Casting a Long Shadow: Roger Allen considers two new translations of Wagner’s influential essay ‘On Conducting’

It is a well-rehearsed cliché all too familiar to those who travel by bus that after a long gap between services two come along at once. The same, it seems, is true of translations into English of Wagner’s seminal writings on conducting. Two new versions have recently appeared, more or less simultaneously, by Nicholas Logie and Chris Walton.

Wagner’s activities as conductor in both theory and practice cast, and continue to cast, a long shadow over the history of operatic and orchestral performance. As Walton points out, ‘There is barely a book or essay on conducting from the late 19th or 20th centuries that does not draw on Wagner’s Über das Dirigieren, either directly or indirectly. [...] his conducting aesthetic exerted a lasting impact on how music – not just his own – was thereafter played and conducted.’