

Dog days ... Richard Wagner. Photograph: Getty

Wagner's whip for his beloved Newfoundland dog, Russ, is displayed at the Wagner museum in Tribschen. This is the house on the shores of Lake Lucerne, with truly transcendent alpine views, where he lived for six years and completed Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and penned such wholesome - and notoriously un-wholesome - tracts as On Conducting and Jewishness in Music.

I visited yesterday, and among the manuscripts, paintings, and letters (I was promised by my Tribschen companions that you could see a letter in which Wagner invited a servant girl to meet him in the woods and to "wear the red knickers" - but alas, the powers that be at Tribschen must have removed it), I also discovered this strange piece of Wagneriana. The whip is mounted in a kitschy gilded frame, and set among a magnificently over-the-top oil painting of stars and swirls, all endowing this instrument of violent animal husbandry with almost mystical powers.

The idea of whipping dogs seems today just a trifle cruel, but Wagner was devoted to Russ (the dog is buried at his master's feet in the grave at Wahnfried in Bayreuth), as he was to all of his pets. He even supposedly used the reactions of an ealier pet, Peps, a King Charles Spaniel, as a final arbiter on whether he should keep or chuck out whatever he'd just written - which means this canine companion was thus probably the only critic Wagner ever listened to.

Tribschen also houses the most famous staircase in musical history: on Christmas Day in 1870, Cosima Wagner's birthday, Richard woke up his wife with the sound of a new composition being played on the stairs, his Siegfried Idyll. This rapturous music is the most intimate and most wonderfully joyful 18 minutes of music Wagner ever wrote. There on the stairs in Tribschen (the all-wood stairwell actually has rather good acoustics) you can imagine Cosima's worshipful adoration of her husband reaching new heights of obsessive intensity. The Idyll was also the first music that Arturo Toscanini conducted with his elite orchestra in 1938 during the first-ever Lucerne Festival, an ensemble that's a distant precursor of Claudio Abbado's Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Even more significantly, the piece is also the starting point for one of the funniest episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Trick or Treat, in which Larry David's whistling of the main tune from Siegfried Idyll outside a cinema in the opening scene of the show ends with him conducting a brass band arrangement of the Meistersinger Overture in the middle of the night outside the home of a Jewish family, whose daughter has covered his house in toilet paper. A Larry David Idyll, even if Cosima and Richard wouldn't have approved.