sawyl | Early Wagnerian exposure

For some reason, I have a very strange early Wagnerian memory. I remember being quite young and, unable to sleep, heading downstairs to the drawing room to find my parents watching the Ring on TV. I guess it must have been a rebroadcast performance of one of the Patrice Chereau stagings because I remember being totally fascinated by the music and the huge crazy pendulum that kept flicking across the stage, presumably to symbolise the ash tree or something. I also remember quite distinctly the problems my pater had attempting to explain the plot of the Ring cycle and the concepts of modernism in opera production to a three year old child.

It sort of sums up my childhood with it's strange mix of bohemianism, precociousness and pretension. I mean, having a drawing room — how very, absurdly, Jane Austen.