Accidental Tourism in Wagner’s Bayreuth - An Analysis of Visitors’ Motivations and Experiences in Wagner’s Bayreuth.

This research offers an analysis of the motivations and experiences of visitors in Wagner’s Bayreuth. Wagner’s Bayreuth is a great example of music tourism as it is maybe the first site where music lovers from around the world visited in order to listen and experience classical music. Taking as a starting point the theories developed on music tourism studies on sites related to popular music such as the ones of Connell and Gibson (2003), Gibson and Connell (2005, 2007) and Bolderman and Reijnders (2016), this research will try to identify whether these theories apply also on the classical music field, based on the example of Wagner’s Bayreuth. This paper addresses four visitor elements; the motivation, the expectation, the experience and evaluation of the above. The personal ‘identity’ of each visitor plays also an important role on their motives and evaluation procedure of the experience, as it defines the relationship between the visitor and the place and also the way of evaluation through their personal story. Through the analysis of these elements, using a qualitative approach with in depth interviews based on these elements, the findings suggest that there are some similarities in the behavior of the visitors between Wagner’s Bayreuth and previous researches on popular culture sites. However, the major difference lies in the fact that the visitors of Wagner’s Bayreuth, who visit the city outside the period of the festival, are not fans of the music and the composer and thus, they have different motives and experiences than the ‘Wagnerians’.