Before leaving for the opera, we were served champagne in the hotel lobby. Black tie is optional, festivity obligatory. Fifteen minutes before curtain time, the brass section steps onto the outside balcony and blows a themed fanfare from Lohengrin, repeated at five-minute intervals.

Inside, the wooden seats are arranged in a hemisphere, unbroken by aisles. If someone falls ill, they are borne aloft down the row, the music uninterrupted. Once the doors shut, there is no escape.

The lights go down and what follows is a silence unlike any other, a silence so profound that it qualifies as a musical sound. The orchestral chords that emerge shrink the auditorium to pocket size. Wagner buried his orchestra unseen beneath the stage, allowing the audience close proximity to the singers, who can deliver without vocal stress even when the accompaniment is ffff. At Bayreuth, Wagner is soft on the voice.

The acoustic is incomparable to any other musical space on earth. I enjoy the opera with a depth of concentration that is hard to sustain in less perfect surroundings. I feel privileged to be here.

This intensity is a Bayreuth miracle. Never have I sat among so rapt and motionless a crowd, many of them whole families and young couples whose tickets must have come by legacy or connections. These are the regular attenders, at home in their pews. I have fallen among true believers: men and women who fulfil an annual ritual for reasons unquestioned, reasons whose origins they have long forgotten.

Expecting a preposterous production, I am not disappointed. Hans Neuenfels dresses his Lohengrin chorus as rats and presents the famous swan as a piece of white sanitary ware that, in the finale, reverses to display a human foetus in the womb. What this has to do with Lohengrin is anyone's guess. Regietheater ("director's theatre") is the ruling creed in German opera, nowhere more so than at Bayreuth where its faux-modernism serves as yet another layer of deception to conceal an odious past. Don't look, advises a conductor friend, just listen to that inimitable sound.