Realism and its Discontents: Simon Williams surveys a multi-authored study of Wagner and Verdi production

Review of Naomi Matsumoto, ed., Staging Verdi and Wagner (Brepols, 2015).

July 2019, Volume 13, Number 2, 92–6.

Verdi’s and Wagner’s careers coincided almost exactly with the ascendancy and decline of realism as the dominant modality in European culture. They conceived of each of their operas primarily in a realistic style, and yet, in their most mature work, the constraints of realism as a theatrical language became apparent and these led Wagner in particular to create music dramas that served as the basis for the far-reaching reaction against realism in the early 20th-century theatre. This historic process of artistic change serves initially as the central locus and then the point of departure for Staging Verdi and Wagner, a multi-lingual collection of essays by various scholars, all of which were initially presented as papers at a conference on the topic, held at the Biblioteca Comunale Forteguerriana, Pistoia, in September 2013.