Before addressing these questions, Gottfried Semper himself deserves some consideration. Of the other two main actors in this tale, Cosima Wagner and Nietzsche, enough has been written to sink several battleships, but Semper seems never quite to have achieved, in his own lifetime or afterwards, the respect and interest he perhaps deserved. No mere architect, but also an influential thinker on art, many of his relatively few commissions have been destroyed (notably in the bombing of Dresden in 1945); his greatest masterpiece was never constructed, but in a travestied form has become one of the most celebrated buildings in the world.

Ten years older than Wagner, who was to play a major role in his life both as friend and frustrater, Semper was appointed to the chair of architecture at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1834, at the age of 31. This was a striking achievement as at this time he had little teaching experience and built nothing. But he was strongly recommended by his teacher, Gau, and had started to make a name for himself as a man of ideas with his pamphlet on polychrome architecture. The question of whether classical architecture was originally painted may seem recondite; but this led Semper to a general consideration of the role of colour, ornament and texture in architecture, a holistic approach which was then quite novel. This is turn is likely to have been an important source of ideas to Wagner about 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (the total art work). Semper investigated other early architectural styles, and took a particular interest in the Assyrian excavations of the 1840s of Botta and Layard.

In Dresden Semper began to receive commissions for many of the most important elements in the rebuilding programme of the King of Saxony, including the Art Gallery and the Hoftheater, a new theatre and opera house to replace the old court theatre. The Hoftheater, built 1838-41, is regarded as Semper's first masterpiece. Elegant and up-to-date (equipped, for example, with gas lighting), the theatre played a major part in raising the reputation of the city as a centre for the arts, and this was undoubtedly one of the attractions for the young Richard Wagner who was appointed assistant Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1843, following the successful premiere there of his opera 'Rienzi'. Again consistently with his architectural ideas, Semper was responsible for many of the stage designs in the theatre. The theatre burnt to the ground in 1869. It was replaced by another design by Semper, this second theatre perished in 1945, but has now been restored.

Amongst Semper's other major commissions was one in 1837 from the Dresden Jewish congregation which had just received permission to erect a synagogue. Semper also built two houses for the wealthy Jewish Oppenheim family in Dresden. In accordance with his ideas, his designs extended to the interior furnishings of these buildings as well as their structures. The synagogue had a rich polychrome interior (largely painted) but Semper also made designs for various of its furnishings. It was damaged and looted on Kristallnacht in 1938 and destroyed in 1945. A new synagogue (the first built in Eastern Germany since 1945) was consecrated on the same site in November 2001, incorporating in its boundary wall a few fragments of the Semper synagogue.

The Art Gallery which Semper constructed as a fourth side to the famous Dresden Zwinger complex (and which still survives, with its magnificent collection) gives another, indirect, connection to Wagner - its first director, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was the father of Ludwig, the man who was to create the role of 'Tristan'.