I grew up in a Jewish household. My mother is certainly not religiously Jewish, but a lot of her family, and therefore my family, were destroyed by Nazism, and Wagner became associated for her with Germanic horror. So when I started playing Wagner loudly, her eyes would close and she'd say, "I know you like it and that's fine, but really you know, what's wrong with Mozart?" It was always an issue. Something to confront.

We all recognise that loving Wagner is not the same as loving almost any other artist. We can try to pretend it is, and would that it were so. But we also know there is something profoundly important about this artist: something that shaped the 20th century, in benign ways. Look at the influence he has had on music. Look at Korngold and Schoenberg, look at the entire secessionist movement in Austria. Mahler said: "There's only Ludwig and Richard." And it's not only music. Two of the great modernist works in our literature, Ulysses and The Wasteland, are suffused with Wagner. "Frisch weht der wind / Der Heimat zu. / Mein Irisch Kind, / Wo weilest du?" the opening lines of Tristan und Isolde are quoted by Eliot in The Wasteland. And there's a great deal of it in Ulysses, too.

Stephen Fry.