August 1 Saturday – The Clemens party arrived in Bayreuth, Germany (Bavaria) on what Sam wrote was “about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday” [“At the Shrine of St. Wagner”]. During their stay in Bayreuth, Sam wrote “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” the second letter to the McClure Syndicate. You can find this letter in Neider’s Complete Essays of Mark Twain (2000).

Paine calls it “one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. He paid full tribute to the performance, also to Wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness” [MTB 922].

Sam described those who waited too long to secure seats and lodgings, adding, “We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in advance”:

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours’ railroading on the continent of Europe — with all which that implies of worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment — and all they had got and all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie [“At the Shrine of St. Wagner”].

Livy inscribed a book of photographs bound in red buckram to Katy Leary: For / Katy Leary /August first 1891 / In memory of days spent in Nuremberg [Gribben 511]. Note: see Oct. 5 for Katy’s leaving. This gift may have been in anticipation of her returning to Elmira.