Wagner Dream - review

For much of his life, Wagner was drawn to eastern philosophy, and from 1856 repeatedly toyed with the idea of an opera on a Buddhist subject called Die Sieger (The Victors). Only the briefest of sketches remain, though he intended to return to the work after completing Parsifal. He died, of course, before he could do so. Die Sieger and its history, however, form the subject of Jonathan Harvey's opera Wagner Dream, which shows the dying composer being granted a vision of the work he might have written. It closely follows Wagner's narrative concerning Prakriti, the untouchable, who relinquishes her desire in order to join the monk Ananda, whom she loves, in a life of spiritual contemplation.

It was hugely admired at its first performance in Luxembourg in 2007. I confess, however, to disappointment with its UK premiere, semi-staged by Orpha Phelan, with Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's a remarkable score. The Wagner entourage is played by actors; the protagonists in the vision sing. The two worlds are linked by an exquisite soundscape that frequently seems to gaze into eternity as well as mark the remorseless passing of time here on Earth. There is beautiful, rapturous singing, too, above all from Claire Booth as Prakriti and Andrew Staples as Ananda.

But Jean-Claude Carrière's libretto has moments of triteness, and deals only cursorily with the dichotomy between Wagner's racism and his fascination with a philosophy predicated on universal compassion. More puzzling, perhaps, is Phelan's semi-staging, which makes no attempt at a historical presentation of the Wagners (Nicholas Le Prevost and Ruth Lass), but turns them into a modern-dress family. Though the work deals with universal themes, it depicts the death of a specific individual, not an everyman figure. Phelan misses the point by suggesting otherwise.