As if to make the point that Richard Wagner's shadow looms over all the classical music that followed him, this Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra began and ended with him. Preludes to Acts I and III of Lohengrin bookended more substantial offerings by Joseph Jongen – Symphonie concertante for organ and orchestra – and Richard Strauss, the latter with his famous musical homage to Nietzsche. Even when the references are indirect, it is clear that Wagner, musically, preceded Strauss and Jongen and that Western music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have been very different without him.