What is the worst possible holiday destination for a Tory MP? A fortnight on the yacht of a friendly arms dealer? A weekend in Tuscany culminating in a midnight pilgrimage to the grave of Il Duce? Or a ranch vacation in the wild, wild west with Senator Larry “wide-stance” Craig, stopping off en route to pay one’s respects to Donald Rumsfeld?

Well, I think I can top all that. I went to a music festival.

And before you jump to the conclusion that I am about to reveal the dark secrets of what I got up to with Caitlin Moran behind the main stage at Reading, or confess to a lost weekend in Leeds with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, I have to explain that it was an opera festival.

You might think that there could be few more innocent summer pursuits for a man coasting gently towards middle age than an opera festival. What could possibly be the problem with the sort of event at which you might expect to see Richard Morrison in conversation with Magnus Linklater about the finer points of bel canto.

Except that the festival I was at wasn’t quite like that.

I spent three fantastic nights at the music festival of all music festivals, most deeply perceived as, well, weird. I joined the pilgrimage to the shrine of the man they still call the Master. I willingly submitted myself to the rituals of what’s seen as High Art’s most arcane cult. I went to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

And why should that be such a bad thing? Well, in ordinary circumstances it might be considered, at most, a little eccentric to spend August sweating inside an auditorium while people sing in German, rather than relaxing beside a swimming pool on a lounger poached from the Germans. But spending time at a festival exclusively devoted to Wagner, surrounded by other Wagner devotees, is more than just a little eccentric in some eyes. For views of Wagner are often clouded by the association between his name and some of his more conspicuous admirers. His music was idolised by, indeed twisted to serve the purpose of, Adolf Hitler. The martial strain in some of the music, and the decidedly odd views of Wagner himself, have left many inclined to view his stuff as no more than a soundtrack for National Socialism. As Woody Allen put it: “Every time I listen to Wagner I’m overcome with an irresistible desire . . . to invade Poland.”

Some Wagner critics allow that you don’t have to be a Nazi to like his music (though they think it helps . . .) you just have to be too outré for words. Wagner himself liked to dress in silks and velvets, flounces and knickerbockers. His operas contain tales of unsatisfiable yearnings, they’re populated by strong women who suffer for love and young knights whose spears bring ease to suffering princes, etc . . . We all know, the insinuation runs, what type of person is going to like highly strung music full of divas and torch songs. Bet they listen to a lot of Tristanin San Francisco.

So put those perspectives together and you generate an assumption that Wagner is music for those who think Norman Tebbit is a lefty sell-out and the Village People insufficiently camp. A Wagner festival is where nostalgics of the extreme right meet the Pet Shop Boys Fan Club. A perfect backdrop, then, for a holidaying Tory MP.

You can’t deny that Wagner bewitched Hitler (even if he left most of the Nazi hierarchy bored stiff), nor is it worth arguing over the camp element in both his personality and appeal. They’re both part of the picture and if that’s all you want to see, then fine. But, as A. N. Wilson points out in his marvellous new novel, Winnie and Wolf, you’re missing so much if you allow that, and only that, to be your view of Wagner. The man himself was a monster – a raving antiSemite, pathetically self-obsessed, deceitful and demanding to the nth degree – but he was also a genius. Not just a great musician but a composer who took music and music drama further than any other individual. Ever.

One can argue over the “meaning” of his operas for ever (itself a sign of their richness – they’re very far from being the one-dimensional political tracts some depict them as) and I shall return to that subject in a second. But nobody I know is drawn to Wagner because they want to see Schopenhauer’s ideas enacted on stage. We’re drawn to Wagner by the music. Haunting and evocative, romantic and wrenching, beautiful and gentle, soulful and even, hard though it might be to imagine it, amusing at times, Wagner’s music has a capacity to take possession of your soul and inhabit your mind like no one else’s. Someone once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. You cannot really convey the appeal of one sublimely special medium through another. But all I can say is that anyone with a mind, and soul, open to music’s beauty cannot spend time in the festival theatre Wagner himself designed for his operas in Bayreuth and not be transported. It is a building constructed to envelop you in music and sitting within it makes surround-sound a reality like nothing else.

Bayreuth is, however, more than just a sublimely designed opera house. From this town, chosen by Wagner himself as his spiritual home, his family have shown, over the generations, how open to interpretation, and reinterpretation, his works are. His great-granddaughter Katharina was under attack this August for her radical reworking of one of his greatest operas. I count myself massively fortunate to have seen her production, which set I and my fellow operagoers talking for hours, combining as it did, reverence for the beauty of ancestral melodies with challenging new thinking. And in that respect, perhaps it was, after all, an appropriate sort of thing for a Tory MP to do . . .

Left-wing cant and the indefensible

There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.

We had two this weekend. We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller’s words, “a mongoloid”, avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.

But their treatment of Miller was positively caustic besides their lionising of one of Britain’s most shameless intellectual apologists for evil. A fawning tribute to the Eric Hobsbawm, 90, made light of his championing of Soviet communism and his support for Stalin, the gulag and totalitarian tyranny. I’m happy to leave the old devil in peace to enjoy his dotage. But can we at least be spared any more laying of garlands at the feet of this man who supported mass murder?

A cool smoke

Cycling through Hyde Park yesterday morning (in tribute to Boris Johnson) I witnessed the quintessence of cool. Riding past me in the other direction was someone pedalling at a gentle pace while he appreciated the view. . . and enjoyed his morning fag. Cycling and smoking simultaneously combines informality with insouciance beautifully in a way that few Englishmen can manage. I suspect the culprit must have been French.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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