Style and Sonority in Wagner String Performance

This article explores the likely string sound-world experienced by and supported by Richard Wagner. Much Wagner performance seems still to work on the assumption that modern manifestations of it, in today's opera houses, is as Wagner himself experienced and conceived it, a matter strikingly qualified by our knowledge of nineteenth-century orchestral and vocal performing practices. Wagner was an advocate of Joseph Joachim (not withstanding some strikingly anti-Semitic remarks here) and this perhaps provides a platform for understanding possible future trajectories for reconstructing more appropriate Wagner string sonorities.