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Reviewed by:
  • Wagner and the Art of the Theatre
  • Thomas Grey (bio)
Patrick Carnegy : Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006479 pages, $48.00, £35.00

"Kinder, macht Neues!" ("Children, do something new!") There is no little irony in the role of this phrase, from an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt, as the mantra of contemporary opera directors seeking authorial sanction for radical new stagings of Wagner's music dramas. At the end of this letter Wagner exhorts Liszt and his Weimar colleagues to "do something new, new, and once more new!—If you stick to the old, you're in thrall to the devil of unproductivity, and you're then the sorriest of artists!"1 In context, Wagner is complaining about the revival of "old" operas in Weimar: Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini ("If I am not mistaken," Wagner remarks, "this work is more than twelve years old; hasn't he done anything in the meantime?") and an opera by Joachim Raff, König Alfred, produced the season before. In urging Liszt and company to "make it new," Wagner is specifically condemning the sterility of tarting up "old" works—even if they are, by today's operatic standards, veritably up-to-the-minute—in new productions, since his own mind is all abuzz with plans for the great cycle of mythic dramas whose texts he is just now finishing. The last thing Wagner is suggesting here is that older operas can be made "new" through new, provocative, unusual stagings.

All the same, he surely did expect his Ring cycle, unlike Benvenuto Cellini or König Alfred, to endure well into the future, and he did not think it amiss that opera houses continued to stage Tannhäuser and Lohengrin even after he had completed Tristan and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Moreover, Wagner does seem to have intuited, as Patrick Carnegy argues in his impressive new survey of the history of Wagner on stage, that the revolutionary character of his "music dramas," in which he was reinterpreting mythology through modern musical and psychological means, might require a different approach to staging from the romantic traditions he had grown up with. And whatever Wagner himself may have thought about stage production and its future, the case can certainly be made that his oeuvre played a vital role in the evolution of modernist and interpretive approaches to production, and specifically in the advent of so-called "director's opera" (Regietheater) in the later twentieth century. For Carnegy, Wagner was ahead of his time not merely as a composer, but perhaps most of all in the demands his works made for a revolution in staging that would finally reject the pictorial, illusionistic ideals of the Romantic ancien régime and embrace abstract, symbolic, "epic," and deconstructive models of theater. For Carnegy, too, it is [End Page 360] important to see twentieth-century developments in staging as the real fulfillment of Wagner's creative vision, the corrective to an element of misprision in his original gesamtkünstlerisch notions that had been repeatedly frustrated by his own and others' attempts to depict the legendary and mythic worlds of his dramas all too literally and, most often, ineptly on stage. Wagner thought he wanted flying valkyries, fur-clad heroes, leafy forests, even boats and horses inhabiting his stage, but his own deep dissatisfaction with the 1876 premiere of the Ring (above all as regards staging) at least planted the seeds of doubt in his mind.

The two chapters on Wagner's original Bayreuth productions—the Ring and Parsifal—in Carnegy's book are perhaps the most thoroughly researched, and they compare favorably to accounts of Wagner's Bayreuth by Dietrich Mack, Oswald Bauer, and Frederic Spotts in their detailed re-creation of the great theatrical enterprise that dominated the last decade of the composer's life.2 Comparing Wagner's first and second Festivals (1876 and 1882) with each other and also with the big-budget stagings of Wagner's works under Ludwig II in Munich one decade earlier (including the premieres of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Das Rheingold, and Die Walküre), Carnegy argues that the composer gradually, and perhaps...

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