Opera on the Way: Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream

This essay studies opera as a practice, idea and experience relevant to spiritual development. Its case is Jonathan Harvey's opera Wagner Dream in which the historical figure of Wagner is taken through a process of dying modelled after the Buddhist bardo. While staging emptiness beyond being and non-being as an event, the opera itself is interpreted as being in search of emptiness in its own way. Harvey's compositional language of ambiguity is analysed in terms of emptiness, and connected to the question of experience. As is suggested in reference to Siegert and Barthes, experience may be understood as generalizable in nature. But it is ultimately proposed that Harvey, in this opera, creates a scene of singulariy and election beyond such generality, providing a key to his response to Wagner's ambiguous persona and Die Sieger, his unfinished project on a Buddhist theme.