A ‘Tristan’ without the Dialogue: Arnold Whittall finds that a new handbook to Wagner’s key work avoids some major issues

This is the fourth Cambridge Opera Handbook to a Wagner work, following on from Parsifal (which launched the series in 1981), Die Meistersinger and Der fliegende Holländer. All four are, to varying degrees, multi-authored volumes, ‘written for the serious opera-goer or record-collector, as well as the student or scholar’, as the cover to Parsifal proclaimed. But this new book, to a greater extent than its predecessors, is in effect an anthology reproducing, or closely reflecting, previously published material. Its very different tones of voice embrace English, North American and German writers (including Wagner himself). Such time-spanning heterogeneity is not by definition inappropriate for a work which, though now frequently performed, retains at least some of that radical, groundbreaking quality that defined it as a landmark of musical – and cultural – modernism. But, perhaps because of the protracted timespan between initial conception and actual publication (not uncommon these days), this book’s avoidance of the most recent scholarship on Wagner’s work leaves a slightly uncomfortable impression of open-endedness.