Transcript of 631. Wagner: LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall

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Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Rest is History, and Happy New Year. And welcome back to the recording of the live show that Tom and I did at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the fourth of May, 2025. Now, on Monday, you should have heard the first half of that show, which was the episode on the Russian composer, Tchaikovsky. And in today's episode, we'll be broadcasting the second half of that show. And this is in one of the most influential, incendiary, and controversial composers, indeed, artists of any kind in world history. And the name of that man is Richard Wagner.

My God, my God. Infolge mit dem Rassen, zu Rast und Weih. Hör die Möhren viel voneinander, bis uns verheben hast, sich geliebt. Erheben krempet schon die Kräge.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage, the host of The Rest is History, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrooke.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Welcome back, everybody. Tom, amazing to see that some people are still here. A few. That was, as many of you will know, the ride of the Valkerries. From the Opera di Valkyrie, the Valkyrie, the divine Shield Maiden. Our divine Shield Maidens tonight were Christine Burris, Mary Wynne-Williams, Ella de Jong, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, Katie Stevenson and Martha Fontanelles-Simmons. Weren't they spectacular?

Dominic, we ended part one with a banger, and we've begun part two with another absolute banger. One of the most instantly recognizable pieces of music ever written.

Exactly. If any of you are planning to stray for Vietnamese village from a helicopter, this is the ideal accompaniment, as you all know, if you've seen the film Apocalypse Now. It is, of course, emblematic of the man who wrote it, the composer who is the subject of our second half, and that is Richard Wagner. Tom, in the first half, we talked about how Tchaikovsky was described by his governance as being as brutal as porcelain, and that is not a description that anyone has ever applied to Richard Wagner.

No, not at all, because Wagner, in all honesty, was a bit of a bruiser. This is a man who essentially bent the whole of the 19th century to his own purposes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he is the single most controversial composer in the entire history of music. Would you agree with that?

I would absolutely agree. I mean, remember that this is a man who wrote savagely anti-Semitic essays, who was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer, and whose operas to this day have never been staged in the state of Israel.

Yeah. It's not really surprising that there's a slight whiff of sulph about Wagner's public reputation.

I think the word we use, Tom, is pungent.

Yes, As you said, pungent. I think the question is, does his antisemitism, which is absolutely gross and palpable, it is absolutely out there, does it taint his music? Are his operas, in some sense, a prefiguring of Nazism? This is an argument that has been raging among Wagner scholars since really the late '60s. It's obviously a very important, a very heated debate, and we will be coming to it in due course. But it's absolutely not the only reason why Wagner matters and why he is a completely worthy theme for a history podcast, let alone a music podcast. I think the reason why Wagner cast such a outsized shadow over the 20th century is because he's such a massive, massive influence on the 19th century. In fact, I think it's hard to think of any composer, perhaps any creative artist, whose influence on the 19th century, the cultural influence, was more Titanic than Wagner's.

Right, I agree. Some of you may have come a year ago when we did Mozart and Beethoven. Now, Beethoven was Wagner's favorite composer, wasn't he? He was a great hero. Beethoven had started a process that Wagner carried to its extreme, which is to take music out of the courts, out of the palace, and to take it to the public, to take it into the heart of public life.

Where it still is to this day. Here we are in the Royal Albert Hall, but this is not a palace, this is a public theater. Wagner is really the midwife of institutions like this. Part Partly because he was such a genius, partly because his music was so influential. But also, and I think just as significantly, because Wagner never for a moment doubts that he is a genius. Dominic, we have experience of colossal egotism, don't we?

We do, from our producers.

But Wagner's egotism is off the scale. But the thing is that not only, unlike us, not only is Wagner's egotism justified, but it enables him to bulldoze his way through obstructions that would absolutely have halted a less self-confident and less assertive composer. So that by the end of his life, it's not Wagner who is paying court to royalty, but the other way round. It is kings and emperors who are paying court to Wagner.

Yeah, and Tom, I think there's also another reason why Wagner is such an extraordinary subject for an event like this. If you compare him with Tchaikovsky, or indeed with Mozart and Beethoven, or with Johann Sebastian Bach, or most composers that you choose to mention, there are all sorts of flamboyant biographical details in Wagner's life that have no equivalent in the lives of other composers.

Often unexpected detail. To look at one of them, Wagner, compared to every other composer who is his equal, is an unbelievably late developer. He's born in Leipzig in Saxony in 1813.

What's that? About 25, 30 years before Tchaikovsky.

Yeah, and it's just a few months after Napoleon has begun his retreat from Moscow. The Napoleonic Wars are raging all around Wagner when he's born. Baby Richard, which is very hard to think of Wagner as Baby Richard, but he was at one point, he is the last of nine children fathered by a man who then promptly dies in a very Wagnerian fashion. His mother then marries again, and Wagner, later in life, seems to have wondered whether his stepfather had actually been his father. As we will see, this theme of people with uncertain paternity is a theme that runs throughout Wagner's operas.

Something really important about this stepfather, Tom. So his stepfather was not a musical man, but he was a man of the theater, and that was to really shape Richard Wagner's life.

Yes. And lots of Wagner's elder brothers were also very involved in the theater. I think because of this familial influence, Wagner grows up as a boy and then a young man who is at least as obsessed by the theater as he is by music. I mean, he's very proficient at music, he's very interested it, but he's not an absolute maestro in the way that Mozart is from the age of three months or whatever. You may wonder, this being so, why does Wagner aspire to become a composer? I think the answer essentially is because he wants to set plays to music.

Right. That's why Wagner is drawn to opera above all, isn't it? Because when we think of Wagner, we don't think of any other musical form, really, but his operas.

Yeah, I mean, That's essentially pretty much exclusively what he writes. His interest in opera is not just as a composer. He wants to write the librettos, he wants to design the theater. He essentially wants to control every last detail of the production.

But I guess the problem for somebody like that is gargantuan ambitions, but does he have gargantuan means and opportunities?

Well, in his teens, in his 20s, and then going into his 30s, no, he absolutely doesn't because he's from a very humble background, relatively speaking. All the powers of patronage in Germany at this point still lie overwhelmingly with courts. And Germany is a patchwork of kingdoms and princes and archbishop riques and so on. And these are the people who are really effectively the only employers that a musician can look to. And so this is the slightly humiliating course from Wagner's own perspective that he has to follow as a young man. And so if we look at him in, let's take a year at random, 1848, when Wagner is 35, he's done okay by the standards of most musicians. He's head of music at the Royal Court of Saxony in Dresdon. But Wagner is pretty miserable. He's miserable because he feels that his status as court musician is a humiliating one. On special musical occasions, he has to wear a blue coat with a harp on the collar. To Wagner, this is like the livery of a servant. He despises the local theater. He thinks it's absolutely hopeless. He wants to pull it down and build a new one.

He hates the musical tastes of his employer and of the locals because they are essentially interested in operettas, and this is not where Wagner is at all, because what Wagner wants to do is write Titanic operas about mythology, about men of destiny, about revolution.

When you mention revolution, Tom, and you claimed you'd chosen a year at random, and I think that was a lie. You were correct. So 1848, as some of you will know, is the year of Revolution in Europe. And by May 1849, Tom, incredible scenes, the storm clouds of Revolution are gathering above Dresdon and Saxony and putting Wagner in their shadow.

They absolutely are, Dominic, and Wagner couldn't be happier about this. It may surprise people who think of Wagner as being, well, let's face it, right wing, because actually that's unfair. He has certain right wing opinions, can't deny that. But in his essentials, he's a bit of an anarchist. In fact, I would go so far as to say a bit of a hippie, and we'll hopefully be justifying this in due course. Certainly, when the threat of revolution comes to the court, he's very, very excited about it. That may, as the revolutionary fervor spreads across Saxony, it absolutely catches Wagner up. So he starts publishing inflammatory pamphlets, to which he puts his own name. He starts distributing flyers around the barricades. At one point, he shins his way up the tallest spire in Dresdon to serve as a lookout, looking for the forces of reaction who are trying to snuff out the brave revolutionaries.

Right, and this is a I don't know if you're working for the person who's running Saxony, right? Because as everybody knows, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 get crushed. So Wagner has effectively been backing a losing horse.

He's been backing a losing horse, and the winning horse is his ex-employer who he's been insulting in pamphlets and flyers. So he's clearly guilty of treason, and the penalty for treason in Saxony is death. So Wagner is in terrible peril. He to flee for his life, and he only just gets away from Saxony. Adding to the the disaster state that he finds himself in is the fact that there's no obvious place of sanctuary in the rest of Germany, because everywhere in Germany has experienced these revolutions, and now that they've been crushed, nobody wants to have anything to do with this failed revolutionary that Wagner has now become. Essentially, across Germany, he has made himself persona a non grata.

He ends up in Switzerland, which for some absolutely unfathomable reason, he finds really boring. I guess, beggers can't be choosers.

What can you say? Well, Dominic, you say beggers, and That is literally what Wagner is, because it's not just that he's skinned, he's massively in debt. He's a man who all his life loves lashing the cash. So he has no money, he has no patron, He has no theater where he can put his operas on. And the next five years, he writes almost no music at all. And again, this is something that is unusual about Wagner when you think of the great composers. It's hard to think of another composer of Wagner's stature who for five years in the middle of his life just stops writing music. You might think he's doing this because he's a bit depressed, he's a bit down, he's lost his self-confidence. Not a bit of it. Wagner has lost nothing of his self confidence. The five years following his escape from Dresden are absolutely not wasted, even though he isn't writing music. Because what he's doing instead, he is reading, he is writing, he is dreaming. The fruit of these dreams will be the single most astonishing cultural achievement of the whole of the 19th century. It will tell the story of a ring, of gods, of valkeries, of heroes.

I think it's time now for some music. Let's hear one of these heroes. He is called Siegfried. He has been raised by Mima, a dwarf, as the dwarf's own son. There's the the theme of confused patrimony. But in truth, Siegfried is the son of a dead hero whose sword, Nótung, had been shattered to pieces by Wotan, the king of the gods. Siegfried, he comes into Mima's forge and he finds the fragments of Nótung, and he picks them up and he marvels at them. Do you know what he says? He says, Nótung. No, tongue.

Night liquor's shit.

That is what he says. Oh.

Tom, it's applause born out of pity and embarrassment.

I don't think so, because that is exactly what Siegfried says. He then cracks up the bellows. He gets in some Viking laughter. As the bellows are rearing, as he sets to forging no tongue, Mima is watching on all schemeing and tricksy, and out comes the hammer, and a sword that was broken and had long seemed beyond repair starts to be repaired.

To banish the memory of what just happened, let us hear the exultant singing of Siegfried, in which we hear, I think, the resolve and the implacability, and if you're a big Wagnerian, I suppose the heroism of Richard Wagner himself. So please welcome Tobi Spence and John Finden as Mima and Siegfried for the Forging of No-Tong, Siegfried's Forging Song.

.

Einst färbte Blut dein falbes Blau, sein rotes Riesen rötete dich. Kalt lagtest du da, das warre

that you can.

In the brook's shop, the shimmering rife, in the dimminging magic, the zwingende krass, das helle Gott, that's been her schon hat.

I have it, I can fall in. But I shall zereigns mich beim zum einen, dem Faden will. Gelegen muss mir die List, lachen muss mir der Lord. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, and all be called. The verachtet zwerg, wie wird er geehrt? Zu dem Horti hin drängt sich Gott und Held. Von meinem Hicken neigt sich die Fels. Von meinem Zorn bittet sie mich hin.

Gold, Gold, weit wie es fehlt.

Jetzt haftest du wieder im Hälst? And har ich müstig, niemeh nicht mehr? Warst du in zwei? Ich zwang dich zu ganz. Ein Schlang soll nun dich mir zerschlagen. Im Schaffen, aber den ich geschafft. Den sterbenden Vater, zesdrang der Stahl. Der liebende Sohn, Schusinoy.

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Head to ancestry. Co. Uk/newyear to learn about Ancestry's memberships and start your family history journey today. It's absolutely bravoureous stuff there from Tobi Spence and John Finden. That is from the Opera Siegfried, the third in a cycle of four operas that are, of course, known as the Ring cycle. Tom, you know I'm a massive fan of J. R. R. Tolkien. I do. A sword that was broken, being reforged, a magic ring. All of this does sound very familiar. I guess the question for me and for a lot of people is, how much was Tolkien, with say, the Lord of the Rings, how much was he influenced by Wagner? Because Tolkien always denied it, didn't he? He said, Oh, I have nothing to do with Wagner. But it does seem a coincidence, to say the least.

Well, To look at the possible relationship of Tolkien and Wagner, I think the best thing is to look at how it is that Wagner comes to write the Ring cycle. The thing is that like Tolkien, he is He's obsessed by the mythology and the literature of the ancient north. So early medieval German poems, but also Viking mythology, the sagas of Iceland, all of that. Essentially in those five years, when he's not writing music and he's in Switzerland following his exile from Saxony, this is what he's doing. He's sitting there immersing himself in Nordic myth. And it's happening a whole century before Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings. And absolutely, Wagner is the first creative artist to recognize the incredible potency of this Norse medieval material. And specifically, what he recognizes is the huge potential that it has for someone who wants to create his own mythological world. And so this is what Wagner does. And first of all, he writes it up as poetry. So again, this is what he's doing in his five years. He's reading, but he's also writing his own mythic account. In this mythic account, you get Ryanmaidens, you get Valkeries, of course, you get Valhalla, you get Wotun, the King of the gods, you get Dragons, you get the magic swords that we've just seen being forged.

All of this, Wagner is putting into poetry, and he's a very, very good poet. Then having done that, he composes the music for it. Then having done that, he wants to put it on. So devotes himself to the exhausting task of trying to raise the money that will enable him to stage the four operas of the Ring cycle in the scale and style that he has in his mind's eye. Essentially, what Wagner wants for the Ring cycle is for it to be, and Dominic, I'm afraid there's only the one word for what he wants it to be, he wants it to be a sacral experience.

Tom Holland, bingo there. But the amazing thing is that he succeeds, doesn't he? Because if we fast forward to 1876, by which time he's actually in his 60s, all his dreams are about to be fulfilled. He now has his own theater in a small town in northern Bavaria called Bayreut. He has effectively single-handedly invented the look, the appearance of Norsemith, so the classic thing, of course, the horned helmet that we associate with the Vikings. The people who to Bayreut for the premiere. For them, it is like a cross between going to a theater in ancient Greece and a religious pilgrimage, isn't it?

It's hard to get your head around just how massive achievement this is, but you asked about Tolkien before. Imagine that Tolkien, he writes The Lord of the Rings, but they're not content with that. He raises the money for the films of Lord of the Rings. And then having done that, he He personally comes up with all the special effects for the films, and he designs the costumes, and of course, he composes the music. And this is not something that Tolkien would in a million years, have thought to do. But Wagner does. He can do it because he is not only a great musical genius, but he is also at the absolute cutting edge of culture and technology in the 19th century. The Ring cycle has the Valkeries and magic swords and all that thing. But it is also, when it goes on at Bayreuth, the most futuristic musical spectacle ever staged in the 19th century. It is the ultimate fusion of ancient and modern. This fusion touches almost every aspect of the production. So there is a dragon in the Ring cycle, and Wagner commissions a dragon to be fought launched in a foundry in Birmingham.

All the bits get sent to Bayreut, except for the neck, which by accident goes to Beirut in Lebanon. This dragon comes on and it has no neck. You have celebrity guests. You have the Kaiser, not the Kaiser that we do impersonations of on the rest of his history, but his dad. Czajkowski turns up, a host of otherosis, and very much friend of the show, Don Pedro II of Brazil.

Oh, lovely to have him back.

Great to have him back, isn't it? And he arrives and he's put up in a hotel and he's given the ledger and it asks him for his name, so he writes it down, and then it asks him for his occupation, and so he puts down Emperor. He's not wrong.

Yeah, exactly.

All kinds of things about musical production begin with Wagner and with Bayreuth. So part of the way in which Wagner himself had raised money for it was to go on tour as a conductor, conducting his own work. And he becomes the first celebrity conductor. So Ollie's pedigree begins with Wagner. On the stage, the curtains part in the middle rather than being raised. Again, something new with Wagner. And on the first night, the reviews, don't just go around Germany, don't just go around Europe. They're cabled across the Atlantic to New York.

That sense of being at the cutting edge, that fusion of ancient and modern, of old myths and the latest technology. You can see that there is a parallel there with Wagner's most famous subsequent admirer, who is, of course, Hitler. Because Hitler is obsessed, as Wagner is, with Nordic myths. Like Wagner, he has a diabolical genius for using the latest technology, the latest media innovations. That That takes us back to the question that's hung over this since we started, the question we began with, which is, how much do you think the Ring cycle, as some critiques do, is laced with the poison of Nazism from the very beginning?

Well, absolutely. As you say, there are critiques who argue that the Ring cycle is absolutely putrid with incipient fascism, that it's virulently Nationalist, and more specifically, that the operas are rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. So It is often claimed, for instance, that Mima, who we saw in the scene that was just performed, is intended as an incredibly negative portrait of a Jew, drawing on all the anti-Semitic stereotypes going. So he's Dwarish and malevolent and cringing. And this is counterpointed to the blonde, heroic Siegfried. But for what it's worth, personally, I think that this is completely wrong. I I think that had Wagner intended the Ring cycle to be anti-Semitic, he would have made it very, very anti-Semitic, and he would have left no one in any doubt about it, because Wagner throughout his life was never a man to hide his opinions. That, after all, is how we can be certain that he was an anti-Semite, because he absolutely trumpeted it.

Right. Isn't it interesting that the Nazis themselves, when obviously the Nazis adore Wagner and they love the Ring, but actually, they don't make a big deal of the being anti-Semitic. Not at all.

It's never mentioned. You would think that if there was an obvious anti-Semitic subtext of the Ring cycle, the one person who would notice it would be Hitler.

It's great.

If it's subliminal, it's very, very subliminal indeed. That's why I think it's not subliminal, because I just don't think it's there. It's not just because of the reception of the Ring cycle, it's because of the drama that is within the Ring cycle. I said that Wagner is actually a bit of a hippie. The Ring cycle is not a celebration of power and domination, but the absolute opposite. The Ring does promise power to those who take it and who want to use it. But Wagner shows the Ring slaving all of those who look to master it.

Right. That's something that obviously would be very familiar to readers of the Lord of the Rings. But this is That's something that Wagner himself coined, right? Because this is not something that you find in Norse or Germanic myths. There are magic rings, but there are no addictive rings of power.

Right. I think that this is because the idea of a ring of power is actually a very, very 19th-century one. Because again, it's about this issue of technology. Wagner is writing his operas at a time where it is becoming evident that the power of technology to cause destruction is It's becoming greater and greater. And, of course, in the decades that follow, it will result in the destruction of the First World War. But Wagner is being prophetic here. And so that's why I think that you asked, is Tolkien influenced by this idea of the Ring as something that is malevolent? I think he is, because I think that, as you say, it's not a notion that is there before Wagner. Right.

Actually, the interesting thing, again, is that what Wagner pits against the power of the Ring, the counterweight to it, is actually something that the Nazis did not rate at all, which is love, the power of love.

Is she an absolute hippie? What Wagner shows us at the end of the Ring cycle, Siegfried is treacherously killed, and he has the Ring on his finger at the time. To Siegfried, the Ring is nothing. It's just a trinket. He's perfectly able to resist it because for Siegfried, the great thing is love, and when he dies, it's with the name of his beloved on his lips. That beloved is Brunhilde, who is a Valker Siegfried, who has become a mortal. She, in her grief that her beloved has died, that Siegfried is dead, removes the ring from his finger, and she renonces all of its power in the name of love. Then having done that, she lights Siegfried's pyre and she climbs onto his horse and she gallops into the flames of the pyre, and the flames rise and rise and they consume Vahalla, the halls of the gods, and so the Ring cycle ends. What you are witnessing is Guttedammerung, the doom of the gods. The message that the Ring cycle ultimately ends up, teaching, is not a fascist one, but the opposite, that set against the ruin of worlds, ultimately, there is only love.

Okay.

Wow. So that was Siegfried's Funeral March from the third act of Gutter Damerung. It's a lamentation over Siegfried's death, his Tod in German, but also a celebration of his life and his love, his Lieber. Tom, those two German words, the pairing of them, lieber, love, and tot, death, it's associated with another opera in particular, another Vagen opera, and it's not an opera that's in the Ring cycle.

Yes, so this is Tristan and Isolder.

Let's get into Tristan and Isolder. Obviously, if you've heard the music, if you've seen it, you'll know that it's 12 hours long. It's a love story, more obviously a love story than the Ring cycle. What I'm now going to do is try and tell you what happens in about 30 seconds. It comes from Arthurian myth. You have Tristan. He's a famous night. He's the adopted son of King Mark of Cornwall. King Mark is pledged to marry Isolder, and Isolder is an Irish Princess. Now, inevitably, it's an opera. There's a love potion. Mark and Isolder are meant to drink this potion, but again, it's an opera. Tristan ends up drinking it instead. Tristan and Isolder drink it. Everything goes wrong, inevitably. There are various operatic shenanigans that we don't need to go into. Tristan dies in Isolder's arms. Isolder then consumates their love by dying as well. But not before she has sung the single most beautiful and most devastating piece of music in the whole history of opera, and that is her Lieberstadt.

Yeah, it's swooning, it's overpowering. Yes, folks, it's sacral. And above all, perhaps it's climactic in every sense of the word. It is the climax of the opera. But Tristan Anizolda is throughout its entire length, unbelievably erotic. There are climax everywhere. And Dominic, do you want to know what Friedrich Nietzsche, the... Yes, you do. The great The great philosopher who admired and despised Wagner in equal measure. Do you know what he said about Tristan? I would love to know. Okay, you asked for it. So Nietzsche said of Tristan, I have never found a work as dangerously fascinating with as weird and sweet an infinity.

So Nietzsche, who's generally bonkers, but in this respect, quite right.

Yeah, this isn't the talking to a horse, Nietzsche.

No.

This is the shrewd and analyst of opera, Nietzsche. We've talked about Wagner as a hater. He's obviously a very good hater. We've talked about his antisemitism, but Dominic, he also hates the French, which I imagine you're slightly more favorable towards. Yeah, he's not all bad. I'm very sad to report he hates London. He comes here several times and he always thinks the weather's terrible, it's too foggy, people are too obsessed with business. So that's very sad. But Wagner is not just about hating things. He is also very, very good at being in love. Perhaps before we end this show in the most climactic manner possible by hearing the Lieberstod, perhaps we could just give a shout out to two people with whom Wagner had very intense affairs.

Okay, I think everybody would absolutely love that.

Well, and the reason I want to give a shout out to these two in particular is because they're very intimately connected to Tristan and Isolder. The first of these is a woman called Matilde Wessendonck. Wagner has a tempestuous affair with her while he's in the process of composing Tristan. Both Wagner and Matilde were married at the time, and Matilde was actually married to one of Wagner's most generous benefactors. I think for Wagner, the sense of betraying somebody who had always shown him nothing but kindness and financial generosity seems to have slightly titulated. It seems to have excited him.

Yeah, Wagner was just a bit of a shit, wasn't he? I think it's fair to say. That's the echo of the plot of Tristan and Zola, isn't it? Wagner is betraying a man who has been very generous to him, just as Tristan is betraying King Mark.

Well, you say he's a bit of a shit. He's an artist. Where an artist has to be a shit, an artist has to be a shit. Because for Wagner, The experience of writing music is always a very intensely sensory and emotional experience. So for instance, he likes to wear beautiful silk clothes. He likes to breathe in the sweetest perfume.

Like you when you're podcasting.

Absolutely. I suspect that to write Tristan, he needed to feel the thrill of an illicit love. Actually, he writes the whole of the second act while he's on holiday in Venice with Matilda and they've both... Wagner has left his wife behind, Matilde has left her husband, and you can see that this would get the creative juices flowing, I suppose.

Well, yes. Well, I mean, the result is... Listen, the result is one of the great masterpieces of 19th century culture. But the problem for Wagner, I guess, is he's written Tristan and Isolder, but putting it on is a very different matter because basically he doesn't have any money.

Right, yes. This is certainly the case for the first five years after he's completed Tristan. But then, brilliantly for Wagner, massive stroke of luck. In 1864, he meets the second of the great loves of his life that I wanted to talk about. This is not a woman, but a man. He's called Ludwig. He's only 18 years old. He has just recently been crowned as king of Bavaria. He's the second Ludwig to be king of Bavaria, so Ludwig II. He, more than any of the superfans that we talked about in the first half, he's the ultimate superfan, possibly in the entire course of the history of music, because it is Ludwig who funds Wagner's theater at Bayreuth, and it is Ludwig in 1865 who coughs up the cash that enables Wagner to put on the first production of Tristan. I think Wagner was not gay, unlike Tchaikovsky, but there is an almost erotic quality to his relationship with Ludwig. Minsters of Kings throughout history have always worried about their Royal Master chucking cash at a royal mistress. The ministers of Ludwig II are very similarly anxious about the amount of money that Ludwig is shoveling towards Wagner.

There is a quality of two lovers about their relationship locked in a very intense passion. They're always quarreling, making up, pledging eternal love, and then the cycle goes round again and again and again.

You talk about Ludwig as a super I mean, Ludwig is the first of many, isn't he? Composers had inspired devotion before, of course, Mozart, Beethoven, whoever. But in Wagner's old age, and then especially after his death, he inspires an adoration of a kind that no composer has ever inspired before. So he really is a composer with fans, with superfans. I guess that's partly because he's an extraordinary self-promoter, but also because, as we've heard, there is just an unbelievable power, an intensity to his work.

Yeah. I think that Europe gets gripped by what you could legitimately call Wagner mania. Wagner mania, among Wagnerians, is still very much a going concern. Certainly, if Wagner is hated, and there are lots of people who have hated him and who do hate him, then so also is he passionately, passionately adored. I can't think of any composer actually who has before or since who has been the focus of such extremes of emotion. When you listen to the Lieblingsdoll as we're about to do from the end of Tristan and Isolder. I think you can see why.

Right. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us towards the close of tonight's show, and that is what we are going to end with. But first, we have a host of thank you. First of all, thank you's to our brilliant goalhanger team. Executive producer, Tony Pastor, who's with us tonight, a great man. We have backstage Hannah, Alia, Izzy, and Julian, who have been shoveling sushi down Tom Holland's throat and fueling Arthur Sandbrooke with pizza. We have our dear, dear friends in business class, our producers, Theo Youngsmith and Tabi Siret, the other two members of The Rest is History quartet. Of course, we have our brilliant conductor, Oliver Zephman, one of the most talented young conductors out there without whom we would not be here today.

Our thanks also to the Philharmonia Orchestra. If there are any people here who are here tonight who have not I just wanted to say if there's anybody here who this is their first experience of listening to a live orchestra, I mean, the Philharmonia Orchestra, powerfully demonstrate why it's so much better to come and listen to a live orchestra than to hear music on Spotify.

Absolutely. Not least when you have the brilliant soloists that we've had this evening, Martha Fontanel-Simmons, Christine Boris, Maury Wynne-Williams, Ella de Jong, Rebecca Aronwe-Jones, Katie Stevenson, Lea Zuh, Tobi Spence, and John Fyndon. What brilliant performers they have been.

Finally, our thanks to Ingler Brimberg, who now, over the corpse of Tristan, will sing of love and death. So thank you and goodbye.

Good night.

Seen’s, seet’s nicht?

Wie du zalt’s immer hab’s schmerzt? Ab und her, den Fels und den Schmerz

is my love, and your weasel. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah

Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

Now, we will be back next week, and I'm sorry to say there will be no musical accompaniment because it will be business as usual. And on Monday, we'll be resuming our normal service with a mighty series based on medieval history. And it is the life and career, the extraordinary achievements of one of the very worst people in history. That person is, of course, Joan of Arc. So a massive thank you, once again, to Oliver Zephman, to the Philharmonia Orchestra, to the Royal Albert Hall, and to our brilliant soloists, Lezou, Ingleber Brindberg, Tobi Spence, and John Finden. Thank you very much, and Happy New Year, everybody. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.