JB: We don't want to fall into the Romantic way of reading that describes all works of art simply by the emotional or the sexual state of the composer. Isn't the crucial thing about the Eroica really to do with the innovation of form, that sense of breaking the formal mould? In Beethoven's first two symphonies you can see a continuity with Haydn and Mozart, whereas was it Wagner that said that those opening chords of the Eroica were the beginning of modernity? 

DJ: Wagner was a very good critic. He saw Beethoven, as it were, as his own precursor.

JB: Shattering classical forms, whether we're talking about music or painting or poetry is a key aspect of Romanticism — the fascination of the fragment and the fragmentary as a form, for example. 

DJ: To what extent do you think that the younger generation today can easily connect with these Romantic aesthetics? Are we going through a Romantic phase ourselves now? 

JB: I notice with my students that they don't have that immediate visceral, passionate engagement with Romantic poetry that those of us who were perhaps closer to the 1960s — a very Romantic era — have. When I was at school and university in the 1970s existentialism and '60s radicalism were still living forces. There seemed to be a continuity back with Romanticism but it seems to me the mode of so many younger thinking people today is irony.

TB: My experience is rather different from yours, Jonathan. For many years in Cambridge, I taught a course on Wagner, not on his music, but looking at Wagner's works through the eyes of an historian, and looking at German history through Wagner and his works. The undergraduates' response was in the majority extremely enthusiastic. They could get inside Wagner's world really quite easily. Wagner would have been thrilled to have learned that the myth of The Ring, for example, had applications just as valid in the late 20th or early 21st centuries as in the middle of the 19th century. Not least because in his music and his texts Wagner had so much to say about the way in which the modern world in its rationalism had explained, understood and then exploited nature. 

That, in part, is what The Ring of the Nibelung is all about: how the understanding, explanation and discovery of scientific laws leads to the exploitation and rape of nature. There have been important revivals of Romantic works in other genres too, so for example the greatest of the German Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich, who was forgotten for decades after his death, is very much flavour of the moment.