Poor old Brahms...It's weird to feel sorry for a composer as celebrated and performed as any of the greats, whose works - and whose preternaturally effulgent beard - are as familiar as anything in classical music.

But I do. That familiarity is precisely the problem. What do we hear when we hear Brahms' music? The acme of solid - even rather stolid - 19th century classicism? The comforting, perfected endpoint of a German tradition that goes back to Johann Sebastian Bach Henirich and Schütz? Or a “leviathan maunderer” (George Bernard Shaw's phrase) whose earnestness and self-conscious historicism mean that his music is essentially limited in what it's trying to say?

This week's performances and broadcasts will, I hope, reveal another Brahms: a visionary pusher of expressive boundaries in his chamber music, a symbolist dreamer in his late piano music and choral works, a multi-dimensional virtuoso of time and space in his orchestral works. And above all: we're going behind the beard to the seething passions of the man it so expertly disguised. That intensity of feeling, that pain and joy is all there in the music - we just have to hear it.

And in the hands of performers from the incendiary Skampa Quartet to the inspirational pianist Stephen Kovacevich, from violinist Daniel Hope’s passionate advocacy to the choral and orchestral resplendence of the BBC Singers and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, that’s exactly what the Brahms Experience will offer listeners in St George’s and Colston Hall and on BBC Radio 3. There’s a powerful, distilled alchemy at work in every note of Brahms that we’ll hear, from the aching melancholy of the Clarinet Quintet on Monday night to the intimate power of the solo piano pieces that Kovacevich will play on Friday. It’s to do with the way Brahms is thinking on so many musical levels at the same time. He dealt with a unique historical situation: coming to maturity in the mid-19th century in Germany and Austria, he felt in a way that no other composer had done before that every piece he produced ought to be able to stand beside the great music he knew and loved so well, from Schubert to Schumann, from Couperin to Bach, from Mozart to Beethoven. That was the tradition that Brahms understood that he belonged to, and which he had to honour and continue with every new work he composed. Everything had to be a masterpiece, in other words, to satisfy Brahms’s astonishingly high personal standards. That’s some pressure to put yourself under!

But honouring that tradition meant the opposite of repeating what had gone before. In fact, Brahms is one of the most innovative composers in classical music because he is simultaneously reflecting and transcending centuries of music history, as well as creating something genuinely new. And paradoxically, all of that intellectual and technical labour, and all of that devastatingly severe self-criticism, produces music that speaks with a unique emotional power. When you hear the opening of the German Requiem, which the BBC Singers perform on Thursday, you’re confronted with a breathtaking simplicity and directness. The choir sings music you feel must always have been there.

It hadn’t been, of course, but that’s the epiphany of Brahms’s best music. You feel you’re hearing not just some of his most inspirational music, but a distillation of the repertoires of classical music as a whole. Brahms is, literally, essential, because his music is a concentrated essence of so many of the repertoires of what we call “classical music”. And that goes backwards and forwards in time, by the way, since Brahms is such a crucial influence on 20th century composers, as well as refining everything that mattered to him in his musical predecessors. So we’ve ended up with Brahms the time-traveller as well as Brahms’s the bearded classicist… Told you this was rich stuff. But that’s just one part of the world of Brahms’s music and his life: join us during the week of the Brahms Experience to hear and find out more!

As part of Radio 3’s season exploring music in the Great War we’ve curated a playlist via BBC Playlister to bring together music associated with World War One – from songs written on active service, to music listened to at home, and works written in tribute to lost loved ones. Explore the playlist below and discover the stories behind the music. To listen to the collection visit BBC Playlister on Spotify. Find out more about BBC Playlister here.

Gurney - In Flanders

Gurney fought during the war and died in 1937, this is one of the works he wrote while on active service.

Elgar - Carillon

Written to show solidarity with Belgium after the German invasion.

Elgar - The Spirit of England

Composed in 1916-17 as a war requiem. The three parts of The Spirit of England were first performed together in Leeds on 31 October 1917.

Elgar - Violin Sonata

Written in 1918 just before the war ended, when Elgar was depressed by the effects of the conflict – it is more introspective.

Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 3 'Pastoral'

Vaughan Williams served as an ambulance driver in the war, this symphony can be heard as a ‘war requiem’.

Foulds - A World Requiem

Composed after the war as a memorial to the dead of all nations, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in 1923 on Armistice night by the Royal British Legion, and repeated in 2 consecutive years, forming the first Festivals of Remembrance.

Nielsen - Symphony No. 4 'Inextinguishable'

Written during the upheaval of the war from 1914-16. Nielsen explained it as the ‘inextinguishable’ forces of Nature beginning again if the whole world was to be destroyed.

Debussy - En blanc et noir

Although Debussy insisted the work was not a comment on the first World War it was never far from his thoughts. The 2nd movement is dedicated to a French army officer killed in action.

Rachmaninov - All-Night Vigil

Written in 1915, the first performance given as a benefit concert to aid the Russian war effort, this work, based on the Russian Orthodox liturgy, can be seen as his response to the war.

Ravel - Tombeau de Couperin

A poignant homage to both Baroque French music and friends of Ravel’s who died during the war.

Rudi Stephan - Music for Orchestra (1910)

Rudi Stephan was a German composer of great promise, who was killed in action 1916 on the Galician front.

Ives - From Hanover Square north, at the end of a tragic day, the voices of the people again arose

Charles Ives wrote this in response to the news of the sinking of the Lusitania.

• Listen in full (Spotify)
• Find out more about BBC Playlister
• Music in the Great War on Radio 3
• Visit the BBC WW1 Portal

Listener and organist Christopher Tinker was present for a dramatic Royal Festival Hall organ premiere in 1971.

It was splendid to hear Gillian Weir this morning on the original RFH organ, and I eagerly anticipate Olivier Latry’s recital tonight. As a pupil of Ralph Downes I frequently turned pages for the organists he invited to the regular Wednesday 5.55 series of years past. On one occasion in March 1971, many critics were present to hear the first (I think) British performance of Ligeti’s ‘Volumina’.

During the morning I had assisted Xavier Darasse, professor at the Conservatory in Toulouse, and was astonished at the range of sounds that emitted from the organ, not least of which was the opening of the work which requires the organist to ‘pull out all the stops’! At the opening, the performer and his assistant are instructed to depress as many keys and pedal notes as possible, and then to turn the organ on. The gradual crescendo of sound was magnificent, although I noticed Ralph Downes looking less than happy, indeed rather alarmed.

We came to the 5.55pm recital. First some Bach, during which Darasse made many slips, causing some hisses from the audience. However, many of them were there to hear ‘Volumina’. Thus to the Ligeti: we pulled out all the stops, depressed the keys, I turned on the motor, the vast crescendo began and for just two seconds the audience was treated to this massive sound! And then, silence.

We pulled and pushed stops, repeatedly pressed the switch, gazed at the organ in astonishment at its silence, but nothing. Eventually the designer and curator, Ralph Downes (not a man for public speaking) addressed the audience, apologised and was most embarrassed to admit that all the fuses had blown and the recital was over. Never to be forgotten, and the season’s title 'Pull Out All the Stops' is a particularly relevant reminder for me.

• Listen to tonight's concert of Florentz, Messiaen and Widor from Notre Dame's celebrated organist Olivier Latry live online or for seven days after transmission in HD Sound.
• Radio 3's 'Live at Southbank Centre' page has dozens of full-length concerts and individual works from the festival for you to listen to.
• The 'Pull Out All the Stops' festival, celebrating the restoration of the Royal Festival Hall's famous organ, goes on until June. More information on the Southbank Centre web site.

 

In the girls’ corner are singers Ruby Hughes, Clara Mouriz, Charlotte Trepess, Elizabeth Watts and Kitty Whately, with the ladies of the BBC Philharmonic and The Hallé conducted by Sian Edwards, and with special guests – violinist Tasmin Little and pianist Kathryn Stott.

CLICK TO BUY THE GIRLS' TRACK NOW!

In the boys’ corner are singers Benjamin Appl, Jonathan McGovern, Tim Mead, Nick Pritchard and Robin Tritschler with the gentlemen of the BBC Philharmonic and The Hallé conducted by Clark Rundell, and with special guests – pianists Gwilym Simcock and David Quigley.

CLICK TO BUY THE BOYS' TRACK NOW!

Give to BBC Children in Need here.

What's exciting about producing Private Passions for BBC Radio 3 – apart from discovering great music - is the way the programme provides intimate glimpses into the lives of all sorts of guests. As they share their favourite music with Michael Berkeley, there are moments where we see a side of them which isn't usually in the public eye – a real 'private passion'.

One such moment came recently as we recorded with Greg Doran, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spoke about his 30-year relationship with the actor Antony Sher – they were recently named one of The Observer's top ten power couples. But Greg talked to Michael not only about their shared love of Shakespeare, but also about the South African comfort food he cooks for Antony when he's depressed. We asked Greg if he could share the recipe for listeners, and what he sent was not just a recipe; it was a love letter. Here it is.

Greg Doran's recipe for Sunday lunchtime Tomato Bredie (to cook while listening to Private Passions!)

Tomato Bredie is a traditional South African lamb stew ('bredie' is the Afrikaans word for stew).

My partner, Antony Sher, was born in Cape Town. Tomato Bredie was a great Sher family favourite. It was cooked for them by Katie Roberts, who worked for the Sher family for sixty years. Katie was from the Coloured (mixed race) township of Bonteheuvel. She taught me her recipe, which I have adapted over the years.
I use lamb neck fillets. They are ideal, as they release the fat deliciously into the meat.First brown the fillet pieces in a casserole. Then remove from pan and fry a large onion roughly chopped in the pan adding a little oil as necessary. You can fry a couple of chopped cloves of garlic in too, though Katie never used garlic.

When the onions are done (2-3 minutes), put the fillets back in the pan. And add a tin of chopped tomatoes. Then add a pint or so of good stock with a good squirt of tomato paste, and bring to a simmer. You can give a good grind of pepper at this point and salt to taste. Katie added sugar here, but I leave that out. Quite a lot of the Cape Malay recipes from Cape Town have an extra sweetness, some even add apricot jam to their curries. A Cape Malay version of tomato bredie, adds turmeric and green chilli, but I don't.

Now you can leave the pan alone and let it simmer gently for 2-3 hours.
Then check the pot. I add a little sprinkle of rosemary now, but Katie never used it.
Next par boil two or three chopped potatoes, and add these to the bredie. Let these steep themselves in the bredie for at least half an hour. Tony hates it if the potatoes are still starchy, they should be infused with the sauce but still retain their little firmness.

Serve with half gem squash filled with peas and a knob of butter, or rice.
I always make a good batch so there is plenty. It almost always tastes even better the next day.

I believe there is a Jewish saying that food is love. For me, tomato bredie is an expression of love.

Elizabeth Burke, producer, Private Passions

• Listen to Greg Doran's Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 6th October at midday.
• Sign up for the free podcast to download every episode of Private Passions to your computer to listen to whenever you want.
• The picture shows Greg Doran (left) and his partner Anthony Sher (Getty Images).

 

Update, 30 September 2013. We've received thousands of ideas from listeners for composers we should feature in the celebration series at Christmas but our call for suggestions is now closed and we've edited this post to remove it. Please don't send in your suggestions. It's too late for us to use them now.

Chris Taylor is Executive Producer for Composer of the Week at Radio 3 in Cardiff. He's been doing some research into one of the longest-running radio programmes in the world. First, some words from presenter Donald Macleod:

It’s been my enormous pleasure to present Composer of the Week for the last fourteen years, and a great honour to be entrusted with one of the longest running programmes in radio history.

This year, Composer of the Week marks its seventieth birthday. To mark that special anniversary, we will feature a composer who has never appeared on the programme before in a special series for transmission at Christimas.

Download this list of every composer who has featured over the last seven decades (PDF).

Donald Macleod

This year, Composer of the Week reaches a significant milestone. On Friday 2^nd August 2013 we celebrate the programme’s seventieth birthday.

That makes it not only one of the longest running programmes on Radio 3, but also one of the oldest programmes in broadcasting history.

To mark this special anniversary, we want to feature a composer who has never appeared on Composer of the Week before. I hope you can help us by sending us your suggestions for any composers we should consider, and there are details of how to contact us below. However, before we could reach out to our Radio 3 audience, our production team needed to do some research into the programme’s history.

Composer of the Week has been produced in Cardiff and presented by Donald Macleod since 1999. So, our own records of the programme go back just fourteen years. Even in that time, we’ve covered an enormous range of subjects. There are our regular stalwarts of the classical canon, like Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Schumann, who appear most years, but also lesser known figures like Fibich, Holmboe and Jommelli. Then there are our occasional diversions into the worlds of jazz, film music and Broadway.

So what of the rest of Composer of the Week’s history? A little digging by our friendly researcher at the BBC Written Archives in Caversham revealed that the very first programme, which was then known as This Week’s Composer, featured Mozart. It was launched on 2^nd August 1943, on the BBC's Home Service at 7.30am, and was just 25 minutes long. We discovered that this first broadcast included recordings of Yehudi Menuhin playing Mozart's violin sonatas in B flat, K.378 and in A, K.526.

In the early days of This Week’s Composer, and until quite recently, the programme was presented live by the day’s duty continuity announcer. Because of this, there are no recordings of the programme in the BBC Archives from before the 1980s. Listen to this episode of This Week's Composer from the 1980s, also featuring Mozart.

If you own any early recordings of This Week’s Composer please do let us know.

The BBC’s annual report of that year said “In 1943 records were the basis, notably, of a new series called This Week’s Composer – an innovation which proved that lovers of serious music are awake in large numbers as early in the morning as 7.30am.”. Not all of our audience agreed. A letter to the Radio Times that year requested “lighter music in the early hours to provide a most necessary contrast to This Week’s Composer.” To be fair, listeners didn’t have a great deal of choice. In those years of wartime austerity the BBC was broadcasting on just two radio channels: the 'Home Service' and 'For the Forces'.

No details have been preserved about who presented the records that first week. We were also unable to discover any surviving audio recordings from those early years. A single page of a draft script from 1944, which seems to have survived in the archives purely by accident, makes it clear that these early programmes were very simple. A couple of lines of information is all that was provided between each record. These comments would have been read, no doubt, by whichever announcer happened to be on duty that morning. The script from 1944 was signed by Stephen Williams, best remembered as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg!

We were delighted to discover this wealth of information about our very first programme. However, it was going to be a much more difficult job to compile a list of all the composers who had ever appeared on the programme. It would be essential, though, if we were to ask our listeners to suggest a brand new composer for us to feature in 2013.

The written records at Caversham are extensive, but often laboriously catalogued on microfiche and card indexes. The BBC’s own sound archives proved to be unhelpful also. The programme was, for many years, cast as a simple sequence of gramophone records, presented live by the duty continuity announcer. Because of this, no recordings seem to have been made or kept. The earliest 'built' programmes we were able to find in the archive date from 1988! This recording from 1988 features current presenter, Donald Macleod, long before he took over the programme on a regular basis in 1999. It’s fascinating to hear how the sound of Radio 3 has changed even in 25 years.

So, we made the decision to go through, by hand, our archive of Radio Times. It was a mammoth task, and one that we had to do in shifts. We found that it wasn’t possible to spend more than a couple of hours at a time poring over the ancient copies, week by week, year by year, before needing to take a break and do something else. Gradually, however, we built up a complete picture of the programme over the last seven decades. Occasionally, particularly during the 1950s, we found short gaps in the sequence, when the programme seemed to be taken off the air for a period, only to return again a few weeks later. But by the 1960s, the programme was appearing every single weekday, just like clockwork.

In 1964, This Week’s Composer moved to a new home, on the ‘Third Programme’, (which would eventually become the BBC Radio 3 we know today). On 18^th January 1988, the programme was quietly re-branded Composer of the Week.

Over the last seven decades we have gone on to feature nearly four-hundred individual composers, and over a hundred more groups, or schools of composers .

Donald Macleod became the new regular presenter for the programme in 1999, with a brief to put the life-story of each composer at the heart of the programme, alongside the music. Donald remains at the helm today. In 14 years, he has written over 3000 scripts, including sixty about J.S Bach alone (and another sixty about Handel).

This December, in honour of our 70^th year, we'll include a composer who has never featured on the programme before, suggested by our listeners.

Download this list of all the composers who have appeared (PDF).

Chris Taylor, Executive Producer, Composer of the Week

• On the Radio 3 Tumblr, the original 1943 running order.
• The Composer of the Week word cloud.

BBC Singers tenor Stephen Jeffes

Wednesday 19 June. Today, I had the amazing experience of standing outside the BBC Singers and listening to my colleagues record a new work called The Elements that Grace Rossiter and I composed for them. Knowing all the voices individually and in their different sections made this piece a joy to compose but I couldn't prepare myself for what an amazing experience it would be to listen to.

The range of vocal styles and colours that the group can create are vast, and their commitment to the score is phenomenal. The piece is being performed tomorrow at The Roundhouse with Grace conducting. The singers will be joined by 500 children drawn from 26 schools in Harrow, who collaborate with them at various moments in the piece. I can't wait to hear it. The wall of sound might knock me over!

Here is a short description of the work. The Elements is inspired by our everyday surroundings. The earth is the platform on which we live, but how often do we consider its natural splendour? The air around us acts as a fuel on which we must rely, yet we can use it as a power source on which to thrive. Water flows back though history as blood flows through our ancestry. The fire of ideas flicker within us. If we share them with our peers, they will gain momentum and roll like fire as they go free.

Stephen Jeffes will post another Blog looking back on the performance.

• Learn more about the BBC Singers
• Explore the history of choral music
• Read Grace Rossiter's biography

At Radio 3 we put out a lot of concerts. If you add together all the four hundred-odd we programme with our friends at the BBC performing groups, the ones we record with other ensembles, the Proms (of course), our Saturday night opera relays and the many concerts we acquire from our partner broadcasters in the EBU, it comes to over 600 per year: about a dozen per week, all year round - and that doesn't include the many more informal performances: the ten or a dozen live performances on In Tune every week, the Jazz on 3, Late Junction and World on 3 sessions, the contemporary music concerts on Hear and Now...

In fact, over half of Radio 3's output is live or specially-recorded music. There can't be a radio station in the world that comes close to the volume and range of live performance that we broadcast. Look out of your window right now: there's a reasonable chance you'll see a big silver BBC truck on its way to or from a Radio 3 concert recording (do wave!).

And all of this live performance, from every corner of the repertoire, presents a real challenge in our increasingly networked world, with devices and screens multiplying around us. How do we give meaning to this almost inexpressible richness of musical performance online? And how do we open up the world of classical performance to the curious online audience? What tools can we use to make our 1,000-year back catalogue, performed live by the world's greatest musicians, more inviting to expert listeners and less forbidding for novices.

We've teamed up with Caper, a Silicon-roundabout startup with a history of work for cultural and musical institutions. They've built a prototype service called 'Concert Club', so named because it's a kind of 'book club for concerts'. It's an easy-to-use web app that makes listening to concerts online into a social experience, allowing enthusiasts and novices alike to share the listening experience.

Concert Club is part of a government-funded scheme called ICTomorrow, which pairs developers like Caper with companies and organisations like the BBC to build and test innovative services that might go into production or be commercialised. It's run by the Technology Strategy Board.

We've packed 'Concert Club' with Radio 3 concerts and we're testing the service for the next month or so. You're invited to join our community of testers. Sign up and join in on the Concert Club beta testing web site.

Tom Armitage, who has lead the development work on Concert Club, has written a fascinating post about it on his blog.

Guy Meredith wrote this weekend's Verdi-meets-Wagner drama. Here he confesses that he made it all up, even the bit about the camels:

I have to be honest and admit that I wasn't aware of the forthcoming joint anniversary of Wagner and Verdi's birth before the producer Cherry Cookson emailed me in the summer of 2011. She had been sharp enough to notice it and make a preliminary approach to Radio 3 and to the production company Goldhawk Essential.

If I'm even honester - while I enjoy opera, I'm by no means an opera buff in general or a Wagnerian in particular. Which was a little more worrying; I imagined that taking a few liberties with Verdi's life wouldn't particularly offend his sunny Mediterranean-style followers but to tell anything but the strictest of truths about Wagner felt like it could get me into very hot Nordic water. Or maybe that should be very cold.

What didn't worry me though was the fact that the two composers never met. Radio is a great medium in the way that the writer meets the listener in a co-owned space. Both their imaginations are at work and so filling that space with something illusory is second-nature.

Cherry and I had worked together some years ago on a Radio 3 play, 'The Surprise Symphony', about an orchestra tour where the musicians kept dying in suspicious circumstances. Re-visiting the ground of comedy and music together with Cherry was an attractive proposition, though the comedy in 'One Winter's Afternoon' is more restrained.

But here, in OWA, there was something else which drew me in: the bitter-sweet period at the end of each composer's life, Wagner dying when he had finally achieved financial stability, Verdi having retired but unable to refuse the call (and the deep frustration) of another last job.

Two other key elements were the affair which Verdi may or may not have had with the soprano Teresa Stolz and his murky claim that he was in some way coerced by his publisher Ricordi into writing Otello: mystery plus room for invention - who could resist? The pairing of Ricordi and the librettist Boito as a comic duo was the icing on the cake - even if I'd made the icing myself.

On the subject of invention, I have to admit that there is no evidence whatsoever for Verdi losing the camels destined for the premiere of Aida in the siege of Paris. The idea however of them being eaten along with the other zoo animals (which is true) seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Reading the play again, I notice that I didn't take any such liberties with Wagner's life. Clearly still too scared.

• Listen to Guy Meredith's 'One Winter's Afternoon' on Sunday at 8.30pm.

It's always good to learn. When Radio 3 asked me, as the BBC's Berlin correspondent, to report on how Wagner was perceived in Germany today, I undertook the task with prejudices. I had theories, oh yes.

One was that Wagner productions in Germany tended to be overly controversial and far removed from anything which Wagner might recognise as his own. There had to be distance between today's Germany and the anti-Semitic composer whom Hitler adored. Witness, I opined, the recent row over the production of Tannheuser in Duesseldorf, replete with Nazis gassing victims.

To feed my prejudice, I had met the chairman of the Welsh National Opera who said that the WNO's excellent (but reasonably 'traditional') production of Meistersinger had been applauded ecstatically by Germans who had gone to Cardiff to see it - "We just couldn't do it like that in Germany", they had said.

So when I saw the Deutsche Oper's Tristan (set on an ocean liner, complete with naked drug addicts), my prejudices were confirmed. I put my opinions to the intendent of the company. Dietmar Schwarz paused and said: "The producer was British". And so he was – Graham Vick.

Or my theory that Wagner didn't really have a place in the DDR – too nationalistic, too close to the Nazis. But in Leipzig, I learnt that Meistersinger was the very first production when the city's magnificent rebuilt opera house opened in 1960.

I now think that Wagner doesn't have that much of a hidden nationalistic resonance in Germany – it's the music that matters. The German elite, from Chancellor Merkel down, flocks in frocks to the gala opening of the festival in Bayreuth each Summer. But that's what elites do – meet and schmooze and socialise at the opera.

When I covered a Neo-Nazi rally in Dresden, there was loud string-music swelling from the speakers over the snarls and shaven heads. Who wouldn't get a surge of nationalistic pride from this Wagnerian wave of sound? Except that it was Elgar.

Tom Service, presenter of Music Matters, travelled to Zurich, where Richard Wagner the revolutionary lived in exile for nine years. Here's his account of the visit:

There’s no more successful myth-maker in music history than Richard Wagner. But travelling to Switzerland - to Zurich and Lucerne - for Music Matters revealed to me – and hopefully to you – the man behind the music and before the myths of his later years: Wagnerian legacies like his pink silk bloomers and velvet-clad composing costume, the Bayreuth theatre consecrated solely for the performance of Wagner’s music in 1876, and the court of his acolytes and idolators, including first and foremost his wife, Cosima.

But before all that was possible, Wagner spent crucial years in Zurich between 1849 and 1858. And thanks to an extraordinary love-triangle, the freedom he felt in political exile from Germany (he had fled Dresden after the part he played in the revolution there), and the support of rich friends and benefactors, from Franz Liszt to Otto Wesendonck, he was able to conceive and map out the course of the rest of his life. He completed the first two instalments of the Ring cycle, he wrote all of the prose poetry for the rest of it (the climactic operas all the way to the end of The Twilight of the Gods), he started work on the music of Siegfried, the third part of the Ring, he wrote a slew of chauvinistic, idealistic, and racist essays, and dreamt of a new kind of theatre for his operas. And despite his marriage to Minna, he fell in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, Otto’s wife; that consuming but un-consummated passion was the essential inspiration for the febrile love-death of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s single most revolutionary opera.

When Minna found out about the infatuation in 1858, Wagner was forced to leave Switzerland. When he came back in 1866, it was again because of a woman – his scandalous relationship with Cosima von Bülow, Liszt’s daughter and wife of the conductor, pianist, and Wagner-devotee Hans von Bülow. Their relationship scandalised Munich society and forced them out Germany; bankrolled by King Ludwig II, Wagner lived for 6 years at Tribschen, a magnificent villa amidst the otherwordly beauty of Lake Lucerne. These were some of the happiest years of his life: he finished Siegfried and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - and he continued to cuckold Hans von Bülow with Cosima, fathering three children out of wedlock and finally marrying her in 1870.

Both the magnificently opulent Villa Wesendonck, where Otto put up the Wagner family in a smaller house on the grounds, and the almost unbelievable perfection of Tribschen’s situation, make them ethereally special places, as I was lucky enough to find out. It’s not surprising that the Swiss landscape, and Wagner’s astonishingly ambitious walking tours in the alps, inspired some of the imagery and music of the Ring – rainbow bridges, cities above the clouds, raging tempests, they’re all there if you look for them in Switzerland. Combine that with the intensity of his love affairs – realised and unrealised, legitimate and illegitimate – and you could say that it’s Switzerland, not Germany, that is the true crucible of Wagner’s life’s work. Well: that’s how it felt to me, at least, experiencing both of these villas of Wagner’s musical invention. And their musical stairwells - as you’ll hear in the programme!

• Tom's trip to Zurich on Music Matters at noon on Saturday 18 May.