Music Made Visible

Stephen Walsh

• BuyWagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy
  Yale, 461 pp, £35.00, September 2006, ISBN 0 300 10695 5

Among the operatic victims of what its enemies nowadays refer to as ‘directors’ theatre’, Wagner has suffered as much as anyone. Keith Warner has the Wanderer crash-land his fighter plane into Mime’s cave; Phyllida Lloyd has Brünnhilde as a suicide bomber who blows herself up in the immolation scene; Jürgen Flimm turns Nibelheim into a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole they are symptoms of a process that has invaded opera over the past thirty or forty years, as directors have sought ever more contorted ways of making modern sense of Samuel Johnson’s ‘exotic and irrational’ entertainment.