The Big Read: A tour as grand as Wagner

The great composer was for most of his life a man on the move, so anyone intent on following in his footsteps in this bicentenary year of his birth will be covering a lot of ground. Michael White suggests some key stops

It tells you something about Richard Wagner that his tombstone, when you find it in the hinterland between his own back garden and a public park in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, is a black slab with no name, no dates, no anything. As popes and princes need no business cards, so Wagner (or his family) assumed there was no need to say whose grave this was. The world was meant to know.

It was an arrogance, but justified - because love or loathe him (as people do, obsessively, either way), he ranks among the supreme creative figures of all time. And as 10 of his 13 operas count among the world's greatest cultural achievements, there will be no escape from them this year, the bicentenary of his birth.

Almost every opera house across the globe will be acknowledging the Wagner Year, not least in Germany, where various cities are fighting over him. Leipzig (where he was born), Dresden (where he made his name), Munich (where he siphoned money from mad King Ludwig to finance the operas) and Bayreuth (where he eventually settled, custom-built an opera house and set up an enduring shrine to all things Wagnerian) are the main contenders. And there are a few other sights a thorough Wagner tourist might want to include, such as the Wartburg at Eisenach (inspiration for Tannhäuser), and a bizarrely creepy little zoo/museum/temple upriver from Bonn at Königswinter that, with the help of several sedated crocodiles, passes itself off as the dragon's lair in Siegfried.

Taking all this in requires some travel - Germany is a big country and Wagner spread himself around it, often on the run from creditors, police and angry husbands. Whereas the lives of most composers are largely uneventful, Wagner's was a rollercoaster progress through extremes of poverty, extravagance, seduction and high-risk political engagement. All of which kept him on the move.

Leipzig is the place to start, since it was there that Wagner came into the world on May 22 1813. The pity is that the town has nothing more to show for this momentous event than a plaque on the wall of what's now a department store. Allied bombs and communist indifference have swept everything away, so although Leipzig is producing a Wagner walking tour, it will largely take you to places where things once stood - including the birthplace, which is now a department store.

That said, you can still see the Thomaskirche, where Wagner was baptised; the Alte Nikolaischule, where he was educated (after a fashion: according to reports he was "slovenly"); and the Arabic Coffee Tree café (one of Germany's oldest), where he would almost certainly have loitered - as the youth of Leipzig still do.

In other cases where the buildings have changed, at least the institutions inside them survive - such as the Leipzig Opera (which in 1878 was the first company outside Bayreuth to put on a Ring Cycle) and the Gewandhaus concert hall (home to one of the world's leading orchestras then as now). And there's soon to be a new arrival on the Leipzig Wagner trail in the form of a statue that symbolically positions a normal-sized Richard in front of a gigantic cut-out shadow. Not subtle, but striking.

Moving on to Dresden - this is where Wagner lived from 1842, premiered three operas (Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser), and left in a hurry after getting involved in the 1848 revolution, pursued by police with a warrant for his arrest. Again, there's not too much to show for his time there. But you can see the tower of the Kreuzkirche, from which he surveyed the mayhem in 1848 and reported on troop movements to his revolutionary friends. You can visit the exquisitely restored Frauenkirche, which stands like the dome of St Paul's Cathedral minus the nave, and was the recipient of a bizarrely extravagant Wagner score called Love-feast of the Apostles, which played with 1300 musicians in the tiered galleries and gets a rare re-enactment as part of this year's bicentenary celebrations.

Otherwise, the best Wagnerian thing to do in Dresden is to leave it for the suburbs - out along the River Elbe to Graupa, where the composer, a notorious sybarite who only ever wore silk underwear, played at what he called "peasant life" and wrote most of Lohengrin. The Graupa farmhouse where this Marie Antoinette-like indulgence took place is open to the public. Next door is an elegantly restored manor house that's about to open as a new Wagner museum.

In Bayreuth, three hours' drive southwest of Dresden, you have somewhere that truly delivers the Wagnerian experience, like a theme park. Bayreuth is the small, quiet town that once a year erupts into the festival Wagner set up to perform his own works with the deadly (and, some would say, unhealthy) seriousness of worship in the temple of a god. And the Bayreuth Festspielhaus - Wagner's theatre - does look forbiddingly temple-like. If you arrive by train, it's the first thing you see in the distance as you step onto the station platform, high on a hill (the so-called Grüne Hügel) and approached by a long, straight ceremonial way that, like many of the sights in Bayreuth, are uncomfortably familiar from photographs of Adolf Hitler (the keenest of Wagnerites) arriving in state, surrounded by swastikas and outstretched arms.

That the Nazis annexed Wagner wasn't wholly Wagner's fault: he had, after all, been under that black, untitled slab for half a century before Hitler came to power. But his extra-musical writings - which covered everything from the evils of Judaism to the virtues of a vegetarian diet - were a gift to the Third Reich and explain the recent installation of a memorial to "silenced voices" in the Festspielhaus gardens. It's a subject that, three generations on, still haunts the Wagner family - who still run the festival (in a format devised by Richard's great-granddaughters Eva and Katharina) and preside over the town like rois maudits (accursed kings). They are, to say the least, a troubled dynasty. Forever at each other's throats.

As somebody immersed in Wagner's music, I admit to trembling slightly at the knee when passing through the Festspielhaus's slate-blue doors: it feels like sacred space. But when you do it for the first time, it's a shock to find how gloomily austere it is. With no carpeting, barely upholstered seats, subdued colours and touches of Victoriana, such as globe lamps on Corinthian columns, it feels so like an abandoned nonconformist chapel in a seaside town that your nose expects the smell of damp.

It's hard to take on board that it's a lifetime quest of millions of devoted Wagnerites throughout the world to get tickets for the privilege of sitting for four to six hours on these hard seats through a Wagner opera. But it's a fact. And when no operas play, pilgrims return to take a guided tour backstage - to see the most celebrated orchestra pit in the world and imagine what it must be like when this cramped black space, claustrophobically enclosed by a canopy that shuts off contact with the auditorium, is packed with 120 musicians in full sonic blast and midsummer heat. It's unsurprising that the conductor's chair (the same Victorian dining chair that's been there since the place opened in 1876) has a makeshift, one-man air-conditioning system draped around it.

As for other things to see in Bayreuth this year, be warned. Wagner's own house, the villa Wahnfried, is closed for renovation and can only be seen from the outside (through a building site). And the fabulous Baroque Margravial Opera House, which predates the Festspielhaus and was the reason Wagner was first drawn to Bayreuth (thinking the stage would suit his purpose, which it didn't), is also closed for renovation.

How the normally organised Germans allowed these closures in the bicentenary is a mystery and a scandal. But by way of (small) consolation, you can still get into the house beside Wahnfried, where Wagner's father-in-law, Franz Liszt, lived and died. You can also wander the Rococo corridors of Bayreuth's charming palace, where the chatelaine took refuge from an unhappy marriage by lining the walls with pictures of female suicides. Her other refuge was the company of artists. Hence the Baroque opera house. Hence Wagner.

Rounding off your Wagner pilgrimage (and the best place to fly back from after Bayreuth) is Munich, city of the ill-fated, ultra-romantic monarch Ludwig II, who, as the young king of Bavaria, fell in love with Wagner (in every sense), and poured money into the composer's ever-open pockets, losing both his mind and his throne in the process.

Munich has two Ludwig sites, the Nymphenburg Palace, where he was born, and the Residenz, from which he governed. But Wagnerites drive out to two other shrines associated with the king: Linderhof Palace (home to the Wagner-themed Venus Grotto) and the Schloss Neuschwanstein, the fantasy castle (and inspiration for all such things in Walt Disney) built in the Bavarian mountains as "a temple for our godly friend" - holy and unapproachable, hence the steep road up to it.

Every room in Neuschwanstein pays tribute to the Wagner operas with fantastic overstatement. In that respect, it's fun. But walking through, you also feel the lonely desolation that was Ludwig's life. It was from this castle that he was taken away one bleak night in 1886, declared mad, and subsequently found floating face down in the shallows of Lake Starnberg outside Munich - at a spot where an enormous cross now rises up out of the water. It's a potent warning of the dangers of becoming too obsessed with Wagner. Bicentenary pilgrims should take note.

More Information

LEIPZIG: Wagner operas throughout the year. For details, see richard-wagner-leipzig.de and leipzig.travel.

DRESDEN: Wagner operas throughout the year. See dresden.de/tourismus; for Graupa museums, see richard-wagnermuseum.de.

BAYREUTH: On now until August 28, the Bayreuth Festival will include performances of the Ring, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser and Flying Dutchman. See bayreuther-festspiele.de. For packages and tours, see bayreuth-tourismus.de.

OTHER PLACES: Neuschwanstein (neuschwanstein.de); The dragon's lair in Königswinter (nibelungenhalle.de); The Wartburg in Eisenach (wartburg-eisenach.de)

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