LAURA TINGLE: Sydney-born Simone Young has lived in the ranks of the world's greatest conductors for decades now, but her story has a humble beginning.
SIMONE YOUNG, CONDUCTOR: I am quintessentially a girl from Manly. I come from a completely non-musical family. I had a schoolteacher already by that stage who was dragging me to concerts and sending me to do this and that.
LAURA TINGLE: Simone Young became intimately acquainted with the opera repertoire in the years she spent working as a repetiteur, a pianist who plays with singers as they learn their roles.
She was destined for bigger things and a career largely shaped by her love of composers of big music, like Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Wagner.
SIMONE YOUNG: I had never heard any Wagner. I didn't have, as a pianist, I hadn't even thought about it. If I had been a brass player, I probably would have been confronted with it straightaway.
And this day the teacher put on, in those days an LP, and said we had to listen to this, and it was the prelude to Tristan, and I was just completely blown away.
I couldn't believe the sounds. There is something about the tension that he creates and maintains over long spans, and then releases, and then the tension picks up again, that creates enormous arcs of structure.
What he created are masterpieces that can be interpreted by successive generations of directors and conductors and singers that address important, key themes about humanity.
LAURA TINGLE: Now the chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Simone Young brought a particularly big piece of music to local audiences for the first time last month.
One hundred and forty musicians, 280 singers in three choirs, six soloists, and a powerhouse conductor. Arnold Schoenberg's epic work, Gurre-Lieder, is one of the most enormous orchestral pieces ever written. It is such a big work that a third of the seats in the stalls of the Sydney Opera House concert hall had to be removed to accommodate an extended stage.
SIMONE YOUNG: Where is even a traditionally big orchestra would have six horns, and maybe four trombones. Here we have 10 horns, and I think there are seven trombones, and two tubas, and two contrabassoons and it is really hugely extravagant.
LAURA TINGLE: In July, Young will add another accompaniment to her extraordinary career, becoming the first woman to conduct Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle at the annual festival of Wagner's music in the German town of Beyreuth.
SIMONE YOUNG: Yes, it is the mecca for Wagnerians and Wagner fans go there every year. I mean Angela Merkel is there almost every year.
LAURA TINGLE: It is a huge thing for you as a conductor. I mean you have obviously got a huge reputation already but do you feel that yourself?
SIMONE YOUNG: Oh absolutely. I mean I will be sitting on the chair of all my heroes. I mean, Barenboim, of course but going back Furtwängler and Kleiber and I mean, right back to Richter.
It is quite extraordinary and I take that on very seriously as carrying the responsibility and the weight of history as well.
LAURA TINGLE: The Ring Cycle, fourteen and a half hours of music over four nights, in a theatre the composter built specially to accommodate the massive orchestras sets and dramas for which he is famous.
SIMONE YOUNG: If you put it in sporting terms, you would say that Beyreuth is to opera, and particularly this repertoire, to Wagner, what Lords is to cricket, or Wembley is to British soccer.
Wagner himself created this opera house. I think that's the special thing about it because he created everything.
He wrote the texts, he composed the music, he gave the instructions for the staging, he designed some of the machines for the staging, and then he designed this opera house in which to put it all on and this extraordinary pit.
The first time you see the opera pit in Beyreuth, you think it can't possibly work, because it literally goes down in steps and stairs for a height of about two floors.
The brass are way down there and that sound all gathers up and comes up.
I have conducted it many times, but you change and develop as an artist, and so I want to take the time to re-study, reacquaint myself with it. I have some new singers, some of whom I have done it with before, some are new to me.
LAURA TINGLE: How different is it physically conducting given that extraordinary pit that you are talking about?
SIMONE YOUNG: Oh, it is quite different and in fact, back in '92 or '93, Barenboim got me to conduct an entire act of Valkyrie and I learned more about conducting Wagner in the first five minutes in that pit than I think I could have learned in years in a music academy because the sound, you can't drive anything there. All you can do is steer it.
Anybody who tries to force things usually crashes and burns.
Simone Young is Australia's greatest living conductor and a music pioneer. Currently chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, she's performed in many of the major opera houses and concert halls of the world - including being the first woman to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic.
This year she'll be the first woman and the first Australian to conduct Wagner's Ring Cycle at the renowned festival theatre in Beyreuth. She sat down with Laura Tingle.