Wagner was the creator of the very theatre in which his heaving, roaring audiences sat. He was the self-proclaimed 'Musician of the Future'. This was exactly what he had set out to achieve, but there was nothing inevitable about it. The magnitude of his accomplishment grew out of a profound instability, which characterises every stage and every phase of his life and which is at the very heart of his music. Withdrawing from instability back into the kingdom of art where he would always be an absolute monarch, where his will would always prevail, he explored the depths and the heights of human experience, by which he meant, of course, his own experience. In this vision of Wagner's life, Simon Callow turns his storytelling energies towards this vast and complex revolutionary of music