BAYREUTH, Germany — It was my first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. There was the thrill of realizing my long-held dream of hearing Richard Wagner’s music in the opera house he built, where some of my favorite recordings were made. But there was queasiness, too, at the inescapable memories of old photos showing the theater defiled during the Nazi era, festooned with swastikas and visited regularly by Hitler.

Then I stepped outside at intermission on Saturday evening and checked my phone.

Swastika flags, like the ones I’d just been ruminating on, were all over my Twitter feed — but they were flying back in the United States, in Charlottesville, Va. There were photos of angry young men marching there with torches, and reports of them chanting about Jews and invoking the Nazi phrase “blood and soil.” A young woman who was standing up to racism was killed. In 2017.

The images shocked the world. But seeing them play out from here — a place that after more than seven decades is still grappling with the horrors of its Nazi past — added another dimension, and a frightening reminder of where such outbursts can lead.

In recent years, Bayreuth has stepped up its efforts to confront its history. A 2008 “Parsifal,” directed by Stefan Herheim, intertwined the opera’s plot with imagery from the founding of the festival and the dark progression of the 20th century in Germany. The bronze bust of Wagner outside the Festival Theater is now surrounded by gray panels, an exhibition called “Silenced Voices,” devoted to Jewish artists who faced discrimination at the festival at the hands of Wagner’s heirs, and to those killed in the Holocaust.