This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Brevity is not a characteristic usually associated with Wagner, but it is a happy paradox that many of the best books on the composer have been short (and some of the worst long). A stand-out in the second category is Robert Gutman’s almost demented biography; the much-missed Bryan Magee and Michael Tanner have made enduring contributions to the first. 

They are now joined by Patrick Carnegy’s attractive and thoughtful collection of essays, Wagner’s Theatre, into which he distils a lifetime’s engagement with the composer. It is a pendant to his 2006 study Wagner and the Art of Theatre, which garnered high praise from Pierre Boulez amongst others (“one of the best documented publications of all the recent literature on Wagner”). 

Carnegy has been steeped in opera and theatre criticism for more than 60 years. He was the first person to be appointed Dramaturg — the very word sounds suspiciously German (it means literary and production adviser) — at the Royal Opera House. Though most of these essays have been published before, the collection’s wisdom and range make for reliable reading. In the fevered field of Wagner studies, its moderate opinions are worth attending to.

The problem set for posterity by Wagner was his obsessive interest in every aspect of his music dramas. Unusually, though not uniquely — Tippett was another example — he wrote the words as well as the music. His meticulous and perhaps inevitably literalistic stage directions instructed his followers how to put on his operas — as they must, for he regarded his work as “only complete when as drama it fully and physically comes to life in front of us”. 

Though Wagner himself came eventually to recognise that an “every leaf on every tree” approach to staging was a cul-de-sac and that it was far better to play to the theatre of the spectator’s imagination, the cult which prevailed at Bayreuth had a long-standing sclerotic effect.

After Wagner died in 1883, his widow Cosima guarded the flame. Years later, she admonished a proponent of new designs that he did not seem to realise that Wagner had himself staged the Ring in 1876 and that therefore there was no scope for further invention. 

She locked the works into an unchanging rite of pure illustration; Shaw was amongst those who criticised her static tableaux vivants (“artists get stuck for ten minutes at a time into poses that become ridiculous after ten seconds”).

However, the world moved on, as it does, and within a few decades the appetite for producing Wagner’s works in accordance with the instruction manual began to fall away. The definitive break with literalism came unsurprisingly in Secessionist Vienna, with the 1903 Tristan und Isolde conducted by Mahler and directed by Alfred Roller. 

Carnegy addresses this turning point in detail. Mahler had previously had posts at Hamburg and Budapest, where “his eye”, an observer noted, “extend[ed] over the entire production, the scenery, the machinery, the lights”. (The author impliedly compares him with Bernard Haitink, a beloved music director at Covent Garden who nevertheless, we are disappointed to read, had a “limited understanding of opera as music theatre” and “lacked any distinctive theatrical taste of his own”.)

Mahler believed that it was better to suggest than to show. Pictorial literalism obscured the music; since everything important was in the score, it was necessary only to stimulate the listener’s power of imagination. This was new, and it is easy for us now to see that it was also right. 

Yet to the modern eye, the contemporary illustrations of that Tristan are strikingly conventional: Act I recognisably takes place on board the deck of a ship, with sails, ropes and nautical paraphernalia. Not for Mahler and Roller the garish red and blue boxes containing protagonists who never so much as look at each other, a concept which dominated a recent London version of the opera. 

Something went badly wrong between 1903 and the present day. Part of the problem of course was the Third Reich. Yet even that terrible convulsion made possible the sober and cleansing abstractions of Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner’s subsequent settings which, as Carnegy says, magnificently served the Schopenhauerian qualities of Wagner’s scores whilst declining to echo the more mimetic musical effects.

By the time of Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Ring, however, the idea had taken root that the proper approach to Wagner was one of detraction. Theatrical shock tactics were to be used to enable the spectator (the sensible listener closed his eyes) to recoil from, rather than to enter into the composer’s illusory world. “What is a God?” jeered Chéreau, “I’ve never met one.” (Carnegy relates that his attitude to this production has softened; readers will wonder whether he wasn’t right the first time.) 

And so on to Richard Jones’ Covent Garden Ring, at which Haitink was memorably caught rolling his eyes in the documentary House, and to any number of contemporary Wagner stagings, with their neon lighting, urban grunge, bag-lady Norns, Nazi uniforms and the rest. 

Once more the Germans have a word for it: Regietheater — the notion that the director’s conception (or ego) is a trump card. It means, or so it is claimed in John Deathridge’s trenchant introduction to Wagner’s Theatre, that “producers are perfectly within their rights radically to reconceive works of art against the grain of what their creators originally wanted — or rather what some members of audiences think they wanted”. (How much is contained in that qualification.) 

The movement flourishes to the present day, not least at Bayreuth itself, for whose frequently nonsensical realisations a ticket is reputedly not so unobtainable as once it was. (Your reviewer was driven away from the Green Hill, never to return, by a 2009 Parsifal featuring Klingsor in full evening dress from the waist up and fishnet tights below — a none too subtle reference, one supposes, to his self-castration.) 

The phenomenon so often inflicts on the paying audience, who have the opportunity to see these operas only a few times in their lives, another evening spent in disappointment and disbelief. So much so that the words one looks for when a new Wagner performance is announced are “concert performance”.

Carnegy has seen too much and talked to too many directors to adopt anything other than a nuanced position on all this. Whilst he deplores the fact that Wagner has become a target for those wishing to score cheap points at his expense, he is open to the possibility that there are always new “fidelities” to discover (his inverted commas). 

The question remains: how to distinguish between good and bad in modern productions? The gold standard is surely respect for the composer’s underlying intentions, hard though these are to discern in an unimaginably changed world. 

Wagner’s self-esteem was such that he regarded only Aeschylus and Shakespeare as his equals

Its opposite is a deliberate, often puerile subversion of the moral seriousness of the original, part of a more generalised ressentiment against high culture and a post-modern desire to blaspheme and desecrate, whose lynching tendency has moved on from religion to art, in an ironical echo of Wagner’s famous dictum about the relation between the two. Creativity on this view consists in destruction, in turning the composer inside-out, in making fun of him.

There is a lot else to enjoy, and a remarkable amount of useful or intriguing information, in this book’s 160 pages. Wagner’s self-esteem was such that he regarded only Aeschylus and Shakespeare as his equals in purely dramatic terms. Carnegy’s essay on the traces of Shakespeare in the mature Wagner (the early opera Das Liebesverbot directly borrows from Measure for Measure) reminds us just how immersed in the playwright the composer was. 

Not all the suggested correspondences are convincing: the debt owed by Meistersinger to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and to Twelfth Night is unquestionable, but fewer readers will be persuaded that there are glimpses of Lady Macbeth in Fricka’s insistence, in Act II of Die Walküre, that Siegmund has to die. 

An essay on Carnegy’s time at the Opera House under Jeremy Isaacs lands heavy blows in many directions, if that sort of thing is to your taste. Some will prefer the no less gossipy but altogether more entertaining and perceptive essays on four great Wagner conductors. Or another on Thomas Mann’s father-in-law Otto Pringsheim, whose judgements on the rehearsals for the first complete Ring in 1876 at Bayreuth are culled from the pages of his recently discovered diary. 

Thanks to Wagner’s Theatre, we know that Prings-heim defended the master’s creation by striking a sceptic on the nose with his beer mug, thereby earning the sobriquet “Schoppen-hauer” (tankard-brawler) and engendering that rarest of things, a good German pun. Better still, that Otto Klemperer, remembered in later life as the austere and gloomy colossus of the magisterial tempo, was soothed on his arrival in Los Angeles in 1933 by the wife of an orchestra manager who chirped “We’ll have to call you “Klempie”.” “You may call,” came the reply, “But I won’t come.”