This year, Australian Cor Anglais player Rixon Thomas was invited to the Bayreuth Festival to perform the famous English Horn solo in Tristan und Isolde. A former oboist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and now with the Royal Danish Orchestra, Thomas looks back on his history-making performance.

Rixon Thomas in front of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. Photo supplied

The biggest solo that exists for the Cor Anglais starts softly on a middle C and ends forte on a low C. This unaccompanied solo lasts for almost four minutes and is in the third act of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Every year, Wagner fans gather in Germany for the Bayreuth Festival, where these mega-operas are performed over a month in Wagner’s purpose-built Festspielhaus (the Bayreuth Festival Theatre). There’s always a scramble to buy tickets. They’re expensive and very difficult to get.

To be invited to play in Bayreuth was never something I had wished for. It would simply never happen. Germany has the best orchestras in the world and plenty of great oboists. Like most festival orchestras, there’s no audition process. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. So...