Reading Wagner

I’ve been having a Wagnerian time of it lately, organizing a festival of events to coincide with the Royal Opera’s performances of the Ring cycle in October. On Wednesday I was deep in the Nibelheim-like bowels of the Royal Opera House, recording extracts from Wagner’s letters with Simon Callow. He read with the most spine-tingling concentration and a vivid fluency that made me unnervingly feel as if I was sitting next to the composer himself. Wagner was undeniably a monster but the energy and passion of the man was astounding. One minute he’s writing exaltedly to Franz Liszt – ‘I now consider my powers to be immeasurable: everything seethes within me and makes music’; the next he is in a rage of despair at the ‘cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.’ When he finally accomplishes the epic task of creating all four Ring operas, nothing will do but to make sure that a theatre is built specifically for their performance. And he manages that too of course, with the help of Ludwig II of Bavaria and many others, including the long-suffering and endlessly supportive Friedrich Feustel, chair of the town council of Bayreuth, who Wagner alternately bullied and flattered until he got exactly what he wanted.