I found opera through Wagner. 

I can still remember coming home in early 1977 (aged either 13 or 14, I don't have the exact date) with a new £1.25 EMI Classics for Pleasure LP which I'd bought in town after school, on the way to the bus stop. Highlights from Götterdämmerung with Rita Hunter and Alberto Remedios, sung in German, LPO conducted by Charles Mackerras. The Arthur Rackham immolation drawing on the cover. I remember where I was standing as I put the needle down onto the new record, and heard for the first time the dawn music that leads into the Brünnhilde-Siegfried duet. The only Wagner I'd heard previously was the Act 3 prelude to Lohengrin, plus tiny but unforgettable snatches of Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger in the "introducing the brass instrument section" of the Classics for Pleasure LP Sir Adrian Boult Introduces the Instruments of the Orchestra.

So, 45+ years later, I'm more than a tad thrilled to have an article published in the March 2023 Edition of Wagner News, the journal of the Wagner Society. It's called Wagner's "Favourite Hero": The Emperor Frederick II.  The article is a love song to Frederick II and to Sicily, developing ideas in Chapter 18 of Opera: The Autobiography of the Western World. Warm thanks to Alan Ridgewell, the Editor of Wagner News, for including it and for curating it so perfectly - all the pictures immediately adjacent to the most relevant text (a couple of small extracts below).

Other articles in the March 2023 issue (my article is 6 pages out of 95) include a comprehensive colourful history of Wagner at the New York Met (the last of a series), and some wonderfully readable, honest and searching accounts of Wagner performances in London, Bayreuth and Berlin. Plus there's an entertaining piece by Catharine Woodward (as she was preparing to sing Brünnhilde with Regents Opera) about how she accidentally got cast as Brünnhilde for the first time - in an online Ride of the Valkyries put together spontaneously during lockdown. Based on these other articles, Wagner News is itself worth the annual Wagner Society membership fee.  

Membership details can be found on the Wagner Society website: https://wagnersociety.org/

This is an extract from the final section of the article, about Wagner's residence in Sicily in the winter of 1881/82: