fitted with
the most modern machinery, lights and so on. The orchestra was sunk,
so that the movements of the conductor and his fiddlers should not
distract the attention of the audience; the auditorium was darkened,
so that everything happening on the stage could be seen with the
greatest possible clearness. When the good burghers of a decaying
mediaeval town found what was going to happen to them they rejoiced,
for they foresaw invasions of millions of aliens who would not hurt
them but would pay out handsomely, and renew the days of the town's
prosperity. Sites were granted free of cost, both for Wagner's own
house--Villa Wahnfried--and the Festival Theatre. When the foundation
of the latter was laid, brass bands and processions took an important
part in the proceedings.

From the very start the enterprise was looked on as a commercial one.
Wagner's house was built, but work at the theatre had soon to be
stopped for want of money. Numerous Wagner societies were started to
raise it; concerts innumerable were given with the same object; the
composer himself laboured incessantly; and eventually it was possible
to resume building. But the very means, or some of the means, adopted
to raise money aroused fierce antagonism amongst the musicians who
did not believe in Wagner, or had been attacked by him and his
disciples, and put into their hands a weapon of counter-attack.
"Begging" was a term freely employed; and a thousand newspapers were
found willing--nay, anxious--to insinuate or to state boldly that the
money was badly needed to enable the composer to live on a sumptuous
scale. When, in the summer of 1876, the first cycle of the _Ring_ was
given, no artistic undertaking could have made a worse start. People
did not know what they were asked to see and to hear; they did know
that all these scandalous rumours had been flying about for years,
that the "entertainment" was not ordinary opera, that the opening of
Bayreuth was to mark the beginning of a millennium--a new moral,
religious, political and goodness knows what sort of era. Bayreuth
from the first had attracted a very disagreeable set of persons, men
whom fathers would not allow to speak to their daughters--or to their
sons. Wagner himself had invited ridicule by claiming that his theatre
was not to be a mere opera-house, but, as he told Sir Charles Halle,
the centre of the intellectual and artistic world. "A noble ambition!"
scornfully replied the pianist. In a