The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Wagner himself conceived and promoted the idea of a special festival to showcase his own works, in particular his monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayreuth_Festival
Being a stronghold of right-wing parties since the 1920s, Bayreuth became a center of Nazi ideology. Nazi leaders often visited the Wagner festival and tried to turn Bayreuth into a Nazi model town. It was one of several places in which town planning was administered directly from Berlin, due to Hitler's special interest in the town and in the festival. Hitler loved the music of Richard Wagner, and he became a close friend of Wagner's daughter,Winifred after she took over the festival. Hitler frequently attended Wagner performances in the Bayreuth Festival Hall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayreuth
As part of the regime's propaganda intentions of 'Nazifying' German culture, specific attempts wereoften made to appropriate Wagner's music as 'Nazi". The author, Paul Bulow also wrote an article entitled Adolf Hitler and the Bayreuth Ideological Circle ' (Zeitschrift fur Musik, July 1933). Such articles were Nazi attempts to rewrite history to demonstrate that Hitler was integral to German culture.
The Bayreuth Circle was a name originally applied by some writers to devotees of Richard Wagner's music who attended and supported the annual Bayreuth Festival in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. As some of these devotees espoused nationalistic German politics, and some of them were supporters of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s onwards, this group of people has been associated by some writers with the rise of Nazism, although there was never any organisation named the 'Bayreuth Circle' or any group of people who identified themselves by that name. Evidence for any political active role played by a 'Bayreuth Circle' as a group is therefore highly contentious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayreuth_Circle
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_controversies
Features: Inscribed by Ruth (Muffie") Steinkraus to her father"
