Why I fell out of love with Wagner

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Rupert Christiansen has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It’s four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had hit a significant birthday, and notched up three decades at the coal face – a quarter of a century at the Telegraph, and an earlier stint at this address. There were other things I wanted to do and after reviewing something like 2,500 performances, I had said everything I wanted to say, several times over, and knew that it was time for other voices to be heard.

Truth be told, I was becoming a little jaded. My blind spots – opera seria, the final eight mediocrities of Richard Strauss, Rossini’s irritating comedies – were turning cancerous, and I was even tiring of masterpieces like Tosca and Die Zauberflöte: no reflection on them, simply the effect of over-familiarity. ‘Don’t you miss it?’ friends still ask. Absolutely not. I happily fork out for the occasional ticket for ‘quality assured’ performances with fabulous singers, and let everything else go their sweet way. To satisfy any spasm of nostalgia I also have recordings and memories.

But something very strange has happened to my taste, something I didn’t expect and can’t quite account for: I have developed a violent and visceral allergy to Wagner’s music. I really can’t listen to it at all, and while it’s easy enough to avoid it on stage or in the concert hall, if it catches me by chance on the radio, it induces an almost nauseous repulsion and something weirdly like embarrassment. It is just too much.

This disenchantment shouldn’t happen. Once you have seen the Wagnerian light, it only gets more intensely fascinating, more alluringly elusive – or so we have been told by fine minds such as Michael Tanner and Roger Scruton (note, incidentally, their gender: women don’t feature much in this field).