This Party's Getting Started

Give your inner culture vulture wings to soar with Spice's round up of some of the most feted festivals from around the globe.

- SONIA NAZARETH

There is much to say in favour of festivals. They frequently act as the great equaliser, as people from all walks of life congregate to celebrate the history, traditions and culture of a place. Not infrequently, I plan a journey to a distant land around a festival time, if only to be transported off the straight-and-narrow, into a world that deviates from the routine of the everyday and invites new ways of being. The talent and passion on display at the festivals listed here, is a reminder that an enthusiastic youthful spirit can be awakened in us all.

Bayreuth, Germany, Musical Chairs— July 24 to August 28

Each year, the Richard Wagner Opera Festival unfolds in Bayreuth. This hugely popular event, a dominant feature of Bayreuth’s cultural calendar, has been a summer fixture for over 140 years. Regarded by music aficionados the world over as the pinnacle Wagner event, an intense rush for tickets is a given. If you do manage to secure one of the highly coveted tickets, the soundtrack that accompanies your stay in Bayreuth, will be a sequence of masterpieces by the 19th century composer.

The canon of Wagner’s works that make up the repertoire include, Der Fliegende Hollander, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal. The main venue for the event is the Festspielhaus. This substantial edifice constructed in 1872 with the backing of King Ludwig, to accommodate Wagner’s enormous theatrical sets, is still one of the largest opera houses in the world. Crafted with simplicity, stark interiors and pared to the essentials, it is driven by one of a kind acoustics and a complete focus on the work of the composer. A quarter-of-anhour before the start of the programme, regardless of the weather, intermission musicians step onto the balcony of the Festspielhaus and produce a fanfare composed especially for the occasion, a tradition practiced since 1876.