Conductor Adam Fischer: Wagner's music is like opium

Trust a Hungarian Jewish conductor to look beyond Richard Wagner's notorious anti-semitism and infamous personal life to mount a Wagner festival on a tight budget that has become a magnet for Wagner lovers the world over. "I don't know any other composer who had this intense effect that makes people crazy," conductor Adam Fischer, 62, told Reuters in an interview on the last day of the two-week-long Wagner in Budapest festival at the city's modern and acoustically crystalline Palace of Arts concert hall. "This is like opium drugs for the Wagnerians - and there are no 'Mozarteans' or 'Beethovenians' who are so dependent." Next year will see a worldwide frenzy for the bicentennary of the birth...