Welsh National Opera. Wagner Dream

Wagner Dream takes place when Wagner suffers a heart attack in Venise. The last moments of his life are projected in the dream of an opera inspired by a Buddhist legend that the German composer imagined, but that he never wrote.

Jonathan Harvey and Jean-Claude Carrière met through their common passion for the India of Buddha. Wagner Dream illustrates the passage between theater and music, between words and song, between a historic era relinquished to actors (Wagner, his wife Cosima, his doctor) and the dreamed space of song, of music, of electronics produced at IRCAM.

At the heart of this opera, the tension between the will of force and renunciation. This cohabitation of contradictory forces that haunts the Wagnerian project (Siegfried or Parsifal, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer) belongs entirely to Western history.

Jonathan Harvey Wagner Dream

Libretto Jean-Claude Carrière
WNO (Welsh National Opera) | Claire Booth, Prakiti | Dale Duesing, Buddha | Rebecca de Pont Davies, Mother | Richard Angas, Old Brahmin
Conductor Nicholas Collon | Director Pierre Audi | Lighting Jean Kalman
IRCAM Computer Music Production Carl Faïa, Gilbert Nouno