Wieland’s style dominated Wagner production for 15 years. After his early death in 1966, political ideology crept back again, as the Left appropriated Wagner’s radicalism — Carnegy gives a particularly fascinating account of Joachim Herz’s mid-1970s Leipzig production of the Ring, focused on Wagner’s critique of capitalism, as well as Patrice Chéreau’s celebrated 1976 cycle at Bayreuth, which spawned a generation of lesser imitators.
Although his designers drew on a number of historical periods, Chéreau sought a coherent view of the Ring’s implications in terms of a dialectic between the natural world and the destructive human exploitation of it. In the 1980s, Ruth Berghaus in Frankfurt took a more subversive path, deconstructing all the Ring’s pretensions to meaning and cheekily interrogating the text rather than accepting its answers. ‘What Berghaus does raise, irrevocably,’ concludes Carnegy, ‘is the question of whether a romantic Wagner can ever be revived.’ Her Brechtian approach, much imitated, certainly continues to enrage the vast body of opera-goers, as it was intended to do.
The book ends with consideration of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1982 film of Parsifal, shot entirely on a vast model of the composer’s death-mask — Carnegy compares it to a canvas by Anselm Kiefer, another postwar German artist preoccupied with the question of German guilt and the Wagner-Hitler nexus. It’s an interesting point at which to stop, because it also raises the issue of Wagner’s cinematic potential (the first attempts to film the operas date back to the 1920s), but also a frustrating one — even after 400 pages, I longed to read Carnegy’s views of the more recent controversial productions of the Ring by Richard Jones at Covent Garden and Phyllida Lloyd at the Coliseum, as well as Christoph Schlingen- sief’s bad yet brilliant Parsifal at Bayreuth.
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