Great Regulars: Tristan also got the better of Semir Zeki,

professor of neuroaesthetics at University College London. He has been to about 18 performances around the world. "Every time I go to listen to one, I learn something new. It is such a rich opera, you cannot imbibe it all at once." The novelist and scholar Harold Acton, meanwhile, described a phenomenon he called "drowned man etiquette". Turn on the lights, he said, in the middle of a performance of Götterdämmerung, the grandest opera of the Ring, and you will see people slumped as if about to go under for the third time beneath the tsunami of sound and emotion. And Peter Conrad, whose book Verdi and/or Wagner came out last week, tells me that while glancing at his score of Tristan, Wagner said it would drive people mad.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Wagner Madness

~~~~~~~~~~~