Chris’s post about the ENO production of Rheingold reminded me of why I don’t know anything about Wagner’s music. When I was a graduate student, I invested a substantial chunk of my income in a pair of season tickets to the Met, with half-decent seating. You got a set program of opera over the course of the year. We had a great time. Then came the Wagner week. I forget which opera it was. Die Walküre I think—anyway, the one where the guy stumbles into the forest hut, falls in love with the girl, and upon discovering she’s his sister sings, delightedly, “Such wonderful news! Our children will therefore be of the purest blood!” or words to that effect.

As soon as we got to our seats we knew something was wrong. We’d gotten to know some of the faces in the surrounding rows, but that night the crowd was different from usual. Everyone was dressed up very severely. The guy sitting next to me looked like a young Nietzsche. The guy sitting next to him looked like Nietzsche when he had tertiary syphilis. (I think he was the first one’s father.) Three elderly women all in seemingly identical black outfits sat in front of us. I’d been warned to expect this sort of thing with Wagner, so I wasn’t too put out. But just before the overture began, a heavyset man sat down behind us. He had some sort of respiratory disease. It required him to inhale in huge, wet gulps. He would then make a low groaning noise, pause momentarily, and exhale in a sequence of rapid belches of descending pitch and increasing duration. He did this without fail throughout the entire first act, without regard for the vicious shushes he got from me, never mind the much more intimitating glares of Nietzsche pere et fils, and he showed every appearance of continuing until the final curtain fell, or he died.

We fled at the first interval. And that was it for me and Wagner. That gurgling, gasping, eructating sound appears in my inner ear whenever I hear a scrap of leitmotif, faint but inescapable, like a tubercular Glenn Gould being drowned in the bath.