Miraculous as Jonathan Harvey’s music is, it seems reductive to call Wagner Dream an opera. Half the cast, after all, don’t even sing, but act: it’s a sincere meeting of music and theatre in a way that opera usually isn’t. Add to this director Pierre Audi’s sensitive but conceptually bold production, and the essential impression is of a dramatic multimedia artwork, which happens to crucially involve music – something of a Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps.
It’s the last day of Wagner’s life. He rows with Cosima, suffers a heart attack, and hallucinates about an opera he never completed on a Buddhist theme. He dies. But with him, we hear the Buddhist opera – sung, unlike Wagner’s own domestic story. The opera Wagner dreams tells of the forbidden love of Pakati, a girl of low caste, and Ananda, a young monk. When Pakati pleads to the Buddha to have mercy on them, he eventually relents, by overturning the existing way of things and inviting Pakati to join the order, despite her gender and social status. Pakati and Ananda’s love must be chaste, but they will be companions in their faith.
It seems that part of both Wagner and Harvey’s fascination with this Buddhist tale stems from the very un-Wagnerian fate of its heroine, who finds redemption in life, unlike Isolde, Brünnhilde and so forth. The very concept of such a peaceable, generous opera by Wagner is not easy to digest, despite his great interest in Buddhism – as Harvey put it in a programme note, with reference to Parsifal: “Wagner’s racialism, nihilism and a hatred of the world distort Buddhist philosophy”. Hence, perhaps, Wagner’s dismissal of the work he dreams here: in a highpoint of Jean-Claude Carrière’s text, he reacts angrily to the way his vision ends, apparently seeking to distance himself from his own addled mind’s creation.
Not that the Buddhist opera sounds anything like Wagner – it’s an irony of Harvey’s music, presumably very deliberate, that the scenes in the Wagner household have a more Wagnerian harmonic soundscape than the opera he is meant to imagine. The Buddhist scenes are a vision of transcendence, something maybe just beyond Wagner’s reach.
But Harvey’s score is an astonishing, transcendent thing. The electronics meld assuredly with the live orchestra and are often made to function as evocations of the beyond; the sounds produced live, though, are no less compelling, especially in this strong rendition from the Welsh National Opera Orchestra and conductor Nicholas Collon. The scoring during the spoken scenes is a marvel of subtlety – too much so at the opening, in fact, where the actors’ booming tones overpower the soft musical backing – and the Buddhist music is beautiful, with one foot in pentatonicism and the other in brilliant, Stockhausen-esque mysticism. It’s all a study in consistency and effectiveness from Harvey, as opposed to a Wagnerian showpiece, but moments stand out especially: Ananda’s scintillating vision of the goddess; the well-integrated snatches of a Schubert piano piece we hear Cosima playing after a slight from Wagner.