MICHAEL WALSH MUSIC CORRESPONDENT: If X-rated entertainment is music to your ears, then orchestral music may be just what you are looking for. Enthusiasts of soaps would eat their hearts out if they knew what we classical fans have been enjoying for the last few hundred years. If I hint at the plot, you will understand why we’re still glued to our sets; the theatrical ones that is.

How does violent blood-letting with plenty of incest, deformities, and necrophilia sound? Yes, a brutish dwarf has his wicked way with a dead maiden and that is not half of it. Dirty bits aplenty, this is none of your Barbara Cartland bodice-ripping nonsense; this is Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle: four operas in one.

Wotan is the Dirty Donald of the plot for although he’s married to Fricka his glad eye settles on his wife’s sister. Erda the Earth Goddess, and her illegitimate daughters the Valkyries, aren’t missed either in his pursuit of steamy lurve. The hero of the cracking yarn, Siegfried, is the son of an incestuous union between Siegmund and Sieglinde but let us calm down, this is family reading after all.

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You might be forgiven for wondering what kind of man writes opera so hot you have to wear sunglasses to watch it. Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) was by all accounts a bit of a lad. Born in Leipzig, he was one of nine children and fatherless at 5 months. His music teacher despaired of him and predicted that he would ‘come to nothing.’ A born rebel, he was expelled from the Thomasschule in Leipzig for drinking, gambling, dueling, and chasing skirt

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He married the young actress Mina Planer who, although failing to understand his belief in himself, somehow kept them from starving through terrible hardships. Richard, a serial womanizer was finally dismissed from his post in Riga. With his passport confiscated and hounded by creditors, he and Mina were smuggled out of the country to end up in Paris. Living in poverty he was imprisoned for debt but then came his first success; the opera Rienzi. Interestingly, this opera inspired Adolf Hitler whose life was to follow much the same plot as Rienzi’s.

Richard Wagner’s life was as drama-filled as much of his opera. Dubbed ‘a political extremist’ he was forced to flee to Switzerland when the revolution failed. Still chasing the ladies, one who was on the receiving end of his affection was Mathilde, the wife of his host, Otto Wesendonck. It was Mathilde who inspired his opera, Tristan und Isolde: Something to think about when its Liebestod finale sends you into raptures as Mathilde evidently sent Richard.

The cuckold husband eventually showed Richard the door and both he and Mina made good their escape; whereupon he fell in love with Cosima, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt. The lady also happened to be the wife of the great composer and pianist Hans von Bulow who afterwards forgave them. Do you still think classical music and opera are boring sissy stuff?

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