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       COPYRIGHT

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

      Copyright © 2017 Simon Callow

      Cover photograph of Simon Callow © Richard Pohle

      Simon Callow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will mbe glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780008105716

      Ebook edition: January 2017 ISBN: 9780008105709

      Version: 2017-12-07

       DEDICATION

      To David Hare,

      friend, adviser, beacon.

       EPIGRAPH

      ‘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

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       Foreword

       Vorspiel

       1 Young Richard

       2 Out in the World

       3 Doldrums

       4 Triumph

       5 The World in Flames

       6 Pause for Thought

       7 It Begins

       8 Suspension

       9 Limbo

       10 Enter a Swan

       11 Towards the Green Hill

       12 The Long Day’s Task is Done

       Coda

       Chronology

       Wagner’s Works

       Bibliography

       List of Illustrations

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       By the Same Author

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

FOR.tif

       FOREWORD

      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,

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