Rocky Road to Redemption: Claire Seymour takes issue with a provocative study of Britten and Wagner

Benjamin Britten and Richard Wagner are not likely bedfellows. Barry Emslie’s ‘extended, ideas driven, essay’ brings them together in order to present an ‘arbitrary and wholly subjective claim’ relating to their similarities and differences (p. 4). Written for ‘the general reader interested in these two composers’, Pathways to Redemption is a ‘set of speculations organised around specific notions’ (p. 4). Emslie hopes that the reader will find it ‘stimulating and a pleasure’, but adds: ‘Naturally, if the assumptions in play are not shared by the reader, none of this is likely to turn out to be the case.’ (p. 4) There are indeed many assumptions in play throughout Emslie’s book which is ambitious in scope, diverse in subject-matter and often imaginative in deliberation. These thought-provoking assumptions are, however, also freely discursive and associative, and defy the reader’s attempts to bring them together into a cohesive critical framework.