Christopher Wintle, Wagner’s Spatial Style

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 4–23.

In drama, we expect a stage-set to distil the time, place and circumstance of an action. Yet our expectation has several aspects, and to gain the measure of a composer’s handling of stagecraft we must begin by taking them in turn. When, for instance, we first see a set, we assess its visible space in material terms – depth, width and height – even before we consider what it represents.