Performance Anxiety: The interpretation of Wagner’s works remains a vexed subject, finds David Breckbill

Review of Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, eds, The Cambridge History of Music Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 88–90.

A full-scale review of this stimulating and ambitious volume (hereafter CHMP) cannot and should not be undertaken in these pages, since even the most optimistic Wagnerians would concede that their hero accounts for only a small part of the vast chronological span and the multitude of musical styles covered here. Yet a brief Wagner-centric evaluation might be in order, since it is generally recognised that Wagner and his works exerted a significant impact on performance style, and that that influence remained strong up until at least the middle of the 20th century. Inquiring Wagnerians might be interested to learn what kind of representation such assumptions have received in this general history of performance.