A Curate’s Egg: Arnold Whittall relishes some good parts, but as a whole this weighty multi-lingual collection lacks substance

Review of Luca Sala, ed., The Legacy of Richard Wagner: Convergences and Dissonances in Aesthetics and Reception (Brepols, 2012).

July 2013, Volume 7, Number 2, 85–8.

There is a certain conviction that artistic significance can be judged as much, if not more, in terms of the posthumous impact of an artist’s works on other creators as on the degree to which those works themselves continue to be performed or otherwise reproduced in the years after their creator’s death. This conviction becomes especially salient in cultures where the differences in character between what has survived from the past and what characterises the present are so extreme. To describe the early 21st century as a continuation of that era of late-modernism (in some usages, post-modernism) that emerged during the 1960s itself risks slighting the far greater prominence – and enduring ‘success’ – of considerably older creations, whose regular repetitions contrast so bracingly with the apparent ephemerality of much that is newly commissioned and performed. In the end, however, late-modernist culture is probably best defined as that which embodies an irreconcilable rift between artworks preferred by the majority and an ever-dwindling minority interest in the new and radical.