The Richard Wagner Museum mit Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung

Since its opening in 1976, the Richard Wagner Museum mit Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth (Richard Wagner Museum with National Archives of the Richard Wagner Foundation) has been a place of research and communication of the life and work of the composer Richard Wagner and the performance history of the Bayreuth Festival. The Richard Wagner Museum with National Archives has the world's largest and most important collection of autographs, manuscripts, music, objects, photographs and literature on Richard Wagner (1813-1883), his wife Cosima (1837-1930) and their son Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930). It also keeps documents on Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Cosima Wagner's father, and on the history of the Bayreuth Festival from its beginnings in 1872 to the end of the Second World War, which is continued with the Wolfgang Wagner (1919-2010) endowment for the years from 1951 to 1986.

Haus Wahnfried, Richard Wagner's residence on the edge of the Hofgarten, was built between 1872 and 1874 with the financial support of his patron, the Bavarian King Ludwig II (1845-1886). This was the first and only time Wagner lived in a house that belonged to him. Wagner lived in Bayreuth until his death in 1883.

Haus Wahnfried, which was partially destroyed in the Second World War, was rebuilt and restored between 1974 and 1976. Together with his son Siegfried's house, built in 1894, and the new building from 2015, it forms the Richard Wagner Museum. Numerous original documents and exhibits there illustrate Richard Wagner's life and work and the history of the Bayreuth Festival. For example, the grand piano that Richard Wagner received as a gift from Steinway & Sons and the sofa on which he died in Venice are exhibited there.

The basis of the collections at the Richard Wagner Museum with National Archives is on the one hand the archive of the Wagner family with Richard and Cosima Wagner's estate and the artistic estate of Siegfried Wagner, which was purchased by the Richard Wagner Foundation Bayreuth in 1973, and on the other hand the collection of the former Richard Wagner Memorial, an initially private, later municipal museum. These two combined diverse holdings are divided into a written records archive, a library, a graphic art and photo archive, a sound archive, a press archive, a collection of paintings and a collection of objects. The Richard Wagner Museum and National Archives is therefore a unique research site in an authentic location.

• The objects of the Richard Wagner Museum available on bavarikon

Collections of the Richard Wagner Museum available on bavarikon

• The estate of Richard and Cosima Wagner