Curtain up in Weimar, 28 August 1850: a court theatre, not a cathedral of a house, and an orchestra of a size you could greet by name at the stage door. Franz Liszt on the podium, asking them for three acts of something nobody had heard before. Somewhere in the machinery, a swan on a rope, which is the part of the evening I always think about. Someone stood in the wings that night whose whole job was to make a bird glide, and whose name we do not have.

The seat that mattered was empty. Richard Wagner was in exile in Switzerland, following his own premiere by post — days behind the applause, reading about a thing he could not attend. Twenty-six years in a projection box teaches you that the person who made the thing is almost never in the room when it lands. The room belongs to the players and the audience.

By all accounts it ran long for a provincial evening, and the orchestra was stretched about as far as it would go. That is not a complaint. A small company doing something beyond its comfortable size is the most honest sound in this business. Otis would tell you what Liszt was doing with the strings; I only know that the curtain went up on time and the swan arrived.