Exploring the Great Beyond: Fred Bridgham assesses a new study of the music drama after Wagner

Review of Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (The Boydell Press, 2014).

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 89–93.

The trajectory of composers chosen to illustrate modern music drama – via Schoenberg and (as a ‘postmodernist’ challenge to modernism) Richard Strauss, to the Italian/Italianate world of Dallapiccola, Nono and Henze – might well seem a partial and eccentric one, born, as Mark Berry readily acknowledges in his new study, both from lack of space to cover the full spectrum and linguistic ignorance of Czech and Russian. Nevertheless, the broad historical, political, philosophical and musical context of each of his protagonists is copiously documented, and their widely divergent responses to Wagner’s innovatory ideas on regeneration of the genre woven into the mix.