Heinrich Dorn, conductor, composer and critic in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, was well known to his contemporaries as a man who disliked Wagner's music. He himself always claimed to have given Wagner every chance: ‘Sensible people who do not set themselves blindly either for or against Wagner's music’, he would comment, ‘cannot but admit that he is the greatest of living composers’. Yet his reviews of Wagner's work invariably ended in querulous diatribes against what he considered Wagner's refusal to supply the necessities of good operatic composition – lively plot, singable melody and if not traditional then at least recognisable forms – in works that, moreover, were far too long. ‘Individual moments seize one’, Dorn wrote after attending dress rehearsals for the Munich première of Tristan and Isolde, ‘but they are, as so often in Wagner's music, oases in a vast desert. … The second act of Tristan seemed to drag on even more endlessly than the first, and at last I found myself in such an apathetic condition that I almost turned and bit my neighbour … just to be delivered from the prevailing circumstances’.