At opposite ends of the scale

A book which opens in the bushes of a Venetian garden and ends, more or less, in the cafés of Parma with chocolate panettone and biscotti dipped in coffee knows how to command attention. Given that what unfolds between these sensory episodes is densely constructed and formidable in scope, this is just as well: Peter Conrad writes engagingly and lures his reader into a grand game of cultural chess. There is no winner or loser, but we need to be alert for fear of missing a wry connection or a devilishly clever move.

The oddity of the title hints at the awkwardness of the subject matter. Verdi and/or Wagner reflects our habit of pitting these two composers, one Italian, one German, both born in 1813 and dominating the entire century with their operatic achievements, against each other. They never met. Inevitably, however, by well-honed competitive instinct if not via gossipy publishers or press reports, they sensed each other’s every triumph and failure, often battling in ‘oblique dispute’, as Conrad terms it.

Verdi is the easier to love, the benevolent friend and comforter you are always happy to encounter, if irascible at times. From the outset, he was a hero of the Italian people. His first success, Nabucco (1842), provided them with a hum-along patriotic lament: Va, Pensiero, the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves, may have been about Jewish exile and Babylonian revenge but it soon became a cry of grief for Italy’s as yet uncreated homeland. The Risorgimento was at once the background and foreground to Verdi’s life.

In contrast, Wagner, the grotesque egotist forever involved in vendettas and grandiose schemes, the romantic revolutionary, is in all respects noisier, wilder and more iconoclastic. You may prefer Verdi’s Don Carlo or Falstaff, but Wagner’s Ring or Parsifal or Tristan are on a different scale of epic intensity.