The Spell of the Greasepaint: Simon Williams salutes a landmark study of Wagner’s works on stage

Wagner was one of the most prodigious polymaths in the history of European culture, and we are still coming to terms with how prodigious he was. There can be no doubt that almost all who are drawn to his work are attracted initially by the potency of his music, but it is not solely as a composer, or even perhaps primarily as a composer, that Wagner would have wished to be remembered. Wagner prided himself as a thinker, a dramatist, a political polemicist, even as a journalist, but above all he saw himself as a man of the theatre. Oddly enough, this is a dimension of his work that has not been fully explored. There are performance histories of the music dramas – Oswald Georg Bauer’s publications spring to mind – and there are works that centre substantially on theatrical aspects of performance, as, for example, the Millington and Spencer Wagner in Performance. But production of the music dramas has rarely been discussed in a context that displays a deep understanding of modern theatre history. This is what distinguishes Patrick Carnegy’s finely written and immaculately documented Wagner and the Art of the Theatre.