For obvious reasons I had to miss the Wagner festival concerts at the Albert Hall in 1877, where motley items were paraded, the Ride of the Valkyries was vociferously encored, and Wagner either conducted or sat in an armchair on the stage while his acolyte, Hans Richter, took over. Mostly wisely, Vasily Petrenko’s Wagner tribute in the same building pursued a different selection of orchestral and vocal chunks, though he did resuscitate the Huldigungsmarsch, composed to mark one of Ludwig II of Bavaria’s birthdays. It wasn’t really worth it.
The voltage remained fairly low during the Act I prelude to Die Meistersinger, nobly enough played by the Royal Philharmonic but still the musical equivalent of chewing too long on the same piece of
