Dreaming Wagner: Welsh National Opera

Yesterday was exactly two hundred years since the birth of Richard Wagner in Leipzig on 22 May 1813. Wagner is by no means the only composer to have triggered seismic shifts in Western culture by revolutionising the musical world; his predecessor, Beethoven, is perhaps the most obvious of other such examples. But Wagner’s genius remains the most musically and socio-politically divisive, and his bicentenary has re-ignited passionate debate about the man, his art and his legacy.

Central to the celebrations - a delicious feast for some and a nauseating excess for others - is, of course, a plethora of competing performances; at the Proms alone, seven of Wagner’s operas, including the mighty der Ring des Nibelungen in its four-opera entirety, will be performed in concert. Welsh National Opera’s response to the occasion is, however, more boldly imaginative than most and offers the opportunity for perhaps a different kind of Wagner reappraisal.

Today, 23 May, WNO opens a new production of Lohengrin at Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre, directed by the award-winning Antony McDonald and conducted by Music Director Lothar Koenigs (whose performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was ecstatically received in 2010). Then, on 6 June, WNO will present the first fully-staged UK production of a contemporary British opera in which Wagner himself is the main character and which draws on the lesser-known spiritual and compositional concerns of his latter years; Wagner Dream by the late Jonathan Harvey (director Pierre Audi, conductor Nicholas Collon).

This brings together two completely contrasting operas by composers temperamentally and aesthetically poles apart. Nonetheless, the works are related in thought-provoking ways and provide an opportunity to re-examine the nature of opera itself as an art-form in the light of Wagner’s undoubtedly towering, if problematic, genius. In conversation, WNO Artistic Director and CEO David Pountney remarked that the company is aiming to offer - in addition to the self-standing experiences of the operas themselves - for those that want it, ‘a very stimulating experience of seeing two completely different visions of what opera might be like, but somehow very closely linked around the same subject and the same composer.’ That subject is divinity and the human aspiration to it, of which Lohengrin is, for Wagner, a nascent and in some ways crudely drawn, yet multi-layered, early expression. Many of the philosophical and religious themes Wagner went on to develop in later operas are present through, for example, references to ancient Teutonic myth within a strongly quasi-Christian pantheon, symbolised by the descent from heaven of a Knight of the Holy Grail (although we don’t discover Lohengrin’s identity until the work’s conclusion).

Indeed, for Pountney, Lohengrin is the first opera in which Wagner attempted to ‘find a musical language for a kind of transcendental state ... and, of course, that music of transcendence is something which Jonathan Harvey spent a whole lifetime trying to find.’ In Harvey’s music, the search revolved around his beloved Buddhism but admitted wisdom from many faiths and found expression in a technological unfolding of an extraordinary orchestral and vocal palette inherited in large part from Wagner, through the kinds of other-worldly, electronically-realised sounds that so enrich Wagner Dream.

It may surprise some to learn that Wagner was attracted to Buddhism upon reading Schopenhauer in the 1850s, and had been planning an opera on a Buddhist subject, Die Sieger (The Victors) for many years. But he died without realising the project and Harvey’s opera depicts an imagined struggle in Wagner’s mind at the moment of his death as he is encouraged by the Buddha, Vairochana, to renounce his artistic ego and surrender to cosmic reality beyond the illusion of the self. Most poignantly, concerning Harvey’s own death last year, WNO are presenting Wagner Dream in a new translation (agreed by Harvey and written by Professor Richard Gombrich, Founder-President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, with WNO Head of Music Russell Moreton) of Jean-Claude Carrière’s original, English libretto into a more culturally appropriate German and Pali; a 2000 year-old language which was spoken by the Buddha himself.

Both Harvey and Wagner were composers of ideas. Whatever one’s position within the Wagner debate, WNO’s summer season makes for a fascinating prospect. As Pountney says, ‘if we are going to go to all the effort and expense of having an opera company, it should be putting out material into society which is a stimulating subject of discourse.’ No doubt Harvey, at least, would relish the opportunity for dialogue along intriguing lines as we are, in effect, offered the chance to consider - or ‘dream’ - his thoughts about Wagner’s thoughts and, hence, to reflect upon our own.