In 1874, Wagner finally completed his monumental opera cycle 'Ring of the Nibelung' – 25 years in the making. In that year, Germans were attempting to forge a national identity from their mythic past, and the rest of Europe was trying to cope with the implications of Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and Marx's 'Das Kapital'. Wagner's music had a grim legacy: the Nazis admired it for aesthetic reasons and for the composer's extreme racist views.

The key aims of this programme are to:

• introduce the viewer to the political and social contexts that Richard Wagner was working in
• introduce the viewer and listener to the cultural influences of Wagner, but in particular the literary influences such as Norse and Germanic legends
• explore in more detail the harmonic importance of Wagner's work
• compare Wagner's harmonic and melodic landscape with his contemporaries such as Verdi
• examine key musical features of Wagner's masterpiece 'The Ring'
• examine the importance of Ludwig II of Bavaria's patronage of Wagner
• consider the work of other 'Nationalist' composers such as Smetana (former Czechoslovakia); Grieg (Norway) and Mahler (Austria)
• consider Wagner's own political views in the light of more recent political events (eg the rise of Nazism)