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  • Wagner and the Art of the Theatre
  • Katherine R. Syer
Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. By Patrick Carnegy. pp. xviii + 461. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, £29.95. ISBN 0-300-10695-5.)

Wagner and the Art of the Theatre crowns a series of smaller publications in which Patrick Carnegy has established himself as an astute and passionate yet sober judge of the ways that Wagner's operas have been realized on stage. Carnegy's contribution to Wagner in Performance (New Haven, 1992), co-edited by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, signalled an important maturing phase in opera production history studies, as did the equally perceptive chapter by Mike Ashman in that volume. In the background remains Oswald Georg Bauer's Bühnenwerke von der Uraufführung bis heute (Propyläen, 1982). Carnegy pursues a more selective path in Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, with more expansive discussions about individual interpretations and influential figures.

Stretches of this valuable tome could serve as a survey of key developments in opera production history since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, so central are Wagner and his oeuvre to revolutionary changes in staging, lighting, and scenic design. In the first of the book's three sections, Carnegy presents an account of Wagner's own thoughts and practices concerning the stage. Usefully, we are reminded more than usual of the importance of figures such as Carl Maria von Weber, whose ideas and practices are essential stepping stones to what we often typically identify with Wagner. At the same time, Carnegy has done some excellent groundwork regarding Wagner's own accounts of the path that led to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. For example, plans of the theatre in Riga, where Wagner conducted [End Page 653] in the later 1830s, support the composer's recall of the auditorium's relative darkness but not his claims that the stalls were shaped like an amphitheatre and steeply raked (p. 13). Such contextualization and myth debunking help to shape a realistic account of Wagner's place in the theatrical world during his lifetime.

Carnegy carefully qualifies Wagner's efforts towards 'stage realism', differentiating them from the 'historical archeology' practised in Paris (p. 40), and, later, the historical verisimilitude pursued by the touring Meiningen theatre company. Wagner was markedly more path-breaking in the areas of acting and stagecraft than he was in scenic or costume design, although the acting style that he endorsed was part of the larger movement to render all visual dimensions of the theatrical experience persuasive. With respect to design, Wagner was mostly concerned with producing his myth- and legend-oriented dramas so that they seemed credible, as if real. Cosima Wagner is presented as sympathetic to this goal during the composer's lifetime, although she subsequently joined the ranks of the historical archaeologists.

Wagner repeatedly turned to cutting-edge technology in his efforts to make the unreal seem real, but his inability to let go of a limited representational style hindered him from finding a completely successful visual language. To be fair, as Carnegy rightly notes, Wagner 'stood on the very brink of the electro-technical-cinematic age that could give him whatever ambience, whatever images he wanted' (p. 131). Only with the new technological possibilities that multiplied rapidly just as Wagner's life drew to a close were bold alternatives to later nineteenth-century realism enabled. Carnegy allies himself with the camp that imagines a reincarnated Wagner avidly exploring alternative and possibly better production solutions. His survey focuses on the more iconoclastic and exploratory of these.

Carnegy's shaping of Wagner's own development can be summarized as follows: during Wagner's years of exile, with his intense focus on operatic reform, his encounter with the writings of Schopenhauer in 1854 gave sharp stimulus to his visions of meaningful approaches to stage design. What had remained rather hazy in his theorizing (Wagner's writings are aptly described as 'rich in contradictions and tergiversations'; p. 46) of a Gesamtkunstwerk gained new potential via Schopenhauer's critique of the external phenomenal world and his celebration of music's primary expressive role in the operatic multimedia mix. Schopenhauer...

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