For the first time, the Royal Opera House and English National Opera have found themselves presenting the operas of Wagner's Ring cycle at the same time, if in very different ways. Glyndebourne staged a Wagner opera, Tristan und Isolde, for the first time in 2003; a revival is planned in 2007, and intriguing prospects are in view for exploring early Wagner on period instruments in the not-too-distant future. Last year, Scottish Opera risked everything to present the Ring, a production that drew packed audiences and huge critical acclaim but almost put the company out of business. Welsh National Opera is to include a new production of The Flying Dutchman in its 60th birthday celebrations next season, with Terfel as the ghostly anti-hero.A Wagner opera has always been a major event for any opera house. Seats are always costly, but sell out in a flash; critics always carp over productions that inevitably seem to be controversial, no matter their approach None of that is new. What is new, however, is the way Wagner has begun to break through boundaries in an unexpected way.Last year, ENO took the final act of its production of The Valkyrie to the Glastonbury Festival, where it played to a crowd 30,000 strong. And at the Royal Opera's Prom, audiences with strong legs could experience world-class Wagner for just £4.

Among the seated concert-goers were plenty who had never heard the music before.Aficionados with ready cash cross continents to hear the Ring and other Wagner masterpieces, and the annual Wagner festival at the composer's own specially-built opera house at Bayreuth has a waiting list for tickets as long as all the orchestra's arms put together. Tickets to hear Wagner can often seem not only unaffordable, but also unavailable. But make him affordable and accessible, and his force hits home. Where does Wagner's power come from? Why are so many people taking to his music when they might never have expected to?The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the music director of Glyndebourne, suggests that Wagner is filling a cultural void. "I think it's symptomatic of our times that we want to seek out something that takes place on a massive scale, while our lives are reduced to the size of a microchip.

People have an unconscious need to experience something larger than life, something of huge emotional force, when it's not possible in daily existence."This emotional world is missing in our times. In the 1920s to 1940s, the popularity of Wagner was perhaps explained by the epic dimensions of the time. Wagner was more an illustration of people's lives, while today it represents the missing element. Wagner is also extremely erotic - and again people can find in his music a substitute for what they miss in their own lives," Jurowski says.Elaine Padmore, the director of opera at Covent Garden, agrees: "It's a fantastic antidote to the mindset of today. Contrary to the idea now that people can't concentrate for more than five minutes, can't take in complex ideas and need different things flashing in front of them all the time, Wagner presents huge spans of long, complex music and philosophy. It requires vast concentration and it hits your brain, your emotions and your ears with equal intensity."David Pickard, the general director of Glyndebourne, found that "we had an audience for Tristan at Glyndebourne that was totally different from the audience for Mozart". He recalls "getting the bug" for Wagner in his teens and making a pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival when he was 17 "There were loads of young people there.