For a start, Bavaria would have had more money. King Ludwig bankrupted the state to pay for Wagner's dreams and peccadilloes.
Without Wagner, the musical vanguard would surely have been led by that complex but generous virtuoso of pianism and composition, Franz Liszt.
Instead of Bayreuth, Liszt's Weimar would have remained the centre of the 19th century's visions of the musical future.
Liszt's ego was plenty big enough, but he never got close to the narcissism and will to power of Wagner.
Wagner's marriage to Cosima made him Liszt's son-in-law.
The court of composers Liszt inspired and admired would have flourished in Wagner's absence.
His own symphonic poems and his later piano pieces would have taken the place they deserve in the late 19th-century repertoire but have never quite achieved.
Instead of Wagner's gigantism and verbosity, Liszt's pieces are musical question marks, stones tossed into the future.
Instead of a focus on late-romantic ideas of progress and development, without Wagner to urge them onwards, there might have been a greater diversity of composing voices and visions.
With no Bayreuth, the Great Exhibitions of Paris and London in the second half of the 19th century would probably have been even more important.
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They would have opened creative imaginations to a greater range of musical cultures.
Musical scenes in Russia and the Americas, as well as France and the UK, might have been allowed to flourish without the suffocation of what Thomas Adès has called the “fungus” of Wagner's sounds and ideas.
