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Copyright © 2017 Simon Callow
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Source ISBN: 9780008105716
Ebook edition: January 2017 ISBN: 9780008105709
Version: 2017-12-07
To David Hare,
friend, adviser, beacon.
‘Only those friends, however, who feel an interest in the Man within the Artist, are capable of understanding him.’
Richard Wagner,
A Communication to My Friends, 1851
CONTENTS
12 The Long Day’s Task is Done
In the summer of 2012, Kasper Holten, then artistic director of the Royal Opera House in London, asked me to create a show to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary. I threw myself at the vast literature, and emerged astounded at what I had found. I knew his work very well – had been a Wagnerian since early adolescence, knew all about leitmotive and the Tristan chord – but, apart from his notorious anti-Semitism, knew remarkably little about the man, his vast intellectual scope, his rascally sex life, his revolutionary politics, his heroic struggle to create Bayreuth. In particular, I knew nothing about his quite extraordinary personality. I determined to put what I had discovered into the one-man show I was evolving, with the result that the text that I read out on the first day of rehearsals lasted four hours. People came and went, had lunch, returned, and came back to find me still droning on. I couldn’t bear to leave anything out. The moment we started rehearsing,