In 2011 he was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's Ring der Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, a reflection of his capacity to produce imaginative tributes to great works of art.

* Lohengrin ( 1987, Bayreuth Festival )

* August 13 – Richard Wagner inaugurates Bayreuth Festival

" Indeed to this day Der fliegende Holländer is the earliest of Wagner's operas to be performed at the Bayreuth Festival, and, at least for that theatre, marks the start of the mature Wagner canon.

Parsifal was first produced at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882.

The Bayreuth Festival maintained a monopoly on Parsifal productions until 1903, when the opera was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Parsifal is one of the Wagner operas regularly presented at the Bayreuth Festival to this day.

At the first Bayreuth Festival after World War II he presented a radical move away from literal representation of the Hall of the Grail or the Flower-Maiden's bower.

The next production of Tristan was in Weimar in 1874, and Wagner himself supervised another production of Tristan, this time in Berlin, in March 1876, but the opera was only given in his own theatre at the Bayreuth Festival, after Wagner's death.

It premiered in Wagner's Bayreuth Festival as part of the complete cycle on 14 August 1876.

It is world-famous for its annual Bayreuth Festival at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented.

On 22 May 1872 the cornerstone for the Festival Hall was laid and, on 13 August 1876, it was officially opened ( see Bayreuth Festival ).

Hitler frequently attended Wagner performances in the Bayreuth Festival Hall.

To the north of Bayreuth is the Festival Hall, an opera house specially constructed for and exclusively devoted to the performance of Wagner's operas.

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 Hall dates to the 19th century and is now used solely for the Bayreuth Festival.

The Richard Wagner Festival Hall on the Green Hill in Bayreuth

Como was the birthplace of many historically notable figures, including the ( somewhat obscure ) poet Caecilius who is mentioned by Catullus in the 1st century BCE, the far more substantial literary figures of Pliny the Elder and the Younger, Pope Innocent XI, the scientist Alessandro Volta, and Cosima Liszt, second wife of Richard Wagner and long-term director of the Bayreuth Festival.

They included Mattia Battistini ( known as the " King of Baritones "), Giuseppe Kaschmann ( born Josip Kašman ) who, atypically, sang Wagner's Telramund and Amfortas not in Italian but in German, at the Bayreuth Festival in the 1890s ; Giuseppe Campanari ; Antonio Magini-Coletti ; Mario Ancona ( chosen to be the first Silvio in Pagliacci ); and Antonio Scotti, who came to the Met from Europe in 1899 and remained on the roster of singers until 1933.

He has attended almost religiously the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth on an annual basis.

The letter caused public outrage in Britain but Hitler rewarded her with an engraved golden swastika badge, a private box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and a ride in a party Mercedes to the Bayreuth Festival.

The premiere of the entire work was given in the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth on 26 July 1882 under the baton of the German-born Jewish conductor Hermann Levi.

In July and August 1882 sixteen performances of the work were given in Bayreuth conducted by Levi and Franz Fischer.

* July 29 – The annual Bayreuth Festival resumes for the first time since the Second World War, now under the general direction of Wieland Wagner, with an opening concert of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, followed by productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Parsifal, and Die Meistersinger.

Finally it reopened with the performance by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra under conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on 29 July 1951, followed by the first post-war premiere of Wagner's opera, Parsifal.

Later in the Nazi era, as part of the regime's propaganda intentions of ' Nazifying ' German culture, specific attempts were made to appropriate Wagner's music as ' Nazi ' and pseudo-academic articles appeared such as Paul Bulow's Adolf Hitler and the Bayreuth Ideological Circle ( Zeitschrift fur Musik, July 1933 ).

In 1872 he took up his residence at Meran, but passed the last years of his life at a sanatorium for nervous disorders near Bayreuth, where he died on 6 July 1891.

Helmut Roloff, playing with a group of musicians from the Bayreuth Ensemble, gives a sturdy reading, in much the same vein as that of the last-mentioned pianists.

Algarotti accompanied Frederick to Bayreuth, Kehl, Strasbourg and Moyland Castle where they met with Voltaire, who was taking baths in Kleve for his health.

After he returned to Nuremberg, he divided the inheritance from his father with his brother John, who received Bayreuth, while Frederick kept Ansbach.

When Frederick I retired in 1437, he compensated his incapable eldest son John with the Principality of Bayreuth while Frederick II assumed the government of Brandenburg.

Weary of the long struggle with the Duchy of Pomerania, he abdicated in 1470 in favour of his younger brother Albert Achilles, he retired to the Bayreuth Principality and died one year later in Neustadt an der Aisch.

So, he toyed with the idea of building his own festival hall ( the Festspielhaus ) in Bayreuth.

After the war Bayreuth tried to part with its ill-fated past.

The town is best known for its association with the composer Richard Wagner, who lived in Bayreuth from 1872 until his death in 1883.

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.

The town of Bayreuth has twinning partnerships with the following towns:

There is also a cultural partnership with the state of Burgenland, Austria, and a university partnership between the University of Bayreuth and the Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

The only two theatres with their own ensemble are the Studiobühne Bayreuth and amateur dramatic society, Brandenburg Kulturstadl.

Since 1976 it has been a museum with attached national archives and a research centre for the Richard Wagner Foundation in Bayreuth

* The Franz Liszt Museum in the house where Franz Liszt died, with about 300 photographs, scripts and printed papers from the collection of the Munich pianist, Ernst Burger, which were bought by the town of Bayreuth.

On the ground floor it portrays the history and development of Bayreuth from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century with a model of the town in the year 1763.

Another division portrays arts and crafts in Bayreuth and the surrounding area with examples of faience pottery, glass products from the Fichtelgebirge and stone pottery from Creußen.

* The German Typewriter Museum with a collection of over 400 historic typewriters from the Research and Training Centre for Shorthand and Word Processing in Bayreuth

At the 1939 Bayreuth Festival Hitler warned Unity and Diana Mitford that war with England was inevitable within weeks and they should return home.

The Bayreuth Festival was seen as a family business, with the leadership to be passed from Richard Wagner to his son Siegfried Wagner, but Siegfried, who was secretly homosexual, showed little interest in marriage.

He made his Bayreuth debut in 1974 with a performance of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Fortunately for Hardenberg, this coincided with the lapsing of the principalities of Ansbach and Bayreuth to Prussia, owing to the resignation of the last margrave, Charles Alexander, in 1791.

His friend and patron Robert de Montesquiou sent him to Bayreuth with a recommendation to Cosima Wagner, which led to a great enthusiasm for Parsifal.