At the age of ten, at her own insistence, she attended the first complete, four-opera performance of The Ring Cycle in Bayreuth in 1876, for which her father served as Wagner's special documentary-archivist.

At various times, attendees included Gerhart Hauptmann (whose son married Bernstein's daughter, Eva), Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Engelbert Humperdinck, Henrik Ibsen, Annette Kolb, Hermann Levi, Alma and Gustav Mahler, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, and Max Weber, among many others.

Shortly after her marriage in 1892 to Max Bernstein, she wrote her first play, Wir Drei (English: "We Three"), which created considerable discussion; some saw it as a dramatization of the matrimonial and sexual views of Taine and Zola.

Her next few plays fell short of exciting the same public attention: Dämmerung ("Twilight", 1893); Die Mutter Maria, 1894; Tedeum (1896); Themistokles (1897); and Daguy Peters.

[citation needed] Almost certainly at the instigation of Winifred Wagner, Bernstein was awarded an exit visa for the United States in 1941, but refused to leave her sister Gabriele behind (who like Elsa had lost almost all her eyesight) as she had become her caretaker.