Were you one of those hopefuls who tried (and failed) to buy tickets for the open-to-all Bayreuth Rheingold that went on sale on 10 October?
Then you will be infuriated to learn that you may have missed out purely because of a system balls-up of Covent Garden proportions.
According to the Nordbayerische Kurier, the process failed to work on the promised 'first-come-first-served' basis because of the method used to cope with the expected demand blizzard.
The system was designed to establish a holding pattern similar to the old ROH online queue. Whenever the server was busy with orders, each new client saw an on-screen clock which told them the waiting time until the server would have enough computing power available.
The problem was that this waiting time was merely an estimate, and it didn't correspond to the actual load on the server. The software engineers assumed each order would take about 20 minutes, when in reality they were processed much faster. As a result, many customers were put on hold much longer than technically necessary.
After 30 minutes, around half of the 2000 tickets were already sold out. And because any tickets left for more than 20 minutes in the online shopping cart without being ordered were released, it was possible a whole 90 minutes after booking started to sign in and buy tickets without waiting - while customers who signed in at the start were still hung in the queue - and other, earlier, customers had given up in disgust after receiving the message that the performance was sold out (because at that moment all the remaining tickets were in the cart).
Needless to say, Festival management were "showered with complaints, both digital and analog."
In allegedly unrelated news, Katharina Wagner is pictured above landing in Buenos Aires today with what looks like enough luggage for a very, very long stay.
