Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school.

As the Israeli author Amos Elon writes in his biography of Herzl: "For inspiration and to dispel occasional doubts, Herzl turned to Wagnerian music.

If a dispassionate response was obligatory, then Wagnerian music, in particular, with its irresistibly sensuous-emotional appeal, was bound to seem wholly illegitimate.

Wagnerian music in general had now taken its hold and was irresistibly leading Nietzsche to admit a response diametrically opposed to the objectivity that had commended itself to him before.

It was not simply the attraction of Wagner's music; Nietzsche, after all, had known some Wagnerian music, including the quintessentially Wagnerian Tristan, for years without feeling any overwhelming pull.

It was a strange sensation, passing from the pagan rites and primal choruses of the second act, through the Wagnerian music of Fevronia's vision of approaching spring, into the heavenly city with its devout Russian ritual.

For C. S. Lewis, Wagnerian music "was a new kind of pleasure, if indeed pleasure is the right word, rather than trouble, ecstasy, astonishment, a conflict of sensations without name."

Was that the answer, or was it merely a case of being excluded because someone had arrived late, which practice still held on the occasions when Wagnerian music was listened to.

'You share my pleasure in Wagnerian music, I see,' he said.

In large measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show their clothes.