STEPHEN FRY

I totally agree, you do however have to, as Stephen did, confront the fact that there are serious flaws in Wagner the man, he used people ruthlessly, von Bulow, Otto van Wiesendonk, the deluded Ludwig, and yet what he achieved was so sublime its almost forgiveable. you so have to seperate the man from the music. His music is so rich with emotion and meaning, unfathomable, I think I hear different things in it each time I listen, its always captivating.

I do love Mahler too, he was the first composer I really got to grips with in my teens, the 5th Symphony blew mw away and I never looked back. Not quite seen all the symphonies in concert. He has as much to say as Wagner, wears his heart on his sleeve more, deeply personal music, the 9th symphony reduces me to tears, its utterly overwhelming

Inspired by Stephen's engaging prog on Wagner:

COSIMA

He is not dead to me.
He stands, there, by the fountain,
Surrounded by red roses.
The water glitters in the light.
But he never loved me.
Gautier - that Wesendonck woman:
Dein Meister ruft!
I never understood.
I worshipped instead,
And, beneath this roof,
Officiated
As we all must do.
O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst...
Mein Vater - mon père...
I despaired
But had my revenge.
I ignored you, papa,
And you died alone.
Verrat!
Verrat!
I hated you.
Wahnsinn!
Jammer!
Wut!
Schlaf!
Tod!
Mutig above all...
The words,
The music...
They penetrate so deep,
These roots of Germany:
The ancient oak
That grows below me
In the salon with our holy relics
(Dusted daily),
Spreading its shadow...
Liebe und Macht.
That little man
Has come again
To pull the sword.
And make a dream come true?
So lost am I in fantasy
I do not know.
That is my son-in-law there:
British...
(I remember the Albert Hall
Where R. went to conduct.)
He sits in his wheelchair with his book,
The little man by his side.
They do not see R.
But he is there.
He never left me.
But for that wretched Pringle girl -
That flowermaiden...!
He never loved me
But I worshipped as one worships God
Who summons faith, not understanding.
‘My watch!’ he cried -
Not ‘Cosima!’
He died
In my arms.
I caught him once wearing my underwear.
How odd!
I do not understand.
Ich verstehe nicht.
What could it mean?
The sunrise was orange this morning
And I heard such music
Such music, Kinder,
Rising from the stairs!
And that little man has come again
To carry the flame.
Berg und Wald,
Das Meer,
Das Schwert,
Der Vogel
Die Eiche
Und, überall, Donner und Blitzen.
The English forests are the same, they say,
But their English names make all the difference.
I was once shown Arthur Rackham.
The British will never appreciate Franz Stassen...
My boudoir is filled with reminders:
His atomisers,
My diaries,
His hair.
(I clutched him till he began to decay, you know.
The memory of that putrefaction lingers -
That’s why I spray attar of roses (his favourite)
To start the day...
It summons him...
Atmest du nicht mit mir die süssen Düfte?
They had to force my fingers from his corpse.
Geliebter!
Lohengrin! - Mein Held!
My champion when all else failed!
They’re taking tea on the lawn.
(My son and his wife have joined them -
Siegfried - Victory in Peace!)
Tea out of Meissen cups
With Plätzchen.
He’s very delicate, the little man -
Almost like a woman
Save for that moustache.
Obviously poor as a church mouse
But mercifully not a Jew.
R. floats above them over the pond, like Buddha.
‘How the rhyme and metre
Help elucidate the meaning of the Dichtung’
As I used to say on similar social occasions,
Though I never understood.
The crowds will be arriving soon,
As it’s June.
I shall not go out.
R. needs me here.
How cruel he could be...
I have stained the pages of my diary with tears.
He will dictate
And I shall obey.
His nib against my page -
His ink impressing my virginity...
But I was not a virgin -
Oh no -
Not a madonna.
That was not me...
A Holy Family?
Joukowsky painted that.
It hangs in the Salon.
No, I shall receive no visitors.
The little man must be content
With my son-in-law
With Siegfried and Winifred.
If he looked up he would see me at the window
But he does not.
Engrossed in Idealism, as it should be,
He seems suitably serious.
R. never took himself so seriously.
He left that to me.
I know I have no sense of humour.
It always seemed unnecessary...
That flower maiden!
I blame myself.
I should never have raised my voice
That way the seizure might have been avoided...
Oh, Hans!
And that spiteful woman who spoiled so much:
Sayn Wittgenstein.
I do not understand
But the future should
For it begins with us.
The little man has grasped the sword.
He wields it over the pond
Cutting dear R. down from his floating dream.
He castrates himself with it
(I never understood why that should be
As R. never explained it to me).
He has taken our dream
To make it come true.
He has run off with the Grail.

What I have seen I saw.
Was he Klingsor?

30th May 2010

The program didn't make me a fan of Wagner, but I learned a lot from it and can appreciate the artistry and the legacy of Wagner's music, even if I don't particularly like it. Stephen really did a beautiful job.

Good post. However, although I can understand where you are coming from I think one of the points of Stephen's film was to try and get the average audience away from the general view of Wagner as being 'Nazi art'. One cannot get away from the fact that that has become the general view of Wagner whether we like it or not and the fact that Wagner published his own anti-Semitic tract is I am afraid unavoidable.

Lots of artists hold occasionally repugnant views (and we must also think of context) but I think Stephen's point was that we have to dig past that and find that Wagner's art is not in and of itself anti-Semitic and should be judged and appreciated on its own merits.

Additionally, Stephen, being a Jew, has an extra reason to address this; it is unavoidable. You could tell that at some level he has struggled with his love of Wagner's art because of the Wagner's own stated views and the film was partly about that struggle.

But in essence your last comment is totally true. Hitler liked Wagner but that doesn't mean we should totally dismiss Wagner. Hitler liked alsatians but that doesn't mean that we should hate them too!

For me-Wagner was a real son of a bitch as a man (personality), barbaric & overestimated as a composer (musician). And he was undoubtedly & steady anti-semitic. But when the man who has last name Barenboim conducts his works i'm in wonder and in love...

Apologies in advance for such a long post, but it’s an absorbing topic and there’s much to say.

Interesting post from Dewin. I wonder if he’s been reading Bryan Magee's "Wagner and Philosophy"? It sounds like it. That book is one of the more commonsensical ones on Wagner I've ever read - which isn't necessarily saying much, given the dross that he's often been lumbered with. The last chapter: "Wagner's Anti-Semitism", might be of interest to Stephen, giving him some lines of thought to proceed along. If I can try paraphrasing Magee’s argument without doing him an injustice, there are four elements to the question of Wagner's undoubtedly virulent racism.

W1. Anti-Semitism in Europe in the 19th century
W2. Wagner's own professions of this attitude
W3. His expressions of it in his conduct
W4. His expression of it in his music

And there are three further elements to his posthumous relationship with Nazi Germany:

H1. Hitler's love of Wagner
H2. Hitler's anti-Semitism
H3. The Nazis' attitude to Wagner

The popular post-war (mis)conception that was addressed by Stephen’s programme consists of some or all of the following elements, depending on who you talk to:

1. Wagner was a proto-Nazi, who would have been a cultural leader of the Third Reich.
2. Hitler became an anti-Semite because of Wagner.
3. Wagner was used by the Nazis as the soundtrack to the Third Reich.
4. Wagner’s music is “typically German” and, either as part of that or separately, anti-Semitic.

All these are demonstrable rubbish because they conflate the first two sets of point above, assuming especially equivalence between points H1 and H2 on the one hand and H3 on the other, and a connection between W2 (and spuriously W4) on the one hand and H1 and H2 (and thence H3) on the other, without offering anything as tedious as actual evidence for these assumptions. Addressing the four points above in order:

1. Anyone can conjure up an alternative history, but it remains no more than an unsubstantiated opinion, just like Hitler’s statement “To understand National Socialism you must understand Wagner”. Both of these have no more validity than a comment I once read to the effect that, if Wagner had been born a hundred years later, he would have wound up in Dachau (presumably for political reasons, and because his art would have been seen as “degenerate”). At best, such statements can serve only as points of departure for discussion.

As far as that statement of Hitler’s goes, it might seem a little supercilious to debate with the founder of Naziism his own testimony as to its roots. But the fatuousness of Hitler’s comment is surely demonstrated by the tons of ink that have been spilled on Nazi Germany by historians and other academics and commentators since 1945, many if not most of whom can be said to have “understood” National Socialism to some significant degree with nary a mention of Tricky Dicky.

2. If you can stand it, read “Mein Kampf” to see where Hitler’s anti-Semitism actually came from. He doesn’t so much as mention Wagner in this regard. Personal (mis-)observation of eastern Jews did most of the damage. In fact, I’m not aware that he ever mentioned Wagner’s anti-Semitism other than in passing.

3. Magee gives the lie to the popular conception of Wagner’s popularity in Nazi Germany. His figures (unfortunately not referenced, so one has to take them at face value) for the performances of Wagner’s operas throughout Germany in the theatrical year 1932-3, the year the Nazis came to power, is 1,837. This steadily and markedly declined throughout the rest of the decade, until by the 1939-40 year it stood at 1,154 (p. 365 of the Penguin paperback edition of 2001). In Stephen’s programme, he interviews someone (I forget who) who talks about the Nuremberg rallies recreating the atmosphere of the “Mastersingers” finale (this is from memory – I stand to be corrected). Frederic Spotts, in his book “Bayreuth: a history of the Wagner festival”, as quoted by Magee, is so trenchant on this point that the passage should be quoted in full. He says:
<i>

Like many another fanatical music-liver, Hitler was determined that everyone should enjoy his favourite music as much as he did. An endearing example of his naive enthusiasm was the occasion of the Nuremberg party rallies, when he always commanded a performance of – naturally – “Die Meistersinger”. [Note the implication that, without Hitler, these performances wouldn’t have happened.]…. On the first occasion the [1,000] tickets were given to party officials. In his memoirs Albert Speer recalls that those men, “diamonds in the rough who had as little bent for classical music as for art and literature”, went instead on drinking sprees. Infuriated, Hitler “ordered patrols sent out to bring the high party functionaries from their quarters, beer halls, and cafes to the opera house”. The following year [unfortunately Spotts doesn’t specify what this year was, but it was most likely 1934 or 1935] attendance was made a Fuhrer command. But when the functionaries yawned and snored their way through the performance, even Hitler gave up (p.165)</i>[i.e. of Spotts’ book].

Wagner's music was indeed played quite often at the rallies. That was down to Hitler. In Nazi Germany, it appears, that where Hitler was, there was Wagner - and vice-versa.

Magee continues with testimony by Heinz Tietjen, general manager at Bayreuth during the Nazi era, that the leading Nazis were hostile to Wagner, and resisted Hitler’s infatuation as much as they could, “the people around Rosenberg openly, those around Goebbels covertly” (Tietjens’ words). Spotts quotes Rosenberg, the party’s chief ideologist, disparaging the “Ring” as “neither heroic nor Germanic” (quite accurately except for the “denigrating” bit).

It seems, then, that there were two types of Nazi attitude to Wagner: boredom, as exemplified by the goosestepping Nazi morons (to quote Indiana Jones’ father) who formed the rank-and-file leadership, and the fear and loathing of the top-level echelons, who recognised that “if taken in the least bit seriously, [Wagner’s works] were contrary to everything the Nazis stood for” (Magee, p.366). Remember the first bit of Stephen’s programme: Wagner was pretty much an anarchist when he wrote the libretto for “The Ring”, and the works first part, “The Rhinegold”, is basically an exposition of that political philosophy, the diametric political opposite of National Socialism. Suddenly it’s not so hard to imagine Wagner in Dachau, the red triangle of the political prisoner (which category included anarchists as well as communists) on his striped prison jacket being stained a darker shade of red from his own blood as he is shot in a Nazi cull of particularly obnoxious or ideologically dangerous prisoners. The only one who would save him from the ravening Nazi wolves is Hitler.

As for the canard about Wagner being played as the Jews were led to the gas chambers, the ‘cellist who survived Auschwitz and who was interviewed by Stephen on his programme simply denies that this happened to anything more than a minimal degree, the implication being that other composers were played more. According to one source, the waltzes of the Jewish composer Johann Strauss were the works mostly played in this grisly context. When leading Nazis died, as far as I’m aware it tended to be Bruckner or Brahms that was played on Nazi radio rather than Wagner (when Hitler killed himself for example, they played the slow movement of Bruckner’s 7th Symphony).

4. As Derwin again points out, “Wagner was not seen as a 'German' composer in the way that Elgar is seen as a 'British'” one (see also Rosenberg's comment above). As for the anti-Semitic bit, Magee points out that Wagner, the inveterate proselytiser for whatever tub he happened to be thumping at that moment, would have taken great pains to highlight to whoever would listen (and whoever wouldn’t) that Mime in the “Ring”, Beckmesser in “The Mastersingers”, Klingsor in “Parsifal” and goodness knows which other characters of his were Jewish caricatures. He said not a word on this subject – not one. This from the author of “Judaism in Music”! I have read one report that someone mentioned an anti-Semitic reading of Mime to him and he was struck by the idea as being a novelty – not the reaction of someone who conceived the character that way. Magee takes a very effective axe to this particular tree, showing that all attempts to prove the existence of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s works boils down to: “If you can see it, it’s there; if you can’t see it, it’s there - it’s just hidden”. Evidence of absence, it would seem, is evidence in its own right.

Fair’s fair, surely – if Wagner should be sent to Coventry for his anti-Semitism, he should be joined there by Bruckner, who Hitler idolised at least as much as he did Wagner; by Carl Orff, whose “Carmina Burana” was the Nazi’s favourite contemporary musical work; by Nietzsche, whose “superman” philosophy was misappropriated by the Nazis as justification for their doctrine of racial superiority; by Brahms, Beethoven, Bach and all the other composers the Nazis absorbed, entirely without justification, into their nationalist ideology. And what about vegetarianism, which Hitler enthusiastically espoused, even if he didn’t consistently practice it? And I hope you sell your Nazi Volkswagen! And that you don’t drive your new car on that Nazi invention, the motorway! Wide, junctionless roads are no more inherently “Nazi” than the Depression-era work programs instituted by both Hitler and Roosevelt. The point, of course, is that if a cultural artefact cannot be shown to demonstrate anti-Semitism, by what standard of fairness is it the artist’s fault if someone uses their work for this purpose decades later? (And I see the Israeli military weren’t too proud to use the Nazi tactic of Blitzkrieg in their pre-emptive strike in the Six-Day War in 1967.)

Of course, some works do themselves demonstrate anti-Semitism. Upon his arrival in Coventry, Wagner would find already resident there Mussorgsky (for the musical portrait “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle”, from the “Pictures at an Exhibition” suite), as well as Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, the Grimm brothers (for the fairy tale “The Jew in the Thorn Bush”) and a slew of Russian authors including Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Gogol, all of whose works quite openly display anti-Semitism (OK, OK, the Grimm brothers merely collected their stories. Bear with me – I’m making a point here), and at least one of whom – Dostoyevsky – wrote lengthy expositions of this attitude. In his book “The Case for Israel”, Alan Dershowitz writes: "Dostoyevsky's views of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy are not much different from the views expressed by Hitler in “Mein Kampf” or in the Czarist forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Let’s try a thought experiment: What if Stalin had made the Soviet Union as anti-Semitic as Hitler made Nazi Germany? What if the Final Solution had been enacted by the Communists in Russia? What if Hitler had no special regard for Wagner at all? And what if Stalin’s cultural hero was Mussorgsky, at least as virulently anti-Semitic as Wagner, and what if he flaunted that adulation as much as Hitler did Wagner? Wouldn’t we today be agonising over listening to “Pictures at an Exhibition” rather than “The Ring” or “Parsifal”?

All of this Wagner-bashing seems to me to betray an inability to sort out the wheat of his music from chaff of... well, everything else. You get the same problem with Heidegger’s phenomenology. This philosophy is tainted for so many by his collaboration with the Nazis during the years of the Third Reich in order to feather his own academic nest. Now, I’m no philosopher, but I dare say that his phenomenology ought to stand or fall on its own merits, not because its originator killed babies and ate them for breakfast or picked his nose or any other such irrelevancies. The truth, as Fox Mulder would have it, is out there, and where it comes from makes no difference to its essential nature. The composer Gesualdo personally repeatedly stabbed his wife after catching her in flagrante delicto, much like Act II of “Tristan” (but without the stabbing), shouting after each thrust: “She’s not dead yet”, and then dumped her mangled body on the steps of his ducal palace to show that world that this is what happens when you cross a Gesualdo, while his servants dealt similarly with her lover; according to some accounts he also cruelly murdered her child by swinging its cradle “until its breath left its body” after cold-bloodedly looking into its eyes and “doubting its paternity”. So what? I adore his strange, highly chromatic madrigals, so eerily prescient of Wagner’s music, and the knowledge that this music comes from the pen of someone capable of such horrific murder is for me no more than a historical curiosity that makes not the slightest difference to my understanding or appreciation of the music. Perhaps the nub of the matter could be expressed thus: If we didn’t know that Wagner was a vicious anti-Semite or that Gesualdo was a cold-blooded killer, would we have the slightest suspicion of this from their work, which is all that remains of them that matters? I think the answer has to be: the very suggestion is ludicrous. There are a few books attempting to demonstrate the anti-Semitism of Wagner’s music, but would their authors have even thought of writing them if the historical accident of Adolf Hitler and his love of Wagner had not occurred? (He said, resorting to the kind of rhetorical trick he disparaged when answering the first of the four misconceptions above.)

So what about the original two sets of points? As Stephen’s programme quite rightly points out, anti-Semitism was a quite acceptable part of the cultural background in the 19th century. Magee adds that it was in fact “progressive”, in that many revolutionaries at that time were anti-Semitic because of the identification of Jews with the old, finance-dominated order that they were seeking to overthrow, and because the purpose of revolution then was mostly nationalist – another cause that was laudable then but which subsequent events have made decidedly suspect, if not beyond the pale altogether. Wagner’s opinions on this subject were one of its more obnoxious and strident expressions. But even this needs qualification: Wagner wasn’t an anti-Semite when he was besotted with his sister’s friend Leah David in his youth, or when he was close friends with Jewish scholar Samuel Lehrs (“one of my life’s most beautiful friendships", he recalled in his autobiography written in the late 1860s, well into his "anti-Semitic" period) and poet Heinrich Heine, who provided him with the bases for the stories of “The Flying Dutchman” and “Tannhauser”, for both of which Lehrs supplied him with additional material. He was also an anti-Semite of a very limited sort when he said at the end of his life: “If I wrote about the Jews again, I would say there is nothing to be held against them, only they came to us Germans too soon; we were not stable enough to absorb this element." There were decided limits to his racism, both chronologically and in terms of intensity at various points after 1849, when he first publicly espoused it.

Magee’s conjecture chimes with that of several other writers: Wagner had a chronic tendency to generalise his experience, partly through an equally chronic inability to realise that what was of importance to him might be of scant interest to everyone else, all combined with a strong paranoia and sense of his own importance in the world (and given the demons that drove him, this was entirely justified). He was down-and-out in Paris for a couple of years around 1840, literally without soles to his shoes and with a wife to support. He pleaded in the most disgustingly self-abasing fashion with the co-king of Paris opera, Meyerbeer, to help him, and – pace Derwin – it appears that Meyerbeer did indeed offer some small assistance (none of my reading suggests that Meyerbeer “treated him appallingly”, much less stole some of his ideas – the worst of his treatment appears to have amounted to quite justifiable neglect; Meyerbeer must have gotten many such letters over the years from aspiring composers, and there was no reason yet to regard Wagner as anything special). Whatever he did wasn’t enough to make a difference, however, so that Wagner remained in penury and finally made his way back to Germany. This nadir festered in his mind, and the fact that both Meyerbeer and Halevy (the “other king of Paris opera”) were Jews suggested a Jewish cabal to do him down. For the Wagnerian mentality, suggestion = proof, and voila: we have “Judaism in Music”, whose specific, although unnamed, target was widely known to be Meyerbeer.

The typical racist’s objection that “some of my best friends are Jews” actually has peculiar force when it comes to Wagner. Whatever his views, and however outrageously expressed, it did not prevent him being idolised by the likes of the pianists Carl Tausig and Anton Rubinstein, the impresario Angelo Neumann (to whom he entrusted the first touring production of the “Ring”), his favourite conductor Hermann Levi, the first conductor of that “arch-racist” opera, “Parsifal”, and Heinrich Porges, to whom he entrusted the task of keeping a detailed account of the first "Ring" rehearsals - an account that is still required reading today. Read “idolised” as “face-to-face” – these were regulars at Wahnfried. He did humiliate Levi on the grounds of his ethnicity, but they remained friends. And since 1883 a whole host of Jewish performers, among them Daniel Barenboim, who led the attempt in 2001 to break the unofficial Israeli ban on live performances of Wagner, have made the composer the cornerstones of their repertoires without seemingly being put off by his anti-Semitism. This is to say nothing of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who – perfectly aware of Wagner’s anti-Semitism – adored his music to the extent that he claimed that his book “The Jewish State” would never have been written and the Zionist movement would not have taken the course that it did were it not for that music. As for the anti-Semitism inherent in it, see the answer to Point 4 above. You’ll find it there, if you want to desperately enough, as well as evidence of Gesualdo’s murderous violence in his madrigals.

As I’ve already said, points H1 and H2 above have no connection with H3. So we’re left with the following undoubted facts: Wagner wrote music, and he was an anti-Semite. Hitler loved Wagner’s music. That’s as far as it goes. The Nazis did not love Wagner’s music, and unless ordered to do so by Hitler, rejected it. Wagner did not inject anti-Semitism into his work; Hitler did not get his anti-Semitism from Wagner, either from his works or his various utterances. Guilt by association is the main conclusion to be drawn, as far as I can tell. That, as the school playground cry has it, isn't fair.

So what do we do with this? I think the conclusion to Stephen’s programme, along the lines of “I won’t surrender Wagner to Hitler”, is a good way forward. Wagner exists in his own right, not as an extension of Nazi anti-Semitism. One thing I haven’t been able to nail down is where the post-war perception of the Wagner-Nazi connection originated. Perhaps the beginnings of an answer lie in the word “self-perpetuating”, which is how at least one writer accounts for the bulk of the unofficial Israeli ban on Wagner. I’d be interested to hear Stephen’s thoughts on this: just how precisely can he pin down the cause of his angst as a Jew about his love of Wagner?

The other thing that makes me think Derwin has read Magee’s book is his reference to Wagner’s undying absorption in the philosophy of Schopenhauer from 1854 until the end of his life. Wagner’s last three works are nothing less than musical expressions of this philosophy, which is most akin to the Buddhist and Hindu nirvana, which the Hindus see as “moksha” – escape from the cycle of reincarnation, desire and suffering into union with Brahman, the godhead of which we are all part. Wagner regarded “The Ring” as an unconscious expression of this philosophy, even though the libretto predated his first contact with it. One project he toyed with shortly after he first read the philosopher, before eventually subsuming its content into “Parsifal”, was “The Victor”, about Shakyamuni, the future Buddha. Schopenhaurean philosophy is a rejection of earthly life that could not be more diametrically opposed to Nazi ideology if it tried. No wonder the leading Nazis hated and feared him so much!

In short: Wagner the anti-Semite has nothing to say to me. He is supremely irrelevant. On the other hand, Wagner the anarchist – and for that matter Wagner the environmentalist – couldn’t be more significant for me. The message of “The Rhinegold” is that of Lord Acton: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It’s a message that I believe has been supremely relevant ever since we started farming and living in cities. The consequences of this power are shown as the degradation of both the human spirit and the natural world, symbolised when Wotan (i.e. homo sapiens) first became conscious and tore a branch off the world ash tree to make the spear by which he exercises power in the world. The ash tree withered and its life-giving spring dried up when he thus raped nature to fulfil his own conscious will to power. What a message for today!! (I can’t reconcile myself with the Schopenhauer bit yet, but maybe that’ll come in a decade or two. It does guide me towards an understanding of the enigmatic ending to the whole cycle, though.)

In the end, however, the most powerful argument for Wagner I have is the “ineffable nausea” that grips me whenever I listen to him, especially “The Ring” and “Tristan”. It’s a visceral feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if a giant fist were making me vomit in the most intensely, profoundly fulfilling manner. OK, you can stop laughing now. This is where words just don’t cut it. Does anyone else have a remotely similar experience, or should I be locked up?

I have just watched the repeat of Stephen's programme on Wagner and I just wanted to make the comment that, although not an all consuming Wagner fan myself, I do recognise the man's genuis.

However, I wish my late father could have seen the programme. He was a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany and, as a young and penniless music student, hitchhiked from Hamburg to Bayreuth to see the Ring cycle promoted by the same fascination and love of Wagner's music that Stephen has, despite being Jewish. I could almost see him sitting there saying exactly the same things.

On his deathbed he expressed a wish that I, too, one day would also find it in myself to love the music as much as he did.

He would definitely have agreed with Stephen's statement at the end of the programme that Wagner's music was "with the Angels". Mr Fry, you are not alone.