You cannot assemble this one alone, so reserve a festival week in Bayreuth for two

A market town of 75,000 in northern Bavaria, three evenings that each end after ten, and a month when every room in it is spoken for. This is one of the five weeks in the catalog that do not exist without an introduction, which is the honest reason to reserve a festival week in Bayreuth for two through an office.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

The line this week has to print against itself

Four steps exist for this, and this week sits on the last of them: it does not exist without an introduction. Elsewhere in the catalog the line runs the other way and tells you to keep your money, which costs us nothing and saves an argument later. Here it does not run that way.

Here is the honest shape of it. Single seats do surface in the open sale, and in a slack year you may get one off a screen at nine on a weekday morning. What does not surface is the combination: three named evenings falling in a workable order, with a bed between them, in a town of about 75,000 whose few thousand rooms are all promised through August. The seats and the beds sit with the same small set of holders, some of them membership bodies, some of them houses that have kept the same rooms for the same visitors since the 1980s. You reach them by being introduced or you do not reach them. This office sits inside that chain, not above it, and it took years of asking to get there.

Eight nights, three of them in the theater

You arrive on a Saturday and leave on the second Sunday, eight nights later. Three of those evenings are spent in the house on the hill; the other five are yours, and you will want all five.

A performance day is not an ordinary day with an evening attached to it. The long works start at four in the afternoon, so lunch is early and small and you are dressed and walking by three. The house stands on a wooded rise about 1.5 km north of the market street, twenty minutes uphill on foot, and most people walk it rather than argue about parking. Each of the two intervals runs a full hour, which is long enough to eat sitting down and to stand outside watching the weather make up its mind. Brass players call the audience back from the balcony, three times, and the doors are shut on the last call; if you are outside when an act begins, you stay outside until it ends. You come back down the hill somewhere after ten, hungry, and the kitchens in the center know it and are still working at eleven.

The house is uncomfortable and always has been

The auditorium went up in four years from 1872 and opened in August 1876 with the four connected evenings of a single cycle. It was built as a provisional house and was never replaced, which is why it is brick and timber rather than marble, and why it seats just under two thousand people with no boxes along the sides, only a shallow gallery across the back. Every row faces the stage square on, in a fan that widens as it goes.

The seats are narrow, wooden and unpadded, and there is nothing between you and the person beside you to rest an arm on. Cushions can be hired at the door and regulars bring their own. There is no cooling beyond opened doors, so on a warm August evening the room goes past thirty degrees Celsius by the second act and men sit in shirtsleeves with their jackets across their knees. Set against that: the players sit in a hooded pit sunk under the stage where you cannot see them, the orchestral sound arrives mixed and from below, and a voice at ordinary strength carries to the back row. Two hours at a stretch, three times over, with no way out until the act ends. Anybody who cannot sit still should read that sentence twice.

The five days that are not evenings

The town was a court town and it shows inside a small radius. A court theater of 1748 stands in the center, an interior of carved and painted timber rather than plaster, and it is the building that brought Richard Wagner here at all; he came to look at the stage in 1871, judged it too small for what he had in mind, and built on the hill instead. Five minutes away a palace of the 1750s keeps the rooms of a margravine with a taste for mirrors and gilding. Four kilometers east, a court garden park laid out from 1715 runs to clipped hornbeam walks, sandstone basins and a grotto whose water plays at fixed hours; the park is open all day and costs nothing, the buildings run roughly nine to six from April into October, and the older palace inside it is seen only on a timed tour of about forty five minutes.

Past the edge of town the ground opens. Forty kilometers southwest is limestone country of small crags, dry valleys and show caves, with walking loops of ten to fifteen kilometers. The district counts its small breweries in the low hundreds; there are villages of a thousand people with four of them, and a marked walk joins several in about thirteen kilometers. Late August gives you about 24 degrees Celsius by day and 13 at night, with roughly 75 mm of rain over ten or twelve days, most of it arriving as afternoon thunder.

Where the $3,760 goes, and who settles with whom

From $3,760 per person, for the eight nights. That covers the two rooms the week uses, each with two separate beds and each within about twenty minutes of the hill, seats for three evenings in the middle price bands, the road transfer from the arrival station on the first day and back on the last, and a car for two of the free days. It does not cover your own flights, which are yours to buy and yours to change; meals other than breakfast; cushion hire; or entry to the palaces. The figure firms up only when the seats and the rooms are actually held, and it moves with which evenings you are given and which band they fall in.

You do not pay this office and we hold no card details of yours. The rooms are billed by the houses that keep them and the seats by the body that holds them, and a commission reaches us out of their side of the sum, weeks after you are home. It is the same commission whichever room you take, which is worth knowing when we tell you the one twenty minutes out is the one we would take ourselves.

This suits somebody who wants a fixed date, will decide a year ahead, and can sit still. It does not suit anybody who needs to leave the decision until spring, anybody bringing small children, or anybody whose idea of eight nights involves water and a towel.