Stephen Walsh writes:

For Wagner, as to some extent for Gluck, operatic reform meant not only reintegration but also deconventionalisation; and one of the biggest problems he faced in staging his works was how to bring off the complicated magical or supernatural effects in such a way as to make them real and vivid, instead of merely symbolic or, worse, risible. All this is charted in much detail and with finely chosen illustrations in the first of the three parts that make up this substantial study. But while stressing Wagner’s literalism and his insistence that his elaborate stage directions be observed to the letter, Carnegy argues that he never wanted the production of his dramas set in aspic.

(LRB 24 April 2008)

Yale | hardback 461 pp. |ISBN: 9780300106954