Tag Archives: Richard Wagner

Tale spin

A couple of days ago, I found myself having a Twitter exchange on a subject that I find fascinating and infuriating in equal parts. Several people were having a discussion about Brahms, and Brahms biography, and biographical approaches and writing styles. ‘Purple prose’, one person argued, was necessary in Brahms’s

Source code

When I was a student at Nottingham University, back in the dim and distant past, I was invited to join a group of friends at a performance of Opera North’s Der Rosenkavalier in town. I’d never seen the show before, and as far as I knew, I didn’t really know

Harmonious Heroes

As anyone who has the vaguest interest in cinema, DVD collecting, watching the TV or even bus posters will know, superheroes are in. They have been for a while: men of steel, fortuitous victims of nuclear/chemical accidents, test subjects of government projects – heck, even sparkly vampires. They battle the