‘This is asking a lot of the buttocks’: my 23-hour Wagner marathon on a rock hard seat in a heatwave

Guardian journalism is independent. We earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. How does it feel to be locked into a venue notorious for its unpadded seating to experience a full-throttle Ring cycle and more? Our critic found out at the 150th anniversary of the mighty Bayreuth festival Liszt and Bruckner were there from the start. Debussy, Mahler and Puccini all subsequently made the journey. So did writers from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to WEB Du Bois, not to mention choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, anarchist Emma Goldman, British fascist Diana Mosley (wife of Oswald) and – most notoriously and fanatically – Adolf Hitler. Culturally and politically, Germany’s Bayreuth festival doesn’t so much have baggage as its own industrial-scale luggage hangar. But it’s also prized as the ultimate place to hear Richard Wagner’s operas. One hundred and fifty years after the composer launched the festival with the premiere of his epic Ring cycle, tickets for this summer’s edition sold out within 90 minutes. No mean feat for a theatre with famously uncomfortable seats, no air conditioning and only one man’s music on the menu. The shortest