Hall or Altes Rathaus) as a replacement for the town hall built in 1440 in the middle of the market place and destroyed by fire.
In 1735, a nursing home, the so-called Gravenreuth Stift, was founded by a private foundation in St. Georgen. The cost of the building exceeded the funds of the foundation, but Margrave Frederick came to their aid.
Bayreuth experienced its Golden Age during the reign (1735–1763) of Margrave Frederick and Margravine Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, the favourite sister of Frederick the Great. During this time, under the direction of court architects, Joseph Saint-Pierre and Carl von Gontard, numerous courtly buildings and attractions were created: the Margravial Opera House with its richly furnished baroque theatre (1744–1748), the New 'Castle' and Sun Temple (1749–1753) at the Hermitage, the New Palace with its courtyard garden (1754 ff) to replace the Old Palace which had burned down through the carelessness of the margrave, and the magnificent row of buildings in today's Friedrichstraße. There was even a unique version of the rococo architectural style, the so-called Bayreuth Rococo which characterised the aforementioned buildings, especially their interior design.
The old, sombre gatehouses were demolished because they impeded transport and were an outmoded form of defence. The walls were built over in places. Margrave Frederick successfully kept his principality out of the wars being waged by his brother-in-law, Frederick the Great, at this time, and, as a result, brought a time of peace to the Frankish kingdom.
Friedrichstraße
1742 saw the founding of the Frederick Academy, which became a university in 1743, but was moved that same year to Erlangen after serious riots because of the adverse reaction of the population. The university has remained there to the present today. From 1756 to 1763 there was also an Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Roman Catholics were given the right to set up a prayer room and Jewish families settled here again. In 1760 the synagogue was opened and in 1787 the Jewish cemetery was dedicated.
Countess Wilhelmina died in 1758, and although Margrave Frederick married again, the marriage was short-lived and without issue. After his death in 1763, many artists and craftsmen migrated to Berlin and Potsdam, to work for King Frederick the Great, because Frederick's successor, Margrave Frederick Christian had little understanding of art. He also lacked the means due to the elaborate lifestyle of his predecessor, because the buildings and the salaries of the mainly foreign artists had swallowed up a lot of money. For example, the court – which under George Frederick Charles had comprised around 140 people – had grown to about 600 employees by the end of the reign of Margrave Frederick. By 1769 the principality was close to bankruptcy.
In 1769, Margrave Charles Alexander, from the Ansbach line of Frankish Hohenzollerns, followed the childless Frederick Christian, and Bayreuth was reduced to a secondary residence. Charles Alexander continued to live in Ansbach and rarely came to Bayreuth.
In 1775, the Brandenburg Pond (Brandenburger Weiher) in St.Georgen was drained.
Following the abdication of the last Margrave, Charles Alexander, from the principalities of Ansbach and Bayreuth on 2 December 1791 its territories became part of a Prussian province. The Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenberg took over its administration at the beginning of 1792.
The town centre still possesses the typical structure of a Bavarian street market: the settlement is grouped around a road widening into a square; the Town Hall was located in the middle. The church stood apart from it and on a small hill stood the castle. Some sixty years later the town (at that time a tiny village) became subordinate to the Hohenzollern state, and when this state was divided, Bayreuth ended up in the County of Kulmbach.
19th century[edit]
In 1804, the author Jean Paul Richter moved from Coburg to Bayreuth, where he lived until his death in 1825.
The rule of the Hohenzollerns over the Principality of Kulmbach-Bayreuth ended in 1806 after the defeat of Prussia by Napoleonic France. During the French occupation from 1806 to 1810 Bayreuth was treated as a province of the French Empire and had to pay high war contributions. It was placed under the administration of Comte Camille de Tournon, who wrote a detailed inventory of the former Principality of Bayreuth. On 30 June 1810 the French army handed over the former principality to what was now the Kingdom of Bavaria, which it had bought from Napoleon for 15 million francs. Bayreuth became the capital of the Bavarian district of Mainkreis, which later transferred into Obermainkreis and was finally renamed as the province of Upper Franconia.
As Bavaria was opened up by the railways, the main line from Nuremberg to Hof went past Bayreuth, running via Lichtenfels, Kulmbach and Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg to Hof. Bayreuth was first given a railway connection in 1853, when the Bayreuth–Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg railway was built at the town's expense. It was followed in 1863 by the line to Weiden, in 1877 by the railway to Schnabelwaid, in 1896 by the branch line to Warmensteinach, in 1904 by the branch to Hollfeld and in 1909 by the branch via Thurnau to Kulmbach, known as the Thurnauer Bockala (which means something like "Thurnau Goat").
The Bayreuth Festspielhaus, as seen in 1882
On 17 April 1870 Richard Wagner visited Bayreuth, because he had read about the Margrave Opera House, whose great stage seemed fitting for his works. However, the orchestra pit could not accommodate the large number of musicians required, for example, for the Ring of the Nibelung and the ambience of the auditorium seemed inappropriate for his piece. So, he toyed with the idea of building his own festival hall (the Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth. The town supported him in this project and made a piece of land available to him, an undeveloped area outside the town between the railway station and Hohe Warte, the Grüner Hügel [de] ("Green Hill"). At the same time Wagner acquired a property at Hofgarten to build his own house, Wahnfried. On 22 May 1872 the cornerstone for the Festival Hall was laid and, on 13 August 1876, it was officially opened (see Bayreuth Festival). Planning and construction were in the hands of the Leipzig architect, Otto Brückwald, who had already made a name for himself in the building of theatres in Leipzig and Altenburg.
In 1886, the composer Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth while visiting his daughter Cosima Liszt, Wagner's widow. Both Liszt and Wagner are buried in Bayreuth; however, Wagner did not die there. Rather, he died in Venice in 1883, but his family had his body brought to Bayreuth for burial.
20th century[edit]
To the end of the Weimar Republic (1900–1933)[edit]
1920 emergency money: voucher for 25 pfennigs
1923 emergency money: voucher for a million marks
The new century also brought several innovations of modern technology: in 1892, the first electric street lights; in 1908 a municipal electricity station, and, in the same year, the first cinema.
In 1914–15, one section of the northern arm of the Red Main was straightened and widened after areas along the river had been flooded during a period of high water in 1909.
After the First World War had ended in 1918, the Workers' and Soldiers' Council took power briefly in Bayreuth. On 17 February 1919, there was a three-day coup, the so-called Speckputsch, a brief interlude of excitement in the otherwise rather staid town.
In a series of völkisch and nationalist "Deutscher Tag" (German Days), the NSDAP organised the event in Bayreuth on 30 September 1923. More than 3,300 military and civilian people gathered (equivalent to 15% of the inhabitants), although Minister of Defence Otto Gessler had forbidden the participation of Reichswehr units. Among the guests were mayor Albert Preu as well as Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, who invited keynote speaker Adolf Hitler to Wahnfried house. There he met writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, son-in-law of Richard Wagner and anti-semitic race theorist. Also on that day, Hans Schemm met Hitler for the first time.
In 1932, the provinces of Upper and Middle Franconia were merged and Ansbach was chosen as the seat of government. As a small compensation, Bayreuth was given the merged state insurance agency for Upper and Middle Franconia. Unlike the provincial merger, the merger of those institutions was never reversed.
Nazi era (1933–1945)[edit]
A stronghold of right-wing parties since the 1920s, Bayreuth became a center of Nazi ideology. In 1933, it was made capital of the Nazi Gau Bavarian Eastern March (Bayerische Ostmark, in 1942 Gau Bayreuth). Nazi leaders often visited the Wagner festival and tried to turn Bayreuth into a Nazi model town. It was one of several places in which town planning was administered directly from Berlin, due to Hitler's special interest in the town and in the festival. Hitler loved the music of Richard Wagner, and he became a close friend of Winifred Wagner after she took over the festival. Hitler frequently attended Wagner performances in the Bayreuth Festival Hall.
Bayreuth was to have received a so-called Gauforum, a combined government building and marching square built to symbolise the centre of power in the town. Bayreuth's first Gauleiter was Hans Schemm, who was also the head (Reichswalter) of the National Socialist Teachers League, NSLB, which was located in Bayreuth. In 1937 the town was connected to the new Reichsautobahn.
Under Nazi dictatorship the synagogue of the Jewish Community in Münzgasse was desecrated and looted on Kristallnacht but, due to its proximity to the Opera House it was not razed. Inside the building, which is once again used by a Jewish community as a synagogue, a plaque next to the Torah ark recalls the persecution and murder of Jews in the Shoah, which took the lives of at least 145 Jews in Bayreuth.
During the Second World War, a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp was based in the town, in which prisoners had to participate in physical experiments for the V-2. Wieland Wagner, the grandson of the composer, Richard Wagner, was the deputy civilian director there in late 1944 and early April 1945. Shortly before the war's end branches of the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) were to have been set up in Bayreuth.
On 5, 8 and 11 April 1945 about one third of the town, including many public buildings and industrial installations were destroyed by heavy air strikes, along with 4,500 houses. 741 people were also killed. On 14 April, the U.S. Army occupied the town.
Post-war era (1945–2000)[edit]
After the war Bayreuth tried to part with its ill-fated past. It became part of the American Zone. The American military government set up a DP camp to accommodate displaced persons (DP), many of whom were Ukrainian. The camp was supervised by the UNRRA.
The housing situation was very difficult at first: there were about 53,300 inhabitants in the town, many more than before the war began. This increase was primarily due to the high number of refugees and expellees. Even in 1948 more than 11,000 refugees were counted. In addition, because many homes had been destroyed due to the war, thousands of people were living in temporary shelters, even the festival restaurant next to the Festival Hall housed some 500 people.
In 1945, 1,400 men were conscripted by the town council for "essential work" (clean-up work on damaged buildings and the clearing of roads). A significant number of historic buildings were demolished post-war but cultural life was soon back on track: in 1947 Mozart festival weeks were held in the Opera House, from which the Franconian Festival Weeks developed. In 1949 the Festival Hall was used for the first time again and there was a gala concert with the Vienna Philharmonic led by Hans Knappertsbusch. In 1951, the first post-war Richard Wagner Festival took place under the leadership of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner. Wieland Wagner's fresh and non-traditional stagings "restored credibility to a theater that had been totally ruined by Nazi ideology."
In 1949, Bayreuth became the seat of the government of Upper Franconia again.
In 1971, the Bavarian State Parliament decided to establish the University of Bayreuth and, on 3 November 1975, it opened for lectures and research. There are now about 10,000 students in the town.
In May 1972, a serious accident occurred at the folk festival in the town, when an overcrowded carriage derailed and several people were thrown out. Four died and five were injured, some seriously. At that time, it was the worst disaster on a roller coaster since the Second World War.
In 1979, US Army serviceman Roy Chung disappeared from the area and allegedly defected to North Korea via East Germany.
In 1999, the world gliding championship took place at Bayreuth municipal airport.
21st century[edit]
In 2006, Bayreuth chose its first CSU member and mayor, the lawyer, Michael Hohl, and, in 2007, a Youth Parliament, consisting of 12 young people, aged 14–17 years, was elected for the first time. The end of October saw the opening of the long-planned bus station and its associated office building on the newly created Hohenzollernplatz.
See also: The Hohenzollern Margraves of Brandenburg-Kulmbach(-Bayreuth)
Largest groups of foreign residents
Nationality
Population (2013)
Turkey
938
Russia
434
Italy
364
China
336
Poland
291
Richard Wagner and Bayreuth[edit]
Wagner family home, Haus Wahnfried
The town is best known for its association with the composer Richard Wagner, who lived in Bayreuth from 1872 until his death in 1883. Wagner's villa, "Wahnfried", was constructed in Bayreuth under the sponsorship of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and was converted after World War II into a Wagner Museum. In the northern part of Bayreuth is the Festival Hall, an opera house specially constructed for and exclusively devoted to the performance of Wagner's operas. The premieres of the final two works of Wagner's Ring Cycle ("Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung"); the cycle as a whole; and of Parsifal took place here.
Every summer, Wagner's operas are performed at the Festspielhaus during the month-long Richard Wagner Festival, commonly known as the Bayreuth Festival. The Festival draws thousands each year and has persistently been sold out since its inauguration in 1876. Currently, waiting lists for tickets can stretch for 10 years or more.
Owing to Wagner's relationship with the then unknown philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the first Bayreuth festival is cited as a key turning point in Nietzsche's philosophical development. Though at first an enthusiastic champion of Wagner's music, Nietzsche ultimately became hostile, viewing the festival and its revellers as symptom of cultural decay and bourgeois decadence – an event which led him to turn his eye upon the moral values esteemed by society as a whole – "Nietzsche clearly preferred to see Bayreuth fail than succeed by mirroring a society gone wrong."
