Michael Henderson

Converted to the Master

Michael Henderson has been to 100 operas by Wagner. He wasn’t always an admirer of the music

Michael Henderson has been to 100 operas by Wagner. He wasn’t always an admirer of the music

When sceptics ask how I ‘found’ the music dramas of Richard Wagner there is an obvious, contrary answer: I didn’t; he found me. As a young music-lover I was certainly no Wagnerian in the making. Although I had always had a love of the orchestra, and slipped easily into the initially perplexing world of opera, I had little knowledge of Wagner, and no desire to find out.

If anything I felt hostile. A master at prep school had entertained some of us 12-year-olds one Sunday afternoon, and popped on an LP called, improbably, Wagner’s Greatest Hits. One day, he counselled, as we tittered, we would grow out of pop, and open our ears to other kinds of music. His intentions were noble but the famous blast of trumpets that heralds the third act of Lohengrin nearly put me off Wagner for life. What a racket!

The operas were long, I knew that much, and rooted in baffling mythology. And weren’t those Wagnerians slightly unhinged, the way they banged on about their man? When the Royal Opera visited Manchester in 1982 I went to Otello but, as I stood in the queue to buy tickets, a Wagner buff who treated us to an impromptu lecture on Lohengrin, in the manner of one of Michael Heath’s great bores, confirmed my impression of this odd cult. No, Wagner was not for me.

It just shows how wrong you can be.

Everybody recalls their conversion to the Master — and a conversion it is: a completely new way of hearing, feeling, living. Mine occurred one afternoon in September 1987, when, on account of some mad impulse, I bought Furtwängler’s recording of Tristan und Isolde.

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