Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama (review)

Thomas May's Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama must be considered a welcome new addition to the vast number of books seeking to explain Wagner's approach to music and drama to the beginner. As part of the "Unlocking the Masters" series from Amadeus Press—a superb set of guides that also includes David Hurwitz's five books The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual (2004), Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Instrumental Works (2005), Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Vocal Works (2005), Exploring Haydn: A Listener's Guide to Music's Boldest Innovator (2005), and Dvorák: Romantic Music's Most Versatile Genius (2005)—Decoding Wagner combines clear, well-written analyses for the general reader with well-chosen musical examples on the included CDs. Since the CDs are restricted to examples taken from recordings owned by BMG Music, the result is a great deal of material (more than 200 pages of text, plus more than two hours of music) for a very reasonable price. Decoding Wagner is thus suitable both for occasional members of the operatic audience who wish to brush up a bit on their Wagner and for introductory college-level courses populated mostly by students whose only prior experience with Wagner may have been in a music appreciation course.

May's great strength is his ability to present "the whole Wagner" clearly and concisely. In chapters that average about fifteen pages, we encounter the broad outlines of Wagner's life, an overview of what happens in each opera, an introduction to such critical Wagnerian concepts as the leitmotif and the Gesamtkunstwerk, the major intellectual influences that Wagner drew on while creating his works, and key musical themes that are essential to an appreciation of each opera. What this kind of approach sacrifices is the sort of detailed plot analysis and summary that one frequently finds elsewhere. If your sole interest is in what happens in Lohengrin or Parsifal, you're still far better off tracking down a copy of Charles Osborne's The Complete Operas of Wagner: A Critical Guide (1990) or going online to review the Metropolitan Opera's synopses (http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/discover/stories/). There you'll find the stories straight and simple in a way that May, because of both his brevity and his interest in doing far more than just retelling the action, never really provides. On the other hand, if you want to begin exploring not merely Wagner's narratives but rather how the composer came to create each opera, how it functions onstage as a drama, how it reflects the cultural and philosophical principles of the composer's day, and how it relates to other works of music, theater, and literature that you may already know, then Decoding Wagner is certainly the book for you. Its analysis never approaches the depth of, for instance, Ernest Newman's Wagner Nights (1949) or Michael Tanner's Wagner (1996), but it also does not assume that its audience can read music, preferring to tie its discussion to specific track references on the two enclosed CDs. Musicians may be bothered that there are no printed musical examples anywhere in the book, but the "Unlocking the Masters" series is not intended for anyone with advanced musical knowledge. It seeks to provide general surveys for readers who have an interest in but little knowledge about the composers that it treats.

Throughout Decoding Wagner, May draws interesting comparisons between Wagner's dramas and various works of both popular and high culture that serve to bring new dimensions to Wagnerian music drama. Thus he compares the way in which the legend of Tristan Christianized earlier pagan themes that had been forced "to go underground" with the process popularized in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), and he links Wagner's characterization of Mime with Tolkien's depiction of Sméagol/Gollum in Lord...