Take 12 marionettes representing Wagner, Dürer, Goethe and other members of Germany's creative pantheon. Display them with outsize heads and in various states of undress. Have them disco-dancing during the masters' procession in Act Three of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Then make them tie up Hans Sachs, guardian of "holy German art", while a stripper sits on his lap - to mock-punish him for capitulating to convention.

Could this be a legitimate way of reading Wagner's mind when he penned the Nuremberg cobbler-poet's injunction, at the climax of Meistersinger, to "honour your German masters"? What the composer achieved in his only light-hearted masterwork was to dramatise the eternal conflict in art between tradition and innovation. If convention is king, it stifles creativity. If innovation is all, the rulebook counts for nothing and chaos ensues.