Paul Griffiths is the author of several books on music, including, most
recently, The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard: Writings About Music (Rochester).
No musical life has been told more often than Wagner’s. Biographies have wafted incense around him, or been incensed by him.
It’s only a little fughetta in C minor, a piece J.S. Bach wrote into a notebook he was keeping for the purpose of teaching his eldest son.